The article will comprise a discussion on the continual aspect of landscape based on a burial place in the eastern part of Estonia. This burial place was used for collective dispersed burials into a stone grave from the 3rd to 11th centuries AD. In the second half of the 11th century the burial tradition changed, and from that time on richly furnished inhumations were practiced...
In the early Anglo-Saxon period, dressing and displaying the body in life and death played an important role in shaping and reinforcing identities and ruling social norms. Studies of the past decades have particularly highlighted the social significance of dressing and staging the body for the event of the funeral. This paper addresses how the production of dress items, the daily...
Mosques are the most obvious materialization of Islam. They are a clear sign of its presence in a particular territory, the building where the history and influence of Islamic governments is reflected through their artistic elements and architectural variants. However, they are also essential for the everyday life of the neighborhoods they belong to, because their inhabitants...
The general consensus amongst scholars is that anthropomorphic and zoomorphic Formative art, usually associated with the Olmecs but extending to post-Columbian civilisations, are depictions of humans and/or jaguars known as were-jaguars (De La Fuente 2000: 258). More recently, there has been discussion concerning what is actually being depicted through this Mesoamerican art form...
As Sue Hamilton brought out, a combination of personal and structural forces harm workers and areas of work. Those forces multiply inequity by channelling already disadvantaged workers into disadvantageous areas of work. For example, under a historic ‘domestic’ division of labour in archaeology, women have disproportionately performed invisible ‘dishwashing’ duties, which have...
Military personnel are often subjected to physical exertion, sleep deprivation, deficient diets, overcrowding, and stress. All of these influences are capable of compromising the immune system’s ability to ward off disease-causing bacteria, thus explaining why the historical narrative of war is frequently accompanied by reports of death and suffering due to epidemics of...
Jared Diamond’s book Collapse captivated readers with its tales of past great civilizations succumbing to dramatic cycles of decline, and among them are the ancient Maya. Diamond’s model of the Maya collapse has become quite popular since its publication, however numerous other divergent theories exist as well, which attempt to explain the phenomenon. Diamond, buoyed by the...
The way we view the past is constantly modified by new evidence and methodological advances. Archaeological data is gleaned from the ground and archaeoastronomical evidence considers the use of the sky in relation to the archaeological record. Since the beginning of the 20th century the two disciplines of archaeology and archaeoastronomy have flirted with one another but there...
Asiatic Rice Oryza sativa L. (Poaceae) is a domesticated grain crop native to the tropical and subtropical regions of Asia, which presently ranks among the most important grains in a global diet. Oryza sativa is comprised of two distinct phylogenetic subspecies, namely japonica and indica, for which genetic evidence indicates at least two centres of domestication: the Lower...
This article details a correction to article Armstrong Bruzzone, F and Vucetic, S 2014. Sharing the Field — Art in the Landscape and Landscape Archaeology. Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 24(1):10, http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/pia.460
This report presents the preliminary results of the ‘‘IN or OUT’’ Project, a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort which aims to investigate social exclusion, marginality and the adoption of anomalous funerary rites in late prehistoric Italy. In particular, this contribution explores the incidence and meaning of practices of ritual marginalisation and funerary deviancy in the...
Review of a conference on research exploring the evolutionary determinants of health, social interaction and urban wellbeing.
It is no secret that samian ware plays a key role in dating the archaeology of the western Roman Empire; the ubiquitous brown, orange and red-slipped sherds are distinctive and abundant enough for detailed study, which has in turn yielded valuable information concerning chronologies of production and deposition from the 1st century AD onwards. Since dates inferred from samian...
‘Green Arabia’ was a lively and smoothly run conference held at St John’s College, University of Oxford between the 2nd and 4th of April 2014. The facilities and organisation were excellent, and an opening address from HRH Prince Sultan Bin Salman Bin Abdul-aziz Al-Saud set the stage for a densely packed programme of world class research in Arabian archaeology. Papers arising...
The Oxford Handbook of Mesoamerican Archaeology is intended to be a showcase of the discipline’s recent developments and provide a comprehensive - but non-exhaustive - overview of early 21st century work in the region. It is probably one of the most ambitious such projects since the sixteen volume series Handbook of Middle American Indians published in the 1960s. It is primarily...
The lead article in this forum, ‘The challenges and opportunities for mega-infrastructure projects and archaeology’, by J. J. Carver, brought a couple of London incidents to mind, the two separated by slightly more than a generation, but each pertaining to the challenges of ‘urban’, or rather any ‘mega-stratified’ sites, for the dense stratification in many contexts is but the...
Jay Carver’s paper is very useful in summarising the process that Crossrail has followed and identifing the key factors in managing the risk, and maximising the benefits, associated with archaeology on major infrastructure projects.MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) has been involved in many of London’s infrastructure projects, at the consultancy, planning, and mitigation stages...