Animal meat, fat, and other animal-derived materials have been essential for human adaptation since the Early Palaeolithic, forming a crucial foundation for many hunter-gatherer societies until rec...

Evaluating the links between South American Amerindian ontologies and the contextual study of knapped lithic technology is the main goal of this paper. To this end, we focus on a study case from ea...

In the 19th century, French youth detention was a necropolitical enterprise aimed at controlling precarious social classes. Built in the 1840s in Normandy, Ferme Neuve is a rare example of the firs...

A 2021 sentence condemned a retired Major of the Military Police of Minas Gerais on charges of genocide against the Krenak people. Between 1969 and 1979, that state’s Military Police established tw...

Although historians and archaeologists have been quick to point out the political and economic conditions that tend to foment sea piracy, less attention has been given to the ecology of ‘blue crime...

The first few months of Second World War were marked by numerous mass crimes against humanity committed by Third Reich civil servants on citizens of the Second Polish Republic – local intelligentsi...

This paper analyses the role and meaning of grinding artefacts in Handoga (Djibouti), a medieval town that flourished between the 13th and 16th centuries in a territory previously occupied by nomad...

This article collects the preliminary results of the SEXLAVES project focused on the archaeological study of the materialities generated by the sexual exploitation of women in the northwest of Spai...

It is proposed that an approach to difference through repetition, inspired by the writing of Gilles Deleuze, provides a conceptual approach to understand the endurance of urban life in medieval Eng...

Published in World Archaeology (Vol. 55, No. 1, 2023)

The rebuilding of the US South following the US Civil War was only possible through widespread forced prison labor formalized as part of the Southern convict lease system. The convict lease system ...

Over the last few decades, Italy has been at the forefront of mass migration flows. Starting from the late 1990s, facilities for the detention and expulsion of undocumented migrants have been estab...

Although archaeologists often highlight the capacity of our field to identify broad-scale patterning in human societies, critiques of social evolution led many to focus on shorter-term, local histo...

Apart from helping us understand past communities’ response to climate change and their plant management resilience mechanisms, archaeobotanical information may also serve as a basis to rethink our...

Religious syncretism alongside the coexistence of various groups of people and their shared material culture was a reality in the Ottoman-era Balkans. Such entanglements remain underrepresented in ...

Preserving the archaeological heritage of North Africa is challenging due to unique anthropic and environmental processes. This study introduces a Bayesian network approach to model and evaluates t...

This paper discusses the impact of modern land use and climate change on mounded prehistoric sites, considering the evidence from Kur River Basin (southwestern Iran). By applying remote sensing and...

Madame Montour, the child of a union forged by an Algonquin woman and French settler, leveraged her fluency in multiple indigenous and European languages to emerge as one of the most prominent inte...

Given that culture involves some form of transmission from one generation to the next, the question of its origins must necessarily involve activities that do not depend on its pre-existence. Danci...

The recent discovery of a bakery in the Casa Rustio Vero at Pompeii has revived a discussion about forced labor and punitive incarceration in Roman-era bakeries. The bakery was hidden in the back o...

Culturally modified trees (CMTs) are a unique form of archaeology and cultural heritage. There are several factors affecting the survival of culturally modified trees in Australia, and these will a...

This paper considers the Early Neolithic phase of activity on an axehead quarry at the Eagle’s Nest, Lambay, a small island off the east coast of Ireland. The site is best known for activity in the...

Archaeological heritage is under threat by climate change all over the world and its resulting impacts are happening so quickly and within so many different physical and socio-cultural contexts, th...

A growing body of scholarship exploring Cambodia’s cultural-religious environment alongside reinterpretations of ancient Angkorian epigraphy has illuminated the enduring sacredness of Cambodia’s an...

Major changes in lithic technologies are often explained by either migration or crisis. Here we argue that continuity and minor adjustments in lithic production can tell equally dramatic tales of a...

As a richly-documented historical case study, Islamic period Southwest Asia provides useful insights into the archaeology of mining and metallurgy. Labor, however, is more difficult to reconstruct ...

Plastic pollution is a global phenomenon offering a vivid illustration of the scale of anthropic impacts on the environment, a key characteristic in defining the Anthropocene. Plastic pollution not...

For archaeology to address adequately the global challenges of climate change, it needs to resolve the Climate Heritage Paradox which consists of two contradictions. Firstly, in contemporary societ...

The Shanghai region is home to millennia of archaeological cultures and a massive modern metropolois. Until recently, this regional history has remained within the overarching framework of a north-...

The Kingdom of Koguryŏ was one of the so-called Three Kingdoms of Korea in the 1st millennium AD. According to the Samguk Sagi (Historical Records of the Three States), it was founded on what is no...

Dolia were the largest type of pottery in the ancient world, capable of holding hundreds to as much as three thousand liters. Their shape and size facilitated wine fermentation, and also made them ...

Published in World Archaeology (Vol. 54, No. 4, 2022)

Published in World Archaeology (Vol. 54, No. 4, 2022)

Published in World Archaeology (Vol. 54, No. 3, 2022)

Published in World Archaeology (Vol. 54, No. 2, 2022)

ABSTRACT Archaeologists have adopted the Gini coefficient to evaluate unequal accumulations of material, supporting narratives modelled on modern inequality discourse. Proxies are defined for wealth and the household, to render 21st century-style economic tensions perceptible in the past. This ‘property paradigm’ treats material culture as a generic rather than substantive factor in unequal pasts.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the death and unequal treatment of human remains in contemporary Brazilian society. It provides an innovative approach to documenting practices such as state inaction and structural violence from an archaeology perspective and explores concepts such as contemporary regimes of disappearance, state apparatus, violence and the ‘right to memory’ in a neoliberal context. Rather

ABSTRACT Human adaptations to marine resources were critical in the successful colonization of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) and the Pacific since the Late Pleistocene. Fishing the dense biomass of ichthyofauna present in this maritime region required the cognitive capability to conceptualize fish ecology and develop methods and technologies to exploit these challenging underwater environments. This

ABSTRACT This article examines the crime of archaeological excavation addressed in the article (26/a/1) of the Antiquities Law of (1988). Clarification of the pillars of such crime required the adoption of descriptive and analytical approach. It included reviewing relevant viewpoints of jurists and judicial jurisprudence. A Thorough analysis included the determination of material, moral elements of

ABSTRACT Polynesian societies have long framed discussions of chiefdoms. Often, these discussions treat Polynesia as a relatively homogenous region. Despite this, substantial variability in political forms developed in the region that came to affect the structure and nature of archaeologically attested past communities. Here we use two case studies to highlight these patterns: the Manuʻa group in West

ABSTRACT Ongoing discussions about the problems of white supremacy and colonialism in archaeology are useful but have not, thus far, fully considered the exacerbated effects of these issues on small islands. In this opinion piece, we, two white women academics from the Global North with extensive experience working in the Dutch Caribbean and the Hawaiian Islands, observe these exacerbated effects in

ABSTRACT This paper employs a historiographical approach to review the allied fields of Egyptology and Egyptian Archaeology in relation to studies of disability and bodily differences in ancient Egypt. We incorporate critical disability studies and embodiment theories to consider whether ableism is prevalent across these disciplines. The focus of this study has been inverted from ‘identifying’ disability

ABSTRACT House size is often used as a tool to calculate wealth in ancient societies, and thus it is also a potential source for the study of inequality. The site of Pompeii, on the Bay of Naples in southern Italy, was first inhabited about 800 years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried it 79 CE. The city provides one of the largest data sets of private architecture in the Roman world, and

ABSTRACT Offshore landmasses in the Western Pacific were colonized during the Late Pleistocene through deliberate seafaring by modern humans. However, our knowledge of the developmental process of the Palaeolithic seafaring is still limited due to lack of reliable chronology for such seafaring. To contribute to this issue, we synthesize lines of evidence on repeated sea-crossings over the Korea/Tsushima

ABSTRACT Organic remains from excavated sites include a wide range of materials, from distinct organisms (‘ecofacts’) to biomolecules. Biomolecules provide a variety of new research avenues, while ecofacts with longer histories of study are now being re-harnessed in unexpected ways. These resources are unlocking research potential, transcending what was previously imagined possible. However, this ‘organics

ABSTRACT The appropriation of local ritual practices and their expansion as part of the Inca imperial ideology is a well-documented mode of dominance in the Central Andes. However, there is still no relevant evidence on how it worked in the southern areas of the empire. We show how the Incas might have appropriated some local ritual practices that consisted of burying caches of skulls with perforations

ABSTRACT The growing rate of global inequality, on the one hand, and hyper-consumerism, particularly among higher socio-economic classes in developed countries, on the other, have resulted in the emergence of new forms of subsistence, lifestyles and settlement types where subaltern groups and populations live and work. This paper investigates the emergence of two of these kinds of settlement in Tehran

ABSTRACT Maritime migration and island adaptation by anatomically modern humans (AMH) are among the most significant current issues in Southeast Asian archaeology and directly related to their behavioural and technological advancement. In the center of this research hotspot are the Wallacean islands, situated between the Pleistocene landmasses of Sunda and Sahul. Two major migration routes have been

ABSTRACT The crossing of the Wallacean islands and settlement of Sahul by modern humans over 50,000 years ago, represents the earliest successful seafaring of our species anywhere in the world. Archaeological research throughout this vast island archipelago has recovered evidence for varied patterns in island occupation, with accumulating evidence suggesting a significant change in cultural activities

ABSTRACT The occupation of Buang Merabak, a cave located on the island of New Ireland, by 42,000 years ago demonstrates that the colonisation of the Bismarck Archipelago occurred soon after that of Sahul. This provides the opportunity to consider the adaptation of small groups of people to a depauperate island environment. An analysis of a lithic assemblage from Buang Merabak was used to consider how

ABSTRACT Archaeology lends a critical perspective to research on social inequality due to the field’s unique access to deep history, emphasis on materiality, and explicit incorporation of multiple lines of evidence. This paper offers a concise overview of archaeological approaches aimed at students and scholars in other fields. We develop a categorization of disciplinary strategies, arguing that archaeologists

ABSTRACT Monumental architecture has long been associated with the rise of the State and societal inequality, yet recent studies have shown some small and relatively egalitarian societies also built large-scale architecture. This study posits that some of these groups utilized ‘institutional flexibility’ – a strategy of creating and then dismantling hierarchical power systems during limited periods

ABSTRACT This paper uses events following the 1878 discovery of a rich Lower Palaeolithic ‘living floor’ at Stoke Newington, London, to explore the social and economic relationships and imbalances that existed within Palaeolithic archaeology in the mid to late nineteenth century. It explores in particular the role of the British working classes in amassing the extant record, the biases they might have

ABSTRACT This paper reviews the available vertebrate record from the Lesser Sunda Islands to explore the effect the Last Glacial Maximum had on human subsistence strategies. By focusing on vertebrate assemblages from Laili and Matja Kuru 2 in Timor Leste, Tron Bon Lei in Alor Island, and Here Sorot Entapa in Kisar, this paper investigates biodiversity and resource availability in these nearby islands

ABSTRACT The Acheulean has long been considered a single, unified tradition. Decades of morphometric and technological evidence supports such an understanding by demonstrating that a single fundamental Bauplan was followed for more than 1.6 million years. What remains unknown is whether sites assigned to the Acheulean represent multiple socially-independent iterations of the same technological solution

ABSTRACT Andrew Sherratt’s ‘Water, soil and seasonality’, World Archaeology (1980), signposted a long-term debate surrounding early farming adaptations to riverine landscapes in western Asia and Europe. Recent research at Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, a key case study in Sherratt’s ‘floodplain cultivation’ model, enables integrated, evidence-based assessment of the local hydrology and agroecology

ABSTRACT The popular prioritization of climate change issues over biodiversity loss in environmental archaeology and palaeoecology has been argued to be in part due to agenda-setting created by the ripple effects of widespread media coverage of climatic change. In this paper, we argue that direct scientific evidence for past human landscapes can act as a powerful tool in modern conservation efforts

ABSTRACT This paper is a cross-comparative examination of how tropical forested islands were populated by humans. It first describes the unique ecological conditions of these environments, how they fluctuated during glacial cycles, and the challenges and affordances they provided people. The paper then explores the global archaeological record, classifying modes of colonisation that led insular tropical

Published in World Archaeology (Vol. 54, No. 1, 2022)

ABSTRACT The rise of water transport technology enabled early modern humans to expand their habitable territory to insular environments. However, apart from intensive discussion for Wallacea, developmental process and regional variation of Palaeolithic seafaring remain unclear. To contribute this issue, the author presents a synthetic model for Palaeolithic seafaring in another region of the western