The Element considers historiography – the extent to which insular prehistorians have integrated their findings with the archaeology of mainland Europe; and the ways in which Continental scholars have drawn on British material. An important theme is the cultural and political relationship between this island and the mainland. The other component is an up-to-date account of prehistoric Britain and her neighbours from the Mesolithic period to the Iron Age, organised around the seaways that connected these regions. It emphasises the links between separate parts of this island and different parts of the Continent. It considers the links across the Irish Sea as only one manifestation of a wider process and treats Ireland on the same terms as other accessible regions, from France to the Low Countries. It shows how different parts of Britain were separate from one another and how they can be studied in a European framework.
Maria De Falco, Paola Aurino, Claudio Cavazzuti
et al.
Abstract The trajectories of human and object mobility in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC have long been a significant area of inquiry within prehistoric archaeology and over the past decade, aDNA and isotope analyses revealed a complex pattern of human migration, cultural admixture and exchange routes. While Northern Italy is clearly involved in this phenomenon, there remains a significant gap for the south of the country, generally considered peripheral to major exchange networks in this phase. Recently, two large cemeteries have been discovered in the hinterland of Mount Vesuvius (Acerra, Italy). They have yielded unprecedented numbers of exotic metal objects dating to 2400–1800 BC. Such items are extremely rare in Southern Italy, displaying typologies more commonly found across Northern Italy and Central Europe. Archaeological, bioanthropological and geochemical methods were applied to material from the cemeteries. Pb isotope analyses and metal artifact distribution modeling revealed long-distance terrestrial and maritime connections to Northern Italy, Continental Europe and the Western Mediterranean. Conversely, Sr isotope data indicate that these prestigious and exotic objects were deposited within a context of low human mobility. By integrating investigations into both metal and human mobility, this study emphasizes the extent and complexity of the exchange network in Southern Italy around 2000 BC.
In the late 19th century, German researchers Friedrich Klopfleisch and, later, Alfred Götze identified a set of archaeological sources they called “schnurkeramische Kultur” (Corded Ware culture). By the turn of the 20th century, this concept had become widespread in many European countries, effectively defining the phenomenon of cultural unification across a vast area in the 3rd millennium BC. In the first decades of the 20th century, Corded Ware finds inspired the development of studies on European prehistory, transcending local geographical and cultural boundaries. They played a key role in the ethnicising concepts of Gustaf Kossinna’s “Siedlugsarchäologie”, as well as in the formulation of the first ideas of interregional scope, presented by Vere Gordon Childe, concerning the key role of steppe migrations in the cultural and demographic changes in European prehistory. It was probably the methods of “Siedlugsarchäologie” that decisively influenced Corded Ware researchers’ commitment to in-depth typological studies characterising individual regions.
In 1857, the French artist Charles Cournault published a plea for a French mission to Persepolis. The aimof the mission was to obtain examples of relief sculpture, like those he had seen in the British Museum, for theLouvre Museum. Believing that Achaemenid art deserved as much attention as Assyrian, Greek and Roman art,Cournault urged the government to undertake the mission and felt certain that it would be aided by the efforts ofthe Iranian diplomat Farrokh Khan who was, at the time, in France. Franco-Iranian relations having never beenbetter, Cournault believed the time was right for a concerted effort to obtain diagnostic Persepolitan sculptures forthe purpose of educating the public. If France did not pursue this goal, he felt certain that other powers would doso. Cournault displayed a reverence for ancient Achaemenid art and sought to promote its qualities to an audienceaccustomed to viewing Greek, Roman and, more recently, Assyrian art as the greatest of all early human artistictraditions.
The excavations of the Temple of Diana at Nemi (Lake Nemi, central Italy) from 2009 to 2021 yielded pre-protohistoric lithic artifacts. This information, combined with available geoarchaeological and palaeoenvironmental data, enables a reconstruction of lake level changes as well as human socio-economic and cultural activities in the area from the end of the Pleistocene to the Mid-Late Holocene. The results suggest that Epigravettian hunters occasionally exploited the basin area during the Final Palaeolithic. In the Early-Middle Holocene, rising water levels, reaching approximately 360 m above sea level, potentially hindered human occupation. However, during the Mid-Late Holocene, decreasing water levels allowed late prehistoric and protohistoric groups to engage in diverse activities in the basin, leaving traces that may hold early symbolic significance. The geomorphological setting and early occupation dynamics influenced the palaeoenvironmental conditions and the patterns of human presence and utilization of the area during the Iron Age and historical times.
Priscilia Barbuti, Oscar Fuentes, Stéphane Konik
et al.
Since the first discoveries of Palaeolithic art in France in the late 19th century, surveying cave walls has remained the archaeological key element of the scientific process. From direct copy on tracing paper to photography and computer graphics, the methods and techniques of the archaeologists have always been related to the technological advances of their times. For the last 15 years or so, 3D has been applied to research projects in prehistoric archaeology and the study of decorated caves. From data acquisition to data processing and management, the field adapts, borrows and assimilates 3D digital ecosystems according to various research problems. What place does the archaeological survey have in it? What input in terms of understanding volumes and surface features can it provide? And what kind of knowledge modelling can 3D tools applied to the Human Sciences create? This is what this paper aims to address.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
Summary: The Ihò Eléérú (or Iho Eleru) rock shelter, located in Southwest Nigeria, is the only site from which Pleistocene-age hominin fossils have been recovered in western Africa. Excavations at Iho Eleru revealed regular human occupations ranging from the Later Stone Age (LSA) to the present day. Here, we present chronometric, archaeobotanical, and paleoenvironmental findings, which include the taxonomic, taphonomic, and isotopic analyses of what is the only Pleistocene faunal assemblage documented in western Africa. Our results indicate that the local landscape surrounding Iho Eleru, although situated within a regional open-canopy biome, was forested throughout the past human occupation of the site. At a regional scale, a shift from forest- to savanna-dominated ecotonal environment occurred during a mid-Holocene warm event 6,000 years ago, with a subsequent modern reforestation of the landscape. Locally, no environmental shift was observable, placing Iho Eleru in a persistent forested “island” during the period of occupation.
Irena Kalantaryan, Marcin Białowarczuk, Michał Przeździecki
The cave settlement at Getahovit-2 in Armenia has a proven record of human occupation from the Palaeolithic to the Middle Ages, making it the third prehistoric cave site, after Aghitu-3 and Kalavan-1, to be known from this region. The current excavation of an Upper Palaeolithic horizon, discovered in 2014, has yielded a radiocarbon date placing the site within the Last Glacial Maximum, thus filling a gap in the archaeological record between the middle and late UpperPalaeolithic (between 24,000 and 18,000 cal. BP). The short-termoccupation by a group of hunters, revealed by the preliminaryresults, is interpreted with considerable likelihood as a stopduring a hunting expedition. Work at the cave site has beenresumed under the flag of a newly established Armenian-Polishresearch cooperation between the Institute of Archaeology andEthnography of the National Academy of Science of the Republicof Armenia and the Faculty of Archaeology of the University ofWarsaw.
The polar bear ('Ursus maritimus') is the apex predator of the Arctic but its distribution throughout the Pleistocene and Holocene has not previously been reported. Although natural death specimens of this species (‘fossils’) are rare, archaeological remains are much more common. This historical compilation presents the record of known ancient polar bear remains from fossil and archaeological contexts before AD 1910. Most remains date within the Holocene and derive from human habitation sites within the modern range of the species, with extralimital specimens documented in the north Atlantic during the late Pleistocene and in the southern Bering Sea during the middle Holocene reflecting natural expansions of sea ice during known cold periods. The single largest polar bear assemblage was recovered from an archaeological site on Zhokhov Island, Russia, occupied ca. 8,250–7,800 a BP during the warmer-than-today Holocene Climatic Optimum: 5,915 polar bear bones were recovered, representing 28% of all remains identified. Polar bear fossils and archaeological remains across the Arctic are most often found in proximity to areas where polynyas (recurring areas of thin ice or open water) are known today and which likely occurred in the past, including for the oldest known fossil from Svalbard (ca. 130–115 k a BP) and the oldest known archaeological specimens from Zhokhov Island (ca. 8,000 a BP). This pattern indicates that as they do today, polar bears may have been most commonly found near polynyas throughout their known historical past because of their need for ice-edge habitats at which to hunt seals.
This article is dedicated to John Morton Coles (1930-2020), Professor of European Prehistory at Cambridge University between 1980 and 1986, Fellow of the British Academy, author of the highly regarded scientific works, teacher and editor. He dealt with several archaeological periods and was involved in different field projects and conducted numerous excavations. At Cambridge, in the Department of Archaeology, John Coles collaborated with such significant figures as Professors Grahame Clark and Glyn Daniel. John Coles devoted much of his time to experimental and wetland archaeology as well as to prehistoric rock carvings in Sweden and Norway. John Coles was awarded an honorary doctorate by Uppsala University. He was the advisor of Biskupin’s archaeological open-air Museum in Poland.
The article discusses changes in production and the of the pottery used in towns in Pomerelia in the early-modern period. These considerations are based on advanced research on late-medieval pottery-making of the region and the relatively poorer state of knowledge about the continuity of transformations at the beginning of the early-modern period. The vantage point for this study is a characterisation of the source base, including both the artefactual and written evidence. This enables the tracing of changes, and characteristic features of goods used, in the 16th century.
Alexandre Guyot, Marc Lennon, Nicolas Thomas
et al.
Nearshore areas around the world contain a wide variety of archeological structures, including prehistoric remains submerged by sea level rise during the Holocene glacial retreat. While natural processes, such as erosion, rising sea level, and exceptional climatic events have always threatened the integrity of this submerged cultural heritage, the importance of protecting them is becoming increasingly critical with the expanding effects of global climate change and human activities. Aerial archaeology, as a non-invasive technique, contributes greatly to documentation of archaeological remains. In an underwater context, the difficulty of crossing the water column to reach the bottom and its potential archaeological information usually requires active remote-sensing technologies such as airborne LiDAR bathymetry or ship-borne acoustic soundings. More recently, airborne hyperspectral passive sensors have shown potential for accessing water-bottom information in shallow water environments. While hyperspectral imagery has been assessed in terrestrial continental archaeological contexts, this study brings new perspectives for documenting submerged archaeological structures using airborne hyperspectral remote sensing. Airborne hyperspectral data were recorded in the Visible Near Infra-Red (VNIR) spectral range (400–1000 nm) over the submerged megalithic site of Er Lannic (Morbihan, France). The method used to process these data included (i) visualization of submerged anomalous features using a minimum noise fraction transform, (ii) automatic detection of these features using Isolation Forest and the Reed–Xiaoli detector and (iii) morphological and spectral analysis of archaeological structures from water-depth and water-bottom reflectance derived from the inversion of a radiative transfer model of the water column. The results, compared to archaeological reference data collected from in-situ archaeological surveys, showed for the first time the potential of airborne hyperspectral imagery for archaeological mapping in complex shallow water environments.
Trace element analyses was carried out using Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer and XRF on a small collection of bones and teeth from horse and human bone samples to check the ratio of strontium and calcium and other elements like zinc and copper. Interestingly the copper representation in humans is much higher compared to that of Sr/Ca. This shows that their diet consisted mainly of animal meat and fish rather than other vegetarian foods. However, the high representation of copper found in horse bone samples makes this scientific evidence an anomaly and needs to be seen with caution and to be checked with a larger set of samples. likewise the zinc samples have a very weak representation. Of course the bones examined in this study came from museum repositories and did not accompany the soil samples hence the values presented here represent only the bone chemistry.
Erik Ersmark, Ludovic Orlando, Edson Sandoval-Castellanos
et al.
With a range that covered most of northern Eurasia and parts of North America, the cave lion ('Panthera spelaea') was one of the most widespread carnivores of the Late Pleistocene. Earlier ancient DNA analyses have shown that it is distinct from modern lions, and have suggested a demographic decline in Beringia during marine isotope stage 3 (MIS 3). Here, we further investigate the Late Pleistocene population dynamics in more detail by combining a powerful algorithm that couples MCMC with coalescent simulations under an approximate Bayesian computation framework. We use an ancient DNA dataset of previously published (n = 34) and new radiocarbon dated specimens (n = 14). Phylogenetic and network analyses based on the mitochondrial control region and the ATP8 gene identified two major haplogroups, one of which appears to vanish around 41,000 cal a BP. The approximate Bayesian computation analysis suggested a decline in effective population size (Ne) in Beringia of at least a 2-fold magnitude that began approximately 47,000 cal a BP, followed by an increase in Ne, most likely around 18,000 cal a BP. The cave lion went through a demographic bottleneck during MIS 3, which may have lasted for several tens of thousands of years, and only recovered shortly before the species' extinction. Several other large mammal species display similar declines in genetic diversity in Beringia during MIS 3, suggesting that major environmental changes might have affected megafaunal populations during this time period.
Although prehistoric periods (especially Chalcolithic) on the western side of the Central Zagros Mountain are fairly known, the Songhor and Koliyaei Plains have not been sufficiently investigated by western or Iranian archaeologists. In the course of the recent investigationsduring the 2002 and 2009 field seasons, thirty three chalcolithic sites, of which nine sites contain Dalma sherds, were identified. The above nine sites are located close to the water resources and most of them are located in the hill sides where pasture lands are accessible. Small size settlements testify that there have been small sedentary or semi-sedentary villages whose inhabitants could obtain their requirements by animal husbandry. The present paper aims to provide valuable information on this culture and examine its probable interaction with its neighboring regions such as Kangavar, Mahidasht, and south of Kurdistan. Keywords: Central Zagros, Songhor and Koliyaei, Chalcolithic period, Dalma tradition, Pottery.
Archaeological science or scientific archaeology?
Modern archaeology depends heavily on other scientific disciplines. This “addiction” affects both archaeology and the supporting disciplines. Here I mainly examine the effects from cooperation between natural sciences and archaeology. The effects are of two types: On one side the cooperation enables archaeologists to see prehistoric man more clearly as part of the environment. On the other side it makes archaeologists habituated to the incessant influx of knowledge from other specialists. As the enrichment of prehistoric knowledge from natural science is obvious and extremely valuable I concentrate on the internal effects on archaeology. In what direction will this cooperative archaeology move in the decades to come?