In recent scholarship on the Ottoman Mediterranean, it has become commonplace to challenge narratives of heroic discovery and cultural superiority expounded in publications by European travellers. Rather than taking a polished, published account as its starting point, this paper discusses the travels of Edward Falkener (1814–96), a lesser-known Victorian architect and writer whose extensive tour around Anatolia (1844–5) was never communicated to a broader audience. If Falkener is remembered today, it is usually as the author of the first anglophone monograph on ancient Ephesus and editor of the first British academic journal devoted to classical art and architecture. This paper reviews Falkener’s career, but instead of these publications, the focus is on his remarkable personal archive of diaries, sketchbooks, watercolours, contracts and notes for an incomplete book about his tour of Anatolia. Drawing on this collection, it explores his fluctuating interests in heritage from different periods of Anatolia’s history and well-documented interactions with a variety of local actors who helped or hindered his meandering tour. Representing the first attempt to study Falkener’s journey, this paper explores the utility of his archive for understanding the challenges and contingencies of Victorian travel in the Ottoman Empire.

This article presents the results of archaeological research of the post-Second World War mass grave site of Jama pod Macesnovo gorico in Slovenia. The surroundings of the killing site and the mass grave have been the subject of various investigations, including the exhumation of human remains in 2022. In addition to the human remains of approximately 3450 individuals, the results of metal detector surveys, and the excavation of the grave itself have yielded thousands of artefacts associated with the victims and perpetrators, shedding light on the events of the post-Second World War period and mass murder of opponents of the communist-oriented national liberation movement and new Yugoslavian regime. The study represents the results of the most extensive exhumation of war victims’ remains in Slovenia and demonstrates the significant role of archaeology in the reconstruction of historically poorly documented events in modern conflicts.

This article concerns the economy of one of the few fortified settlements of the Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age on the northern coast of the Black Sea, the Uch-Bash settlement, and its satellite settlement, Sakharna Holovka, in the Inkerman Valley in south-western Crimea. Archaeological excavations from the 1950s onwards have yielded much information on the cultivation of plants from the settlement, including charred grains and their impressions on pottery, tools for harvesting and processing the crops, storage containers, and other objects. Data were also obtained on the crops that were grown in the Inkerman Valley. Together, this evidence shows that the production of cereals was a major aspect of its economy at the turn of the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

In 1937 the philosopher Robin Collingwood excavated a henge monument in Cumbria and identified the postholes of a series of timber buildings, which he compared with those at other sites. These structures at Eamont Bridge were replaced by a stone circle. He planned to continue the work for a second season, but was prevented by illness. His project was completed by the famous German scholar Gerhard Bersu, who concluded that many of the features identified two years earlier were of geological origin; others were rootholes and animal burrows. Their projects have played a part in the history of fieldwork, but in recent years influential researchers have tried to rehabilitate Collingwood’s reputation as an excavator. Their views were encouraged by his pivotal role in studies of the northern frontier of Roman Britain. In 2023 parts of the monument at King Arthur’s Round Table were re-excavated with the aim of settling the dispute. The new work supported Bersu’s interpretation, but recognised that Collingwood’s approach was not as misguided as his critics had supposed – it was directly based on his agenda for historical research. The real problem is that he had been working without sufficient experience on a difficult subsoil. This article considers the methods used by both researchers at King Arthur’s Round Table and compares their distinctive approaches to field archaeology.

This article offers a fresh interpretation of the ancient Roman relief at Palazzo Sacchetti, identifying it as a depiction of the senatorial delegation meeting Septimius Severus at Interamna in AD 193. Through iconographic analysis, it argues that the relief embodies the Senate’s expectations for Severus’ rule, grounding his image in the principle of Iustitia and portraying him as a model of moderation and fairness. Ultimately, it reveals how the relief uses a ‘historical’ depiction of a real event as a lens to examine the negotiation of power dynamics between the emperor and the Senate at the outset of Septimius Severus’ reign.

The concept of ethnicity has been largely omitted from recent interpretational models in European prehistoric archaeology. However, eagerness to avoid the problems associated with its past uses has left us with difficulties in talking about important aspects of collective identities in the past. This has become particularly clear as increasing attention has turned to understanding processes of migration and their underlying social dynamics. Here, we argue that a concept of ethnicity cast along the lines of Rogers Brubaker’s ‘ethnicity without groups’ provides us with a possibility to avoid the conceptual baggage of essentialist and static views of ethnic identities. Instead, it stresses the dynamic nature of collective identities and the social and political use of ethnicity. This is especially useful, we argue, for the study of prehistory and in periods of profound change, such as situations of migration. We use the historical Migration Period as a foil to discuss the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and the third millennium B.C. Corded Ware and Bell Beaker phenomena to demonstrate how group-making and ethnicity formed and were transformed during migration processes.

This paper explores the utility of conviviality thinking for archaeological theory and practice. It first situates calls for convivial analysis as a response to the excesses of late capitalism and the existential challenges of the global Anthropocene polycrisis. The paper then highlights the critical, ethical and interpretive potentials of the concept to re-think human–animal coexistence, to frame new approaches to ecological conservation and to creatively reimagine shared multispecies futures. A suite of examples from hunter-gatherer archaeology and archaeological museums is offered to illustrate how conviviality thinking helps to challenge traditional representations of the past and contributes to an engaged, post-critical approach to museum and heritage practices fostering a fruitful dialogue on the diversity of species co-living. Conviviality constitutes a powerful lens through which to integrate theory and practice and to draw on the empirical strengths of archaeology, while recognizing the need to speak to a critical moment in planetary history.

This paper presents an archaeological material science study of pottery production and use at the Bronze Age Minoan town of Palaikastro, east Crete, from Middle Minoan IIA to Late Minoan IIIA2 (c. 1850 to 1300 BC), through petrographic analysis of thin sections and wavelength dispersive X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. The compositions of 288 archaeological samples are compared with geological references collected from the site and its adjacent hinterland. The results of this study indicate that throughout this period the majority of the archaeological pottery assemblage was probably produced using materials from a small number of geological outcrops local to the town; however, the manner in which these resources were utilised changed significantly over time, particularly between the Proto- and Neopalatial periods.

Since its rediscovery in the context of nineteenth-century colonial India, the study of the ancient Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara (northern Pakistan) has been hampered by very limited information about the provenance of finds. This is the result of poorly documented expeditions by archaeologists and antiquarians, as much as the enduring appeal of classically-influenced Gandharan art to collectors. The present study casts light on the modern itineraries of antiquities recovered on the North-West Frontier of late colonial India with new discoveries about the extraordinary Evert Barger expedition of 1938.

Although it made a major contribution to the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, its nominal sponsor, the Barger expedition was characterised by a surprisingly haphazard and unstrategic approach, even by the standards of the day, and it straddled the diplomatically sensitive boundary between the official jurisdiction of British India and the princely state of Swat. By exploring new information about three Barger sculptures in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, two of which were previously unprovenanced, this study unpacks the complex history of the Barger antiquities, correcting past misapprehensions and adding depth to a story of colonial archaeology that has tended to rely on generalisations.

Panoramic accounts of long-term socio-political change tend to marginalize the role of animals. Taking a materialist stance, we re-evaluate the ways livestock shaped the emergence of the tributary mode of production out of a kinship-ordered mode of production. This explicitly Marxist analytical framework foregrounds the interplay between value, wealth, and labour, while attending to the economic specificities of livestock that make it particularly dynamic. Drawing on ethnohistorical data, we identify wealth in livestock as heritable, expandable, flexible, and convertible, while inherently unstable. We offer the first synthesis tying these qualities together and present a holistic picture of how these qualities can catalyse the class formation by promoting differential accumulation of wealth, economic growth, and direct appropriation of value from producers. These dynamics offer an animal-centric explanatory lens to view the long-term trajectory of northern Mesopotamia from the Neolithic through the Late Chalcolithic (9700-3500 BCE), where caprines, cattle, and pigs were central to the development of urbanism and states. While our analysis is specific to the social formations, species, and human-animal relations in northern Mesopotamia, the framework we present can be applied to contexts globally to better understand the animal side of political economic dynamics of early complex societies.

The capacity to relate a signal to an arbitrary, specific and generally understood meaning—symbolism—is an integral feature of human language. Here, we explore two aspects of knapping technology at the Acheulean site of Boxgrove that may suggest symbolic communication. Tranchet tips are a difficult handaxe form to create, but are unusually prevalent at Boxgrove. We use geometric morphometrics to show that despite tranchet flaking increasing planform irregularity, handaxes with tranchet tips have more standardized 3D shapes than those without. This challenging standardization suggests tranchet tips at Boxgrove were part of a normative prescription for a particular handaxe form. Boxgrove presents some of the thinnest handaxes in the Acheulean world. To replicate such thin bifaces involves the technique of turning-the-edge. Since this technique is visually and causally opaque it may not be possible to learn through observation or even pointing, instead requiring arbitrary referents to teach naïve knappers. We use scar ordering on handaxes to show a variety of instances of turning-the-edge in different depositional units at Boxgrove, indicating it was socially transmitted to multiple knappers. The presence of societally understood norms, coupled with a technique that requires specific referents to teach its salient features, suggests symbolism was a feature of hominin communication at Boxgrove 480,000 years ago.