During the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, the territory of western Somaliland was integrated into a series of Muslim states which controlled large areas of the southeastern Horn of Africa. One of the ways this control manifested itself was in the emergence of a network of permanent settlements on the westernmost side of Somaliland and the neighboring Ethiopian region...
Few studies of post-Columbian animal economies in the Americas elaborate on the influence of traditional Indigenous knowledge on colonial economies. A vertebrate collection from Santa Elena (1566–87 CE, South Carolina, USA), the original Spanish capital of La Florida, offers the opportunity to examine that influence at the first European-sponsored capital north of Mexico. Santa...
Many nineteenth-century Chinese migrants to Pacific Rim countries died far from their home villages. Diverse approaches were adopted to mark graves, possibly anticipating the subsequent, culturally important, repatriation of their bones. This paper evaluates the morphology of grave markers from eight northeast Australian sites and considers reasons for the variations. Physical...
The Canary Islands were initially colonized around 200 CE by North African Berber populations who brought with them domestic plants and animals. These communities remained isolated until the arrival of Europeans in the Late Middle Ages which triggered the conquest of the archipelago. Its geostrategic location in the framework of Atlantic expansion facilitated the arrival of...
The recurring ebb and flow of epidemic diseases profoundly impacted how colonial administrations dealt with death. This article focuses on the role disease played in shaping the “necrogeography” of colonial landscapes, a key point of intersection between funerary and landscape archaeology. Using an extensive corpus of evidence from cemeteries that capture inhumation practices...
The Bois Marchand Cemetery in Mauritius was established in 1867 in response to the massive death toll exerted by a disastrous malaria epidemic that swept the island between 1866 and 1868. As all the aspects of Mauritian society are represented in the cemetery’s necrogeography, the still-active burial ground offers an ideal setting to examine life and death during the Indenture...
Since June 2022, the Central Museum of Prisoners-of-War (Poland) has been carrying out a multidisciplinary research project entitled “Science for Society, Society for Science at the Site of National Remembrance in Łambinowice.” The aim of this article is to discuss the preliminary results of selected non-invasive and invasive archaeological and ethnographic research realized...
Colombian urban archaeology has been growing since the 1990s, particularly in Caribbean cities such as Cartagena, Barranquilla, and Santa Marta. The investigations generally respond to the need to comply with protection regulations of archaeological heritage in restoration projects of Assets of Cultural Interest (BIC, the Spanish acronym for Bienes de Interés Cultural), located...
This article charts the development of The Made in Migration Collective, a coalition of displaced people, academics, and creative professionals that was developed during a recently completed British Academy postdoctoral fellowship. Following discussion of how archaeology and heritage are under attack globally from far-right nationalism and specifically within the UK, I provide...
How do we learn to share? As contemporary Western folks, what do we share, under what conditions, and with whom? Through two personal “material stories,” our paper explores how archaeologists can think beyond capitalism when interpreting material worlds. We consider the dynamics (and limits) of sharing economies as an emerging form of collective production. Starting from the...
The NoMA Business Improvement District (BID) is one of Washington DC’s fastest developing areas and has one of the city’s largest concentrations of unhoused tent camps, many of which are located in underpasses that provide bits of protection and privacy. These underpasses were created during DC’s City Beautiful Movement and have been the site of neoliberal antihomeless strategies...
Advances in text mining and natural language processing methodologies have the potential to productively inform historical archaeology and oral history research. However, text mining methods are largely developed in the context of contemporary big data and publicly available texts, limiting the applicability of these tools in the context of historical and archaeological...
To develop a historical archaeology of hope, post-medieval European archaeology should shift the focus beyond dark heritage to sites and events opposed to daily destruction and alienation. This case study of an antinuclear protest camp in 1980s Germany shows that cracks in capitalism formed when people protested for something; as they experimented with alternative lifeways and...
This paper discusses the Australian boab tree and its potential for research as living historical archaeology. Boab trees play an important role in the economy, culture, and cosmology of Indigenous people in northwest Australia and continue to hold a powerful presence in the Kimberley region today. Working with Nyikina and Mangala Traditional Owners we have undertaken to document...
Knowledge of the terrain and its use are essential for successful combat. This paper highlights the importance of these facts through the deeds of general Miklós VII Zrínyi (1620—64). His efforts to strengthen the defense of Međimurje resulted in a complex defense system that actively used the terrain to its advantage, established primarily for the protection of the Kakonya...
The Bay of Pasaia is one of the highest heritage value portside cultural landscapes in the Basque Country, Spain. In order to understand the factors that have led to the current complex configuration, this study traces the historical development of this landscape. It analyzes economic and social dynamics that led to transformations of the historic areas, port, and natural...
This paper maps and spatializes the Almshouse Ledger records for the children of unmarried parents in New York City in the 1820 and 1830s. Mapping the distribution of poverty and the provision of forms of welfare in the city, this paper illustrates specific areas of the city which were attracting the very poor as early as the second decade of the nineteenth century. This paper...
One of the largest territories affected by the aerial bombardment carried out in Europe in 1944 is located near Kędzierzyn-Koźle. Surrounded by former synthetic fuel production plants, it contains craters from the explosions of detonation and general-purpose bombs, as well as smaller craters indicating the existence of unexploded bombs. The research presented in this article was...
Narratives embedded in studies of modern Spanish colonialism have conspired against a deep understanding of colonialism as a global and current issue and have influenced or limited the directions for research. By focusing on particular narratives that separate and disconnect the realities of the colonies from those of the Iberian Peninsula, this article discusses the conceptual...
One of the largest territories affected by the aerial bombardment carried out in Europe in 1944 is located near Kędzierzyn-Koźle. Surrounded by former synthetic fuel production plants, it contains craters from the explosions of detonation and general-purpose bombs, as well as smaller craters indicating the existence of unexploded bombs. The research presented in this article was...
The last 500 years is characterized by immense socioeconomic and environmental transformations on a global scale. Animals were significantly affected by these processes but were also central to many of the transformations that shaped the modern world. While there has been a growing number of researchers investigating animal bones from archaeological sites from this period, the...
The development of historical archaeology in the Iberian Peninsula has opened new and stimulating avenues of research into its most recent times. One of these has been the archaeology of the Carlist Wars, a series of nineteenth-century conflicts related to the overarching process of the emergence of liberal governments in Europe and, contemporarily, of counter-revolutionary...
Diversification of standards of living in modern societies is one of the main research topics for economists and sociologists. Usually, economic inequalities are considered to be a natural phenomenon which trigger further progress and, in moderate amounts, are socially acceptable. However, deep inequalities are unjust and destructive and lead to conflicts. The research of...
The early modern history of the Dutch Caribbean island of Bonaire has to a large extent been influenced by its most valuable resource: solar salt. Through a multidisciplinary approach combining a landscape study, underwater and terrestrial archaeological surveys, and documentary research, the maritime cultural landscape of Bonaire’s southernmost saltpan is analyzed holistically...