Issue 401 - October 2024

Regional variation in the historic development of agricultural societies in South-west Asia is increasingly apparent. Recent investigations at the wetland site of Balıklı (c. 8300–7900 BC) provide new insights into the initial processes of sedentism in Central Anatolia and the interaction of early communities within local and larger-scale networks. Located near major obsidian sources, excellent architectural preservation and faunal and botanical records at Balıklı suggest cultural connections to the upper Middle Euphrates region, yet inhabitants of the site do not appear to have participated in the wider South-west Asian obsidian-exchange networks and largely relied on wild resources.

The analysis of coprolites provides direct evidence of resources consumed and may be paired with ethnographic data to elucidate the dietary and medicinal use of plants in archaeological communities. This article combines and contrasts the macroscopic analysis and DNA metabarcoding of 10 coprolites from Bonneville Estates Rockshelter, Nevada, USA. While the results from both methods confirm previous understandings of subsistence practices at the site, minimal overlap in identified taxa suggests that each accesses different components of the consumed material. The two methods should therefore be seen as complementary and employed together, where possible.

The Maghreb (north-west Africa) played an important role during the Palaeolithic and later in connecting the western Mediterranean from the Phoenician to Islamic periods. Yet, knowledge of its later prehistory is limited, particularly between c. 4000 and 1000 BC. Here, the authors present the first results of investigations at Oued Beht, Morocco, revealing a hitherto unknown farming society dated to c. 3400–2900 BC. This is currently the earliest and largest agricultural complex in Africa beyond the Nile corridor. Pottery and lithics, together with numerous pits, point to a community that brings the Maghreb into dialogue with contemporaneous wider western Mediterranean developments.

High-elevation environments present harsh challenges for the pursuit of agropastoral subsistence strategies and relatively little is known about the mechanisms early communities employed to adapt to such locations successfully. This article presents the sequential carbon and oxygen analysis of archaeological caprine teeth from Bangga (c. 3000–2200 BP), which is approximately 3750masl on the Tibetan Plateau. Made visible through this method, intra-tooth variation in isotopic composition allows insights into herding strategies that possibly included the provisioning of livestock with groundwater and agricultural fodder and summer grazing in saline or marsh environments. Such intensive provisioning differs markedly from lower-elevation agropastoralism.

A dearth of published archaeobotanical data from the Late Bronze Age of western Anatolia limits our understanding of agricultural production in this key area. Recent excavations at Çine-Tepecik provide insights into farming and the political economy in the kingdom of Mira within the lands of Arzawa. Archaeobotanical assemblages indicate that farming was structured to meet both domestic and institutional consumption; the former utilising a wide range of crop species while the latter focused on cereals. Plant remains provide further evidence for a ‘hybrid’ suite of farming practices across western Anatolia and contribute to debate around the spread of broomcorn millet cultivation.

Investigations in the Tollense Valley in north-eastern Germany have provided evidence of a large and violent conflict in the thirteenth century BC. Typological analysis of arrowheads from the valley (10 flint and 54 bronze specimens) and comparison with type distributions in Central Europe, presented here for the first time, emphasise the supra-regional nature of the conflict. While the flint arrowheads are typical for the local Nordic Bronze Age, the bronze arrowheads show a mixture of local and non-local forms, adding to the growing evidence for a clash between local groups and at least one incoming group from southern Central Europe.

Classical archaeological chronologies are steeped in relative dating, but the application of absolute methods does not always support such clear-cut seriation. Here, the authors consider the significance of a Macedonian vase in reconciling the conventional and absolute chronologies of Early Iron Age Greece. Decorated with compass-drawn concentric circles and found in a Late Bronze Age context at ancient Eleon, Boeotia, the authors argue that this vessel establishes a chronological anchor and supports a twelfth-century BC emergence of the Protogeometric style in central Macedonia. A model for the indigenous development and dispersal of the Macedonian Protogeometric style is presented for future elaboration.

Rice agriculture was brought to Japan during the first millennium BC by migrant communities of farmers from the Korean peninsula. Substantial geographic variation is observed in the uptake of this new subsistence economy, reflecting different forms of interaction between farmers and foragers. Here, the authors analyse a combination of settlement and radiocarbon data to determine the extent to which these different forms of interaction led to regional variations in population growth rate. Their results confirm the presence of different trajectories of growth, providing new insights into the diversity of demographic processes during the earliest stages of farming in Japan.

Looting and plough damage to the eighth–fifth centuries BC tumulus of Creney-le-Paradis, France, hinders interpretation of this potentially significant site. Nevertheless, application of novel microtomographic techniques in combination with optical and scanning electron microscopy allows the first detailed examination of 99 textile fragments recovered from the central pit. The authors argue that the diversity of textiles revealed—at least 16 different items—and the quality of weaving involved confirm earlier interpretations of the high status of this burial, which is comparable, at least in terms of textiles and metal urns, with other ‘aristocratic’ tombs of the European Iron Age.

Religious practice in the Roman world involved diverse rituals and knowledge. Scholarly studies of ancient religion increasingly emphasise the experiential aspects of these practices, highlighting multisensory and embodied approaches to material culture and the dynamic construction of religious experiences and identities. In contrast, museum displays typically frame religious material culture around its iconographic or epigraphic significance. The author analyses 23 UK museum displays to assess how religion in Roman Britain is presented and discusses how museums might use research on ‘lived ancient religion’ to offer more varied and engaging narratives of religious practices that challenge visitors’ perceptions of the period.

As airborne lidar surveys reveal a growing sample of urbanised tropical landscapes, questions linger about the sampling bias of such research leading to inflated estimates of urban extent and population magnitude. ‘Found’ datasets from remote sensing conducted for non-archaeological purposes and thus not subject to archaeological site bias, provide an opportunity to address these concerns through pseudorandom sampling. Here, the authors present their analysis of an environmental lidar dataset from Campeche, Mexico, which reveals previously unrecorded urbanism and dense regional-scale settlement. Both characteristics, the authors argue, are therefore demonstrably ubiquitous across the central Maya Lowlands.

Archaeological cultures present allegories of ethnic identities across the centuries or millennia but such conceptualisations are necessarily incomplete and lack the resolution to explore transitions between cultures. Here, exploration of the archaeological contexts, production methods, stylistic variation and radiocarbon dating of 20 preserved textile fragments facilitates an examination of cultural change at Huaca del Sol (Huacas de Moche, northern Peru). While occupants of the site experienced many outside cultural influences, including those from the highland Wari Empire, continuity in textile traditions suggests that some sense of Moche identity was maintained through the tenth century and after the perceived end of the Moche culture.

The American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is a globally important comestible crop that features prominently in Polynesian lore; however, the timing and mode of its Oceanic transplantation remain obscure. New research from the Māori cultivation site M24/11 in Aotearoa/New Zealand, presented here, offers a re-evaluation of evidence for the early use and distribution of the sweet potato in southern Polynesia. Consideration of plant microparticles from fourteenth-century archaeological contexts at the site indicates local cultivation of sweet potato, taro and yam. Of these, only sweet potato persisted through a post-1650 climatic downturn it seems, underscoring the enduring southern-Polynesian appeal of this hardy crop.

Calls for the restitution and repatriation of cultural objects continue to escalate. High-profile cases such as the Parthenon Frieze and the Benin Bronzes dominate international news cycles and provoke fierce debate; however, less attention has been paid to items that are quietly returned and to the potential positive outcomes for the institutions on both sides. This article discusses three Southeast Asian case studies to address this lacuna and urges institutions to become more proactive in their engagement with restitution and repatriation claims.

Cultural inheritance is a central issue in archaeology. If variation were not inherited, cultures could not evolve. Some archaeologists have dismissed cultural evolutionary theory in general, and the significance of inheritance specifically, substituting instead a view of culture change that results from agency and intentionality amid a range of options in terms of social identity, cultural values and behaviours. This emphasis projects the modern academic imagination onto the past. Much of the archaeological record, however, is consistent with an intergenerational inheritance process in which cultural traditions were the defining characteristics of behaviour.

Many years ago, I taught a course at the University of Aberdeen on the ‘4As’ of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture (Ingold 2013). As we had been discussing flint-knapping, I invited the master-knapper, John Lord, to give a demonstration. We watched in awe as he skilfully detached flakes from a flint nodule of irregular shape to reveal the classical, bifacial form of an Acheulean handaxe. Then it was our turn to use wooden or antler hammers to detach flakes from fragments of flint. After an hour or two, none of us had made any headway. What looked simple in practised hands would have required years to learn, not a single afternoon! Nevertheless, the workshop taught us an important lesson. As Bentley and O'Brien (2024) remind us, mastering the skills to make an Acheulean biface requires hundreds of hours of practice. The question is, why does it need so long? What is going on during these many hours?

I want to preface this response by noting that, while I think Bentley, O'Brien and I fundamentally differ in how we approach the archaeological record (2024), I am also convinced that the more perspectives on the past we can cultivate, the richer our interpretative garden will be. Moreover, the more narratives of past worlds we develop, the more nuanced and complex our image of the past will become and, hence, the messier and more human (Frieman in press). I therefore write in the hopes that we can disagree with care, so that all of our scholarship is enriched.

I thank Bentley and O'Brien (2024) for their cogent review of issues associated with inheritance and intention in cultural evolution. Intent is, of course, present in cultural process and that begs the question as to when and how we concern ourselves with it as a factor in cultural evolution (Rosenberg 2022). Intent underlies our understanding of both micro- and macro-scale processes of cultural evolution. Lamarckian microevolutionary process depends on decision-makers choosing whether or not to accept and sometimes alter cultural traits (Boyd & Richerson 1985). Zeder (2009, 2018) points out that even long-term change may be affected by conscious infrastructural investments that alter capacity for socioeconomic production and, subsequently, canalise later developments.

In response to Bentley and O'Brien's (2024) article, I wish to focus on a specific aspect of cultural inheritance—that of technological innovation in later prehistory. In essence, I agree that “inherited social practices and knowledge” (2024: 1407) are indeed the backbone of technological transmission. Many examples can be cited where technological expertise (potting, metalworking, etc.) is passed down within a family or through apprenticeship schemes. For example, the first Ming Emperor of China (Hongwu, reigned AD 1368–1398) initiated in 1381 a census (the ‘Yellow Book’) in which households were classified for taxation purposes into one of four categories: general, military families, artisans and salt-producers. Artisans were classified by trade and the implication is that the family trade was fixed and inherited (Huang 1974: 32). This system continued until at least the end of the Ming dynasty (AD 1644).

We appreciate the respondents’ comments on our debate article ‘Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions’ (Bentley & O'Brien 2024). We all agree that traditional cultural practices—such as manufacturing Acheulean handaxes—often take considerable amounts of time to learn; as Gladwell (2008) popularly proposed, it takes 10 000 hours of practice to make an expert. We also appear to agree that cultural practices are intergenerational. As Frieman (2024: 1421) notes, ideas and practices persist because they are “valued, recreated, manipulated, instrumentalised and enacted generation after generation”; and as Ingold (2024: 1417) puts it, traditional tasks “are not subject to the free will of the individual but fall upon practitioners as part of their responsibilities” to their communities. Drawing on the practice of Bronze Age metallurgy, Pollard (2024) asks the million-dollar questions: how does innovation occur, and what causes it? As both Prentiss (2024) and Pollard note, for example, the pace of technological change is often punctuated, an observation common across the natural and social sciences, but one that defies easy explanation (e.g. Duran-Nebreda et al. 2024; O'Brien et al. 2024).

Egyptology has been changing. At least in the way its practitioners present their findings to a broad public audience. A selection of recent publications for general-interest readership represents something of a reorientation of perspectives on the (Western-led) archaeological ‘discovery’ of Pharaonic Egyptian remains, and the opening up of a subtle counter-narrative, which is something of an anti-archaeology. Rather than attempting to reconstruct what might positively be said of ancient events, their causes and motivations, Egyptologists are increasingly owning up to what is not known or what happened in the aftermath of the ‘main event’ that conditions the nature of the evidence we have at our disposal.

The complexity of the settlement pattern of hunter-gatherers is an underexplored issue in Tibetan archaeology; the multi-year survey and excavations at the Xiada Co site aim to address this situation. The project has provided evidence of long-term human occupation since the Early Holocene and has revealed the earliest human residential structures in Tibet.

Systematic investigation of caves and rockshelters in Uruguay is revealing the archaeological importance of these sites and their association with earthen mounds. Multiple periods of human occupation at Tamanduá rockshelter are revealed through stratigraphic analysis, and radiocarbon dates suggest recurrent occupation from the Early Holocene up to the historic period.

This project focuses on the subsistence strategies of Early Neolithic communities that inhabited the upland region of South Bohemia. Its results reveal a distinctive trajectory for this peripheral area that was colonised significantly later, brought incoming farmers into close contact with hunter-gatherers and made them adapt their conservative farming practices.

Combining non- and minimally invasive archaeological survey, geomorphological methods and linguistic studies enables a better understanding of the dynamic use of the Daugava waterway from the Bronze to the Viking ages. Results indicate a common origin period of many fortified settlements and also identify research questions about cultural fluctuations in the Baltic-Slavic–Scandinavian contact area.

The ancient site of Nessana in the south-western Negev had an important role in the logistics of early-Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The arid climate, which preserved organic material, and the richness of multilingual epigraphic evidence from this region make Nessana a key site for archaeological study of the material culture of pilgrimage.

Reconstruction of a nineteenth-century cobbled pathway in the village of Aristi provides valuable insights into the material culture and settlement archaeology of Ottoman-era Greece. The authors argue that such small-scale pairing of restoration and archaeological practices in ‘traditional’ settlements could enhance our understanding of Ottoman archaeology without undermining the lived experience of such places.