Welcome to the first issue of the European Journal of Archaeology (EJA) for 2020. Before presenting the articles and reviews in this issue, I want to introduce the editorial team moving forward. This will be the first issue in nine years to be published without the oversight and insight of long-term editor Robin Skeates. Robin stepped down as General Editor at the end of 2019; and I will be doing my best to live up to his example and achievements. I will be joined by new Deputy Editor Dr. Zena Kamash. Zena is a specialist in the Roman Middle East and Roman Britain and senior lecturer in the Department of Classics at Royal Holloway University. She has a strong interest in community outreach, public engagement, and post-conflict heritage, the subject of several of her ongoing projects. Dr. Marta Díaz-Guardamino will be continuing in her position as Reviews Editor. Marta has been a member of the editorial team for a number of years and brings a clear vision to the EJA reviews. Under her leadership, the quality of the reviews published by this journal has remained extremely high and we have seen increasing diversity in reviewer backgrounds, reviewed books, and book topics. Joining her as Assistant Reviews Editor from 2020 is Dr. Maria Relaki. Maria is a specialist in the material culture and society of Bronze Age Crete. She is a lecturer with the Open University and previously held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship at the Université Catholique de Louvain. I think I speak for all four of us when I say that our primary aim is to continue to bring you four issues of excellent new research and thought-provoking reviews every year.
In this issue, we present six articles and nine book reviews, spanning later prehistory to the post-medieval period and geoarchaeology to world heritage. Of note, two of the papers in this issue (Åhfeldt; Mol) contribute innovative theoretical and methodological approaches in digital archaeology. In recent years, the EJA has published a number of digital archaeological studies—both those applying new digital methods to archaeological sites and materials and those attempting to develop a more robust interpretative framework for these tools (see issue 22.3). This ongoing dialogue is an important part of developing rigorous methods and novel applications for new digital tools, and I am pleased that the EJA continues to create a forum for this sort of nuanced research.
In the first article in this issue, Mirva Pääkkönen and colleagues conducted lipid analysis on over 120 ceramic sherds and compared this to zooarchaeological data to explore subsistence practices in Finland from the Neolithic to the Iron Age. Their results point to a quite varied diet throughout the period in question, with dairy fats appearing in the third millennium bc on Corded Ware ceramics, indicating the earliest traces of animal husbandry. However, they suggest the exploitation of domestic animals decreased in subsequent phases, only becoming important again in the early Metal Ages. Interestingly, they suggest that Late Neolithic groups previously assumed to be living fully hunter-gather lifestyles continued to consume products from domesticated animals, although they might have acquired these materials from neighbouring agriculturalists rather than practicing animal husbandry themselves.
The performative aspect of Halstatt C/D funerary rites in the Low Countries is the subject of Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof and Robert Schumann's contribution. They delineate a specific form of Early Iron Age elite burial which they argue is part of a shared ideology throughout southern central Europe and directly related to the famous Hallstatt Fürstengräber. These so-called “chieftans’ graves” date to the 8th and 7th centuries bc and typically comprise cremations associated weaponry, drinking vessels, horse gear, and wagon parts. Moreover, they identify several specific practices and modes of relating to grave goods which are shared between Hallstatt and Low Countries elite burials, including the deposition of deliberately destroyed objects, objects wrapped in cloth, and horse gear but not horses as well as the reuse of ancient burial mounds. They conclude by suggesting that these funerary rituals demonstrate a shared ideology between elites in the Low Countries and in southern Central Europe. Although they nod towards recent attempts to apply globalization models to this period, they do not explore how these relationships would have been experienced or maintained by the elites in question—an obvious area for future research.
Juanjo Ferrer-Maestro and colleagues take us on a tour of the extramural monumental landscape of the Hispano-Roman city of Saguntum. This city saw major building campaigns in the first and second centuries ad, and the authors synthesise archaeological and topological data and classical texts to reconstruct and examine the growth of its urban peripheries. They argue that the recently excavated foundations of a large honorary arch in the outer city clearly demonstrate the importance of this new extramural quarter and might reflect an investment in urban monuments by an increasingly wealthy local population. This article offers an engaging discussion of the changing pattern of urban occupation in a provincial city, although its focus on public and monumental architecture means there is little attention paid to non-elites, the majority of the people who would have been living in Saguntum at this time.
Eva Mol offers us a different vision (quite literally) of Roman monumental architecture in her attempt to apply a post-human framework to digital reconstructions of the Iseum Campense in Rome, a destroyed temple to Isis and Serapis known only from documentary sources and fragmentary archaeological traces. She proposes that virtual reality reconstructions have an important capacity to represent not just the reality of what we know about this lost temple, but also the otherness and surreality of Roman religious spaces. She favours reconstructions which put the (human) viewer into a decidedly non-human immersive environment, forced to engage and perceive from the perspective of statues or to experience time in a non-linear manner. This article serves largely as the theoretical underpinnings of a larger project in progress, but its potential to shake up our idea of Roman religion and the way we in the present might engage with it is clear. Hopefully, the implementation of these ideas lives up to the hype.
A more quantitative approach to digital archaeology is developed by Laila Kitzler Åhfeldt in her discussion of 3D-scanned runestones from Bornholm. The rune stones on Bornholm are a late development, appearing only in the 11th century, and have engendered much debate about their origins, relations to Swedish rune stone carving traditions, and role in local political economy. This article uses multivariate statistical analyses of microtopography within the engravings to explore similarities in the gestures used to carve the runestones in Bornholm and those in different Swedish regions in order to explore links between rune carvers in these regions. She uses the results of this analysis to discuss the organisation of rune carving and the complex networks of rune carvers who clearly travelled around southern Scandinavia and communicated with each other about their work. This article provides a lovely example of the way digital methods can enhance archaeological research as well as a really clear illustration that quantitative methods and social models can be developed together.
The final research article in this issue is Hanna Kivikero's discussion of fish consumption in medieval and post-medieval Finland and its role in the wider economy. She brings together zooarchaeological and archival sources from two castle sites, Kastelholm in the Åland Islands and Raseborg in south-west mainland Finland, to delineate both the administration of the fish trade and the preparation and consumption of fish. She draws out the networks of trade through which fresh and dried fish travelled to and between two castle sites and concludes that fish were a significant part of the diet at both sites as well as an important economic resource. Kivikero's integration of documentary sources in her research allows her to build on her detailed analysis of the fishbone assemblages from these two sites to construct a complex picture of the regional economy and the role of maritime resources within it. This interesting, high-quality study won the EAA's Student Essay Prize in 2018, and we are pleased to publish it here.
Our reviews section this issue has a strong focus on the European Bronze Age. Joanna Brück's new monograph proposing a relational reading of Bronze Age Britain, Heide Nørgaard's discussion of bronze crafting in the Nordic region, Maikel Kuijpers' exploration of skill in Bronze Age metallurgy, and a new edited volume integrating metallurgical analysis and social theory all come in for strong praise from Oliver Harris, Matthew Walsh, Xosé-Lois Armada, and Claudio Cavazutti, respectively. Also included are commentaries on a pair of edited volumes collecting new research into ancient textiles, one focussing on the archaeology of warfare and violence, and one collecting new approaches to the north-west European Roman frontier—all found very worthwhile. A critical reevaluation of Unesco's world heritage listing program is strongly recommended, while a new textbook of geoarchaeology is welcomed but deemed flawed.
If you are interested in submitting an article on any aspect of European archaeology, or have recently published a book that you would like us to review, do please get in touch with a member of our editorial team or visit us on https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-archaeology
The Reviews team is also actively looking to increase the pool of potential book reviewers. If you would like to be considered to review for EJA, please e-mail Marta and Maria at ejareviews@e-a-a.org and ejaassistreviews@e-a-a.org with a brief list of your topics of interest and a short CV attached. Advanced postgraduate students as well as those who have completed their PhD are able to review for EJA. Proposals to review specific books are considered, provided that they are relevant to the EJA’s mission.
