Studies related to prehistoric, Circum-Alpine lakeside settlements have for the last decade or so begun to focus increasingly on the reconstruction of its inhabitant’s social dimensions of life. More traditional models attempting to explain the often-fleeting settlement patterns set in a tightly managed cultural landscape focusing on climate and economic factors alone have proven...
Archaeologists have explored a wide range of topics regarding archaeological stone tools and their connection to past human lifeways through experimentation. Controlled experimentation systematically quantifies the empirical relationships among different flaking variables under a controlled and reproducible setting. This approach offers a platform to generate and test hypotheses...
During the Lower Paleolithic, the interaction between hominins and elephants through the medium of lithic tools is testified by numerous sites in Africa, Europe, and Asia. This interaction ensured hominins a large source of food and of knappable raw material, bone. The availability of the huge package of resources represented by these animals had a deep impact on hominins...
Toward the end of the Pleistocene, the world experienced a mass extinction of megafauna. In North America these included its proboscideans—the mammoths and mastodons. Researchers in conservation biology, paleontology, and archaeology have debated the role played by human predation in these extinctions. They point to traces of human butchery, such as cut marks and other bone...
The ability of early hominins to overcome the constraints imposed by the characteristics of raw materials used for stone tool production is a key topic on the discussion about the evolution of hominin cognitive capabilities and technical behaviours. Thus, technological variability has been the centrepiece on this debate. However, the variability of lithic assemblages cannot be...
The analysis of site locations is an important component of archaeological research. Recent advances in this topic include the use of ecological models such as the ideal free distribution and its variants, which predict site locations under various conditions in relation to criteria that promote the greatest adaptive success. Such models can face problems in determining such...
The paper proposes a new method to quantify the flow of water and water accumulation zones on bedrock panels. This can be used to investigate how water influences the placement of rock art. The analysis is based on photogrammetric models on which water flows and accumulations were modelled using a NetLogo simulation and the SAGA hydrology package. To test the hypothesis that...
Personal ornaments are widely viewed as indicators of social identity and personhood. Ornaments are ubiquitous from the Late Pleistocene to the Holocene, but they are most often found as isolated objects within archaeological assemblages without direct evidence on how they were displayed. This article presents a detailed record of the ornaments found in direct association with an...
Research into ancient Chinese metallurgy has flourished over recent years with the accumulation of analytical data reflecting the needs of so many archaeological finds. However, the relationship between technology and society is unlikely to be revealed simply by analysing more artefacts. This is particularly evident in the debates over the sources of metals used to manufacture...
The Mesolithic in Eastern Europe was the last time that hunter-gatherer economies thrived there before the spread of agriculture in the second half of the seventh millennium BC. But the period, and the interactions between foragers and the first farmers, are poorly understood in the Carpathian Basin and surrounding areas because few sites are known, and even fewer have been...
The Carpathian Basin was a highly influential centre of metalworking in the 2nd mil. BC. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of metal objects from the Late Bronze Age, the scarcity of contextually associated metalworking remains representing distinct phases of the metalworking cycle from this region is striking. Here, we explore Late Bronze Age metalworking through the lens of a...
Thermal influences on marine molluscs are poorly understood across all disciplines, including archaeology. This presents potential issues for further analysis including radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis, as well as hindering our understandings of processing and preparation methods for shell in the past. Different methods of burning or heating may not always leave...
Magic and witchcraft, classic topics in the anthropology of religion, involve everyday things such as ashes, ceramics, minerals, shell, and projectile points. In many cultures, people attribute agency to such artifacts, as well as architecture, begging the question what is the archaeological record of such animate beings? To understand past human lifeways more fully, we need to...
The acoustics of the Lower Chuya River area rock art landscape are analyzed through both the exploration of its acoustic properties and the ethnographic information gathered about the region. The results obtained in the acoustics tests undertaken in the area, in particular at the rock art sites of Kalbak-Tash I, Kalbak-Tash II, and Adyr-Kan, are examined. They indicate that the...
Boomerangs are among the most recognisable elements of Australian Aboriginal technology. In the popular mindset, the prevailing image of these wooden artefacts is that of thrown implements that return to the thrower, principally used for hunting animals. However, boomerangs have a deep multipurpose role in Indigenous societies, with just a few examples of their known functions...
The last decade saw a rapid increase in the number of studies where time–frequency changes of radiocarbon dates have been used as a proxy for inferring past population dynamics. Although its universal and straightforward premise is appealing and undoubtedly offers some unique opportunities for research on long-term comparative demography, practical applications are far from...
Recent expansion of alternative frameworks for archaeological interpretation, particularly non-Western ones, provides an opportunity to revisit and challenge orthodox narratives in the discipline. The Melanesian concept of kastom provides a framework to understand contradictions arising from the selective nature of colonial-era culture change. One facet of these transitions is...
During the 4th millennium BC, an intensive artefact circulation system existed among the hunter-gatherer peoples of north-eastern Europe. Along with other goods, ring-shaped ornaments that were mainly made of different kinds of slates or tuffites were commonly distributed. Although commonly referred to as ‘slate rings’, these ornaments consist mainly of fragments of rings. In...
A new theoretical approach to medieval rural settlement, built on the concept of intensity, is proposed. It is argued that analysing settlements as intensive spaces creates new opportunities to explore the emergence of difference in medieval lived experience. The approach is intended to overcome the challenges posed by approaches to medieval architecture framed by binary...
The endokarst landscape is the result of long erosion and sedimentation processes that have modelled an environment in which capricious forms abound. Despite being a hostile environment for human life, these caves must have attracted the attention of human groups from as early as the Palaeolithic. It is striking that many examples of rock art appear to be closely symbiotic with...
A commonly identified problem in open-air sites is the poor preservation of bone surfaces because of the multiple agents and processes that act on them. In these assemblages, surface modifications of anthropic origin can be scarce or null, and its activity is mainly inferred through the stone tools and evidence of anthropogenic breakage. Carnivore activity is also frequent. La...
Landscape plays a vital role in the development of military campaigns through the definition of geostrategic landmarks that structure the control of the territory, the imposition of constraints to the movement of armies and the identification of features that facilitate defence against attackers. These factors are linked to the study of past spatial mobility which is typically...
Contributing to the issue of complex relationship between social and cultural evolution, this paper aims to analyze repetitive patterns, or cycles, in the development of material culture. Our analysis focuses on culture change associated with sociopolitical and economic stasis. The proposed toy model describes the cyclical character of the quantitative and qualitative composition...
We review palaeoenvironmental proxies and combinations of these relevant for understanding hunter-gatherer niche construction activities in pre-agricultural Europe. Our approach consists of two steps: (1) identify the possible range of hunter-gatherer impacts on landscapes based on ethnographic studies; (2) evaluate proxies possibly reflecting these impacts for both the Eemian...