As a Palestinian archaeologist whose work is focused on the geopolitics of Palestinian archaeology practice and theory, I reflect in this provocation article on the current devastation of the Gaza Strip by Israel and how archaeology can be incorporated into Gaza’s current situation. Pertinent questions include the following: How should archaeologists treat the ruins of the Baptist Hospital or any ruins in Gaza? What should be done with all these ruins? When does democide become genocide? Is an ex situ analysis possible? Is there such a thing as archaeology without a place? What kind of ‘regime of truth’ does it establish? What ethical implications does this form of analysis have? What kind of accountability does it possess? In what ways does it shape our memories of events?

Games and other forms of play are core human activities, as vitally constitutive of cultural and social practices in the past as they are today. Consequently, play, games and fun should be central in archaeological theory, but our review shows they are anything but. Instead, very few studies deal with these concepts at all, and most of those that do focus on how the affordances play offers link it to ritual, power or other ‘more serious’ phenomena. Here, we offer an explanation as to why play has taken such a backseat in archaeological thought and practice, relating it to the ambivalent aesthetics of having fun with the past in our own discipline. Building on our own playful practices and those of other scholars in the ancient board gaming and archaeogaming communities, we propose a move towards a more playful archaeology, which can provide us with a new window into the past as well as into our own professional practices.

The concept of a matricentric society, linked with female rule, has been enthroned in studies of Europe’s prehistory during the past two centuries. Nevertheless, in the 1960s and 1970s, feminist approaches dethroned the idea of the Mother Goddess as the key organizing principle of Aegean Neolithic societies. Recently, however, certain versions of gynecocracy, implying female rule, and/or of matrilineal kinship have been rethroned for studies in the Aegean Neolithic and Bronze Age. This article critically assesses how and why scholars have supported the existence of matrilineal kinship and/or female rule in the Aegean Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. Which pools of evidence have they used to support their claims and why? The multiple lives of matrilineal kinship and female rule in the research record will be discussed through the lens of enthroning, dethroning and rethroning processes. Ultimately, tracing these processes helps to elucidate the troubled relationship between translating socio-cultural anthropological concepts with and without applying socio-cultural anthropological knowledge to the archaeological material.

In response to the article written by Sabina Cveček, it is argued that the view expressed by the author that matrilineal kinship has been ‘throned’ and ‘re-throned’ in Aegean prehistory has resulted from a poor understanding of anthropological terms. It is also proposed that archaeological perspectives on matrilineal kinship cannot be ‘streamlined’ through the contribution of social anthropology and ethnography as both fields are plagued by their own limitations.

How can we understand prehistoric lithic objects? What meaning should we give them and what view should we adopt to claim access to their significance? How can we reduce and clarify our biases? This article is a proposal to introduce Peircian semiotics to review lithic objects. For a long time, these were apprehended as types, sometimes within evolutionary lineages; however, in this research, knapped stone objects will be perceived through a semio-pragmatic grid and reviewed as signs. The proposed approach is a new way of accessing the fields of technical phenomena of prehistoric communities. This new perception aims at a quest for objectivity, by clarifying the affective, analytical and interpretative a priori as an answer to the sometimes very personal view of the prehistorian on lithic objects. Charles Sanders Peirce’s logical theory of signs or semiotics is contextualized within an ‘artisanal’ reading of prehistoric tools as initiated by Éric Boëda and further developed by Michel Lepot. Through this phaneroscopic/phenomenological vision, the technical object, now a sign-object, is placed in action (semiosis) within a system of signs. This new trajectory is positioned both as a methodological tool and as an innovative milestone in the construction of a more logical episteme in Prehistory, taking lithics both as signs of past human activity and of archaeological representations.

To date, traditional narratives of the Late Iron Age have focused almost exclusively on discussions of the elite. These were the martial rulers and major landholders who occupied the upper strata of Scandinavian society. The lives of lower-status population groups, including enslaved and other ‘unfree’ or dependent peoples such as landless farmers, have long been marginalized in archaeological discourse. We have little knowledge of the ways in which the lifeways of subaltern peoples were shaped by the construction and maintenance of socio-political hierarchies and networks, or of how social inequality permeated and impacted the daily lives of communities. In this article, the authors propose that the concept of structural violence, developed by sociologist Johan Galtung, has the potential to offer an interdisciplinary framework for multi-proxy studies of (bio)archaeological and textual data.

Focusing on the late prehistoric southern Levant, we recently suggested that the diffused low-frequency distribution of large predator bones (lion, leopard and bear) coalesces into a coherent temporal pattern when observed at a sufficiently long timescale. While in the previous research we sought to determine what sort of sociocultural mechanism might explain this pattern, effectively drawing it into the orbit of the familiar, in this brief provocation, we push in the other direction, towards the unfamiliar: how can a process or phenomenon be culturally significant yet meaningless at the human and societal levels? How is a phenomenon substantial in the long term and insubstantial in the short term?

What legitimizes archaeological work in an age of global climate change, socio-political crises and economic recession? On what topics should archaeology focus its research questions, and what forms of archaeological engagement are not merely justifiable but able to make a difference in light of such challenges? Today, there is a tendency, we argue, that archaeological responses to current challenges are expected to align with a specific mode of conduct, political stance and genre, where, for example, a very particular notion of activism, responsibility and ethics is dominating. There is no denial that current challenges call for immediate instrumental reactions, but we contend that valuable reactions can – or even must – vary, and that more fundamental and slow ontological and epistemological change should also be nested within these responses. In this article, we explore what it means to care – what it means to be concerned – in the Anthropocene through archaeological practice and aesthetic engagement. By highlighting the relations between ethics and aesthetics, we explore ways in which we get in touch with the objects of concern, placing undecidability and speculation as dispositions equally important to urgency and impact.

Object biography, amended and expanded by the newer and ontologically updated concept of object itineraries, is a well-established analytical tool for documenting human–object interactions. The present paper explores its intersection with art, and proposes the concept of Creative Object Biography, as a step forward in the discourse and as a means for articulating and sharing alternative narratives and imageries not only among specialists but also – and especially – with the wider public, aiming to render discussions on materiality relevant to diverse audiences. The paper uses as a case study a group of three every-day objects associated with the Vlach pastoral transhumance of northern Greece, whose entanglements and cultural itineraries functioned as the inspiration for the creation of three original short films.

On the occasion of a short research trip to Japan, I had the opportunity to sit down with Professor Koji Mizoguchi in Kyushu University, Fukuoka, to discuss several topics, which you will find transcribed below. I was curious as to his thoughts that he – as the President of the World Archaeological Congress, a non-governmental and non-profit organization that promotes the exchange of archaeological results, training at a global scale and the empowerment of Indigenous and minority groups, a Professor of Social Archaeology, and one of the few archaeologists writing archaeological theory in the far East – had on the state of the art of archaeology today. Furthermore, since I grew up in Europe but nevertheless feel a deep connection with my own Asian ancestry, I was very interested in Mizoguchi’s own experience and contributions to archaeology in Japan and the world.

This reaction to the Paul Newson and Ruth Young paper entitled ‘Post-conflict ethics, archaeology and archaeological heritage. A call for discussion’ (Archaeological dialogues, 2022) supports the call for a discussion regarding archaeological ethics in post-conflict zones. Following the agreement on the fuzzy border between the state of ‘conflict’ and ‘post-conflict’, it reflects on the continuity between these two. Furthermore, the reaction adds an additional issue to the discussion, which is the ethical ground of ‘being above the conflict’. Applying a ‘holistic ethic’ approach, it reflects on the ethical assessment of archaeological practices performed by Russian archaeologists in the zones that were damaged during conflict, escalated due to the actions of the Russian government. A series of examples are shown to consider the complexity of ethical judgements in this particular case. Last but not least, the reaction claims that in some cases ethical judgements are possible and effective due to the convergence of numerous factors.