From an analysis of over 3,000 beads and pendants from seven contemporary Late Neolithic/Copper Age (3500–2500 BC) sites in the Portuguese Estremadura, two dominant patterns emerge: (1) most beads show a high degree of standardization in terms of size and shape and are made from local materials; and (2) a minority are made from non-local, rare, and visually distinctive materials (e.g.variscite, ivory), and are less standardized and more labour-intensive. The emphasis on a wide-range of materials suggests that uncommon ornaments may have functioned as ‘value added' materials with special significance, enhancing potential design combinations. Material preferences for beads, bracelets, pendants, plaques, and ground stone tools (da Veiga Ferreira 1951; Lillios 1997, 2008) appear to mirror other Western Mediterranean raw material preferences for ornaments and other polished stone objects (Goñi Quinteiro et al. 1999; Harrison and Orozco Köhler 2001; Pascual Benito 1998; Skeates 2010; Teruel Berbell 1986) suggesting that the Estremadura participated in aspects of a wider system of shared symbolic values.

The aim of this paper is to locate in the emergence and elaboration of Sardinia's Nuragic society, a narrative of cultural identity formation. The Nuragic period is typically defined in terms of economic, social, and demographic characteristics, and a Nuragic identity is implicitly taken to be a passive byproduct of these material circumstances. Such an account overlooks the role of identity in enabling and characterizing human action. The disjointed and contradictory Nuragic period transition preceded the formation of a coherent cultural identity. This identity, it will be argued, underwent a retrospective rearticulation to establish a distinct boundary between the Nuragic society and its antecedents. The material record illustrates clearly that the history of the Nuragic identity is implicated in social development on Sardinia in the second millennium BC.

Over the (slightly more than) two decades that the European Journal of Archaeology (formerly the Journal of European Archaeology) has been in print, we have published a number of excellent and high profile articles. Among these, Paul Treherne's seminal meditation on Bronze Age male identity and warriorhood stands out as both the highest cited and the most regularly downloaded paper in our archive. Speaking informally with friends and colleagues who work on Bronze Age topics as diverse as ceramics, metalwork, landscape phenomenology, and settlement structure, I found that this paper holds a special place in their hearts. Certainly, it is a staple of seminar reading lists and, in my experience at least, is prone to provoke heated discussions among students on topics as far ranging as gender identity in the past and present, theoretically informed methods for material culture studies, and the validity of using Classical texts for understanding prehistoric worlds. Moreover, in its themes of violence, embodiment, materiality, and the fluidity or ephemeral nature of gendered identities, it remains a crucial foundational text for major debates raging in European prehistoric archaeology in the present day.

In 1968, a weapon grave with brooches was found at Suontaka Vesitorninmäki, Hattula, Finland. Since then, the grave has been interpreted as evidence of powerful women, even female warriors and leaders in early medieval Finland. Others have denied the possibility of a woman buried with a sword and tried to explain it as a double burial. We present the first modern analysis of the grave, including an examination of its context, a soil sample analysis for microremains, and an aDNA analysis. Based on these analyses, we suggest a new interpretation: the Suontaka grave possibly belonged to an individual with sex-chromosomal aneuploidy XXY. The overall context of the grave indicates that it was a respected person whose gender identity may well have been non-binary.

The Côa rock art covers 17 km of the river valley and extends along the banks of the Douro, downstream of the confluence between the two rivers. A total of 194 different panels with Palaeolithic zoomorphic motifs have already been identified. Later prehistoric and historic periods, especially the Iron Age, are also represented. Settlement of the valley in Upper Palaeolithic times is documented by residential sites dating to the Gravettian, the Solutrean and the Magdalenian periods. Results of stylistic analysis, whose chronological predictions have been independently confirmed by superposition patterns derived from the figurative stratigraphies observed in the numerous palimpsests known, indicate that all these periods are also represented in the art. The outdoor location of the Palaeolithic art, the size of the territory, the number and aesthetic quality of the motifs represented and the almost uninterrupted continuity to the present of the artistic use of the region's rock faces concur to the uniqueness of this complex of sites. Accordingly, an Archaeological Park was established in the area, the construction of the dam that threatened to flood the rock art has been abandoned and the valley is to be included in UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Gordon Childe is a suitable name to invoke in responding to the considerable honour of delivering the Inaugural Address at the first meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists. For this is a historic occasion, and in founding such an association we are participating in the heritage left by the fathers of our discipline: such great names as C. J. Thomsen, J. J. A. Worsaae, Heinrich Schliemann, Oscar Montelius, Arthur Evans, the Abbé Breuil, and in our own day perhaps I might add the names of two such very different scholars as Sir Grahame Clark and the late Marija Gimbutas, whose absence we regret today. As Napoleon is reported to have said to his troops before the pyramids at Giza: ‘Soldats, songez que, du haut de ces pyramides, quarante siècles vous contemplent.’ Well, many more centuries of history and of prehistory look down upon us, as well as a century and a half of European archaeological scholarship. This is a notable heritage in two senses: the heritage of our European past, and the heritage of scholarship in the field of archaeology which has revealed and is revealing that past to us. But let us not forget that it is a heritage also in a more troublesome sense. For it is we as archaeologists who reconstruct (or some would say construct) that past. In this we cannot avoid doing so from the standpoint of the present, and we have the responsibility of interpreting that past for our contemporaries in the present.

Indo-European languages are believed to have spread through population movements from the original epicentre. In recent years, this diffusion and divergence of languages from the ∗proto-Indo-European mother tongue has been identified with the dispersal of farming populations from the region of Anatolia/northern Iran, who are held (e.g. by Renfrew) to have gradually colonised Europe between c. 6000 and 3000 bc. It is here argued that this was not necessarily the case, and an alternative explanation for the divergence of Indo-European languages is presented, based on contact, exchange, trade, and intermarriage. Linguistic models for contact-induced language change, the archaeological evidence for such contacts at the transition to farming in Europe, and evidence for the adoption of farming by the local, hunter-gatherer populations are discussed. This leads to the formulation of the ‘Neolithic creolisation hypothesis’. The paper finally suggests a scheme for the divergence of the Indo-European languages following this hypothesis and discusses the linguistic implications.

Warfare is increasingly considered to have been a major field of social activity in prehistoric societies, in terms of the infrastructures supporting its conduct, the effects of its occurrence, and its role in symbolic systems. In the Bronze Age many of the weapon forms that were to dominate battlefields for millennia to come were first invented—shields and swords in particular. Using the case study of Ireland, developments in Bronze Age warfare are traced from the Early to the Late Bronze Age. It is argued that during this period there was a move from warfare that made use of projectiles and impact weapons to warfare that used both defensive and cutting weapons. This formed the basis for a fundamental reorganization in combat systems. This in turn stimulated change in the social organization of warfare, including investment in material and training resources for warriors and the development of new bodily techniques reflecting fundamental changes in martial art traditions. Metalwork analysis of bronze weapons and experimental archaeology using replicas of these are used to support this position. The article explores how developments in fighting techniques transformed the sociality of violence and peer-relations among warriors and proposes that these warriors be regarded as a category of craft specialist exerting significant social influence by the Late Bronze Age.

During the third millennium cal BC, there were major changes in many aspects of Cypriot material culture, technology and economy which characterize the division between the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age on the island. Many innovations can be traced to Anatolian antecedents. These include a very wide array of domestic as well as agricultural and industrial technologies. Their nature and range make it possible to argue strongly for the movement of people to the island, rather than for other mechanisms of technology transfer and culture change. This identification of an intrusive group, with distinctive patterns of behaviour (habitus), opens up questions of prehistoric ethnicity, and the processes by which the initial maintenance of different lifeways by indigenous and settler communities eventually gave way to a common cultural system.

This article summarizes and discusses recent research into the Danish Bell Beaker phenomenon c.2350–1950 BC. Its focus is on the meaning of material culture here represented by Bell Beakers and bifacial lanceolate flint daggers, both seen from a social perspective. The Bell Beaker pottery is known to have had a very wide distribution. However, questions remain as to why Bell Beakers were only adopted in some regions and what meaning this special pottery had? Similarly the Danish type I daggers, which were manufactured within the context of the Danish Bell Beaker phenomenon in the northern parts of Jutland, had a wide distribution. Daggers of this type, which in general denote male identity, were exported in vast quantities, especially to Norway and the western parts of Sweden. In both case studies the evidence from a Danish Bell Beaker settlement site excavated in recent years – Bejsebakken – plays a major part.

This paper presents some new observations concerning the construction of the Sutton Hoo helmet, as a point of entry to a wider discussion of pre-Christian religious and ideological links across Scandinavia. It will be argued that in certain circumstances and locations, such as the firelit interior of the hall, the wearer of the helmet was seen as both war leader and war god, a literal personification of Odin. This interpretation is supported and extended with a variety of Scandinavian finds from the sixth to tenth centuries, and arguably represents an unusually physical manifestation of the ritual border-crossing between human and divine elites. In the socio-political context of early medieval kingdoms, the dramatic imagery of the helmets and related military equipment had a critical role to play in the communication of power, the origin of military prowess, and the religious allegiance of a warlord.

This article describes a path to addressing the discomfort that I and many of my braver colleagues have had, when putting words into the mouths and heads of prehistoric actors, knowing that these words say more about us than they do about prehistory. Yet without such speech, how are we archaeologists and the broader public to imagine the intangibles of the deep past (emotions, affect, gender, senses)? Moreover, such words create a misleading certainty that conceals the ambiguities of the archaeological data. Are there alternative options to verbal and vocal clarity when creating imagined fictive narratives about the past? With inspiration from composer Györgi Ligeti, from linguists and experimental psychologists, and from ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) performers, I explore the emotive power of vocal non-verbal interjections and utterances that have more universality and less cultural baggage, using them in three diverse re-mediations of digital media from three prehistoric archaeological contexts in Europe and Anatolia.

Among the most prominent prehistoric features in the boreal forests of northern Sweden are trapping pits or pitfalls used for hunting elk and/or reindeer. Even if often ascribed to the Viking Age and its trade in furs and other animal products, the chronology of these features has long been a matter of debate. In this article, a database of 370 dated radiocarbon samples from excavated pitfalls has been compiled and analysed using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) modelling to create the most elaborate chronology of Swedish trapping pit systems so far. The analysis shows that the most intensive period of construction of trapping pits was in the centuries before the Viking period. This challenges previous interpretations of Viking Age resource exploitation but is in line with several other recently published studies concerned with resource exploitation, non-agrarian production, and trade connecting northern Scandinavia with inter-regional trade networks.

Studies in submerged prehistoric archaeology have gained momentum in recent years with particular focus on the inundated landscapes of the European continental shelf. Although this renewed interest lies primarily in modern coasts and seas, there are a variety of differences between the submerged prehistoric archaeologies of inland and marine environments, ranging from questions of scientific research to heritage management to practical field methods. Some of these differences are the result of location, function, and period. Despite this, there exist similarities that, if ignored, risk increased marginalization of the archaeology of submerged landscapes from the greater field of prehistoric archaeology. A holistic evaluation of prehistoric archaeological landscapes must include inland waters and coastal zones and their relationships. Aquatic environments, viewed both as individual locations as well as continuous and connecting waterways, are introduced for their differences and similarities, and simplified examples of material and legislation are introduced in order to contextualize submarine sites and practices within the greater fields of prehistory and underwater archaeology.

Communicating archaeology from one person or group to another is beset with problems. The media, the public and students all have different requirements, while the language in which they are addressed – both the spoken language and the intellectual framework or discourse – can act as a disincentive to understanding. Big changes are in store for archaeologists and for other members of the academic community as electronic publication takes over from traditional methods of dissemination such as the printed book. Archaeologists must be prepared for these changes, and should endeavour to put their findings across in a way that interests and stimulates their audience.

Contemporary Lithuania, an area of the Balt cultures, is the northernmost region where burials, dated from the late second to the late seventh century ad, have been found with selected parts or whole bodies of horses. This study presents new information about these burials based on a multidisciplinary—archaeological, zooarchaeological, and chronological—approach. Our aim is to reconstruct the funeral rites and the human-horse relationships in Lithuania from the late second to the late seventh centuries ad, to refine the chronology of the horse burials in the region, and to use the new zooarchaeological data for more detailed studies of mortuary practices.

This article looks at the depiction of archaeology and archaeologists in popular cinema. A number of key films are discussed to address the article's main themes of cultural appropriation and contested ground (encompassing treasure, the public, politics and gender). Archaeology in film cannot be divorced from the wider cultural contexts in which it operates and, though portrayals of archaeology and archaeologists are frequently unsatisfactory, a positive conclusion is attempted which seeks to understand the narrative drive of popular fiction and a long history of public exclusion from archaeology. Most of the films considered do not warrant labelling as great works of art, but they are part of a cultural form with perceptions to offer, able to stimulate debate within a vital framework of cultural practices by which identity – individual and social – is constructed and evolved.

Scholars of Roman archaeology, epigraphy, and history are increasingly discussing urban maintenance and waste disposal, but the impact of these phenomena on the archaeological record remains largely understudied. The presence of waste disposal systems in Roman towns entails that a large part of what was discarded was periodically removed from the urban area. This in turn implies that whole historical periods may be underrepresented by the finds recovered within the city. This aspect can be apprehended through the post-excavation analysis of the House of Titus Macer in Aquileia, whose mid-imperial phase, during which the domus was inhabited and regularly maintained, is poorly represented. What has been observed suggests that great caution must be exercised when using data collected within urban sites to draw conclusions on ancient economic trends. To tackle this problem, our research agendas should target large extra moenia dumps more frequently.

The Roman province of Germania Inferior is characterized geographically by the river Rhine—the border of the Empire—and the forts along it. From the north-west to the south-east, there are significant differences in landscape and type of rural habitation. Whether these differences are also noticeable in animal husbandry forms the subject of this article. Are there any differences in species proportions and slaughter ages between the western and eastern parts of the province, and between urban, military, and rural sites? What does this say about farming and food supply? After presenting an overview of the zooarchaeological data from Germania Inferior, I shall discuss in detail one civitas—the civitas Batavorum, with the best known zooarchaeological dataset within the province. What changes in species proportions and cattle size can be detected over time from this civitas? Is there evidence for inter- and intra-site variability and changes in butchery methods? This article's further aim is to demonstrate what kind of questions a synthetic overview of zooarchaeological datasets can address.

This paper explores the nature and chronology of La Tène and early Roman unenclosed agglomerations in central-eastern France. It has been prompted by the discovery of a c. 115 ha La Tène D2b/Augustan (c. 50 BC to AD 15) site close to Bibracte in the Morvan, located around the source of the River Yonne. This complex provides a new perspective on the chronology and role of Late La Tène and early Roman unenclosed settlements, adding further complexity to the story of the development of Late La Tène oppida. It indicates that these ‘agglomerations’ followed remarkably varied chronological trajectories, raising important issues concerning the nature of landscape and social change at the end of the Iron Age.