In recent decades, Contact Rock Art has emerged as a critical area of study within global rock art research, offering unique insights into cross-cultural encounters. These artworks serve as a lens through which we can examine the historical dynamics of encounters between Aboriginal people and newcomers to their shores. Traditionally, research in this field has emphasized cultural...
Unidentified, commingled remains from mass grave contexts make human skeletal identification difficult, particularly in regions where there have been multiple, distinct conflicts, the excavation and retrieval of remains has been delayed, and/or graves contain both combatants and civilians. Identification is further complicated when information about the excavation and recovery of...
The Strangways Springs artesian mound spring complex in South Australia reveals a layered history in which resources, technology, labor, and culture are significant and changing variables. The site exists in Arabana country, and for thousands of years provided a location for human shelter, artesian waters, and life sustaining resources. The arrival of sheep stations in the “Far...
Landscape approaches utilizing line-of-sight profiles and viewsheds to compute intervisibility are far from new techniques in archaeological research. Various well-known works have described the methods and theory used to map visibility on plantationscapes. However, due to a lack of technological capabilities, most have been forced to utilize incomplete datasets, applying...
This paper studies the ceramics recovered during archaeological missions carried out between 2000 and 2004 at the Santo Domingo convent in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. We explore the morphotypological and chronological characteristics of the ceramics used during the Early Modern era, shedding light on their typological evolution over time. We analyzed the city's supply patterns...
Contemporary migration from the Global South to the Global North is marked by vulnerability, violence, and injustice. These processes give rise to distinct materialities in border regions and transit countries. Although inherently mute, such traces can act as “material witnesses,” testifying to the inequities encountered along these journeys. Contemporary archaeology can apply...
This article explores the impact of seventeenth-century Spanish colonization on Indigenous CHamoru mortuary practices and presents the osteoarchaeological study of human remains recovered from the church and cemetery of San Dionisio in Guåhan (Guam), Mariana Islands. The construction of San Dionisio was connected to the arrival of Jesuits missionaries and to the beginning of...
The process of implementing the liberal-bourgeois revolution was a transcendental event in Western history. The liberal revolutions of the eighteenth and, especially, nineteenth century, gave birth to a new world that sought to impose itself upon the traditional world, that of the Ancien Régime. The arrival of liberalism was not without conflicts, controversies, and dichotomies...
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Dutch Republic heavily relied on imported timber for the construction of its cities, dikes, and ships. This timber originated from the Baltic Sea, the German Rhineland, and the "Little East,
The study of historic ecological exchange is a multidisciplinary pursuit between paleoecology, history, and archaeology. This special collection and introduction explore ecological exchange between approximately 1500 and 1700 CE in the West Pacific, specifically in the Japanese and Philippine Archipelagos as well as littoral China. Rather than focusing exclusively on the...
The goal of this project was to determine the source of Jamestown’s black “marble” knight’s tombstone. From 1627, it is the oldest such tombstone in the Chesapeake Bay region. We used the fossils contained in archived fragments from the stone to identify its microfossils which included six species of foraminiferans. These co-occurred in what is now Belgium and Ireland during the...
Afro-Caribbean ware is Caribbean-made pottery manufactured both at the craft and industrial scale by enslaved and free potters of African descent. Previous sourcing studies have shown historic variation in centers of production and market distribution of these wares across the Caribbean. We used Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) on a clay sample and 13 low-fired coarse...
Studying why newly introduced cultivars fail to make inroads with local populations is notoriously difficult, as these “rejected” crops often leave little or no physical evidence. Taking advantage of unusually ample historical documentation, this paper studies wheat’s introduction, dispersal, and sporadic cultivation in the Philippine archipelago, with an emphasis on the period...
Capsicum peppers are among the oldest domesticated crops in the Americas. Columbus introduced them to Europe, from where they spread to the Far East via Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. However, the details of how Capsicum peppers were introduced into the Asia–Pacific region and their subsequent dispersal remain unknown. Therefore, we investigated the genetic diversity and...
This study deals with Early Modern burials in ancient monuments located nowhere near churches or execution sites. Examples are given from four prehistoric sites in different Swedish provinces, dating from the Early Neolithic through the Roman Period, with a total of 15 buried Early Modern individuals. Written sources along with details of the burial rite suggest that they are...
Taking a bioarchaeological approach that puts human skeletal remains in context with historical records, we reconstruct the experiences of three women who lived in the West during the 1800s and early 1900s. Telling the stories of one woman from a homestead outside the city of Las Vegas, Nevada and two women recovered from a sand dune near Walters Ferry, Idaho, we offer insight...
This article presents the discovery in Ruszów (German: Rauscha, today in Poland) of 103 stone epitaphs from a demolished monument commemorating the inhabitants of this village – German soldiers who died during World War I. After World War II, Poland received part of Germany’s territory in exchange for lands lost to the Soviet Union. Forced deportations followed the change of...
This study investigates pre-colonial and colonial-era pearl fisheries in Sri Lanka using archaeological data from the Gulf of Mannar (GoM). Following surface surveys, test pits were excavated in three pearl oyster middens and one coastal settlement. The archaeomalacological study of the molluscan remains from the middens confirms that the pearl oyster (Pinctada fucata) was the...
Traveling and recording the adventures lived abroad in travelogues was a common practice among European aristocrats in the eighteenth century. The travel journals are filled with descriptions of the places they visited, but also with characterizations of their impressions and emotions evoked by historical landmarks. This paper aims to explore the sensations of northern and...
The strategic importance of the Azores Islands resulted in the formation of a vast post-medieval underwater cultural heritage, consisting of shipwrecks and anchorages. This paper will discuss the scientific potential of this heritage through a presentation of the main shipwreck sites, specifically focusing on two historic ports of the archipelago’s central group where...
Between 1833 and 1877 the Tasman Peninsula (Van Diemens Land/Tasmania) operated as a restricted penal zone for British convicts transported to Australia. The main penal settlement was situated at Port Arthur, with a series of substations spread across an area of 660 km2 (250 mi2). At its mid-1840s peak over 3,000 male convicts, military, and free resided on the peninsula. The...
Reverend Thomas Bridges’ Yagan-English dictionary (1879) has hitherto been little explored outside of linguistics but is highly valuable as a complementary source to archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic records in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina and Chile). The dictionary contains 22,800 entries and yields rich information concerning the marine lifeways of the Yagan and...
Within a landscape, boundaries are the physically or socially defined lines that mark the limits of spaces. They can appear static and binary, and therefore analytically restricted. Yet it is argued here that while space is often analyzed in archaeology to inform social, economic, or institutional interpretations of a landscape, the analysis of boundaries is a complimentary...
Historiographic debate in Australia over whether or not the asymmetrical conflicts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in the colonial period can be characterized as “war” remains unresolved, largely because most such events did not involve the traditional military. In this regard the situation in Queensland merits special attention, since much of the conflict in that...