The importance of archaeological heritage management in a united Europe has increased in recent years, and the archaeological scene is changing drastically. Causes of this development are, among others, the end of the political division of Europe and the ‘green debate’ with its effects on the way in which the archaeological heritage is being treated. Equally important are the effects of the. Malta Convention and the influence of lawmaking within the EU. This paper discusses recent developments and the need for cooperation at a European level, as well as the various opportunities, tasks and challenges of heritage management in the immediate future.

Faunal reports from Magdalenian levels at Cueva de Nerja have been surveyed from both a taxonomic and a paleocultural standpoint in order to spot overall and specific patterns concerning the exploitation of animal resources. Although both diachronic and inter-site comparisons are limited due to the scarcity of data and the assemblages themselves have been studied by different scientists with different aims and methods, both first- and second-order magnitude patterns emerge from this study. The most important pattern concerns the constancy of the main subsistence basis throughout the periods under consideration despite dramatic differences in the diversity of cropped resources. Such a result substantiates, to a certain extent, the hypotheses concerning an intensification of cropping by humans during the latest stages of the upper Paleolithic (a phenomenon which we have named the ‘Tardiglacial paradigm’).

Excavations of stratified peat sites, carried out by the author on the Upper Volga during recent years, yielded a large number of varied bone projectile heads. Among these, arrowheads are most numerous. Half-finished artifacts of this group were also found together with lithic tools used for boneworking. Traceological studies enabled the author to identify various features left by lithic tools on the surface of the bone artifacts. A programme of experiments helped in the understanding of the operational chain during their manufacture, and what tools were used for each stage.

Long tubular bones were used to make the majority of the arrowheads. They were either broken into long pieces with a hammerstone or use was made of the ‘groove and splinter’ technique. Direct percussion with hammerstones was used for other bones. Secondary treatment included more accurate flaking and retouch, cutting, planing, scraping, sawing with the help of stone tools, usually flint burins, knives, scrapers and saws. Abrasive slabs were used for grinding, while fine polishing was achieved with the help of leather, sometimes, with fine dust-like abrasive agents.

The operational chain for the manufacture of arrowheads was the following: (1) obtaining a splinter of bone; (2) removal of unnecessary mass of bone with the help of burin and scraper to create a pre-form; (3) cutting of slots for inserts (for composite arrowheads); (4) planing of the surface with a knife, carving of details and, engraving of ornamentation. Many arrowheads were then polished, except for their bases. Specific variants of secondary treatment were observed on some arrowheads. The study showed a high degree of development of boneworking, with standardization of designs and technological operations, especially during Boreal times. Later, many arrowheads were crudely made, though wear traces and resin at their bases indicate that these are finished tools which were used.

Mortuary practice can be interpreted as a system of rituals based on people's perceptions of life and death. There is a great deal to suggest the prehistoric find sites we usually call cemeteries also had an important function as ritual sites. Several types of structure occurring at cemeteries from the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age in southern Scandinavia favour a broader interpretation of these sites. This article is based on the results of the excavated ritual and burial site at Ringeby in Kvillinge parish, Östergötland, an excavation which was undertaken with the express purpose of studying the archaeology of religion. The article also includes a general discussion of the concept of ‘grave’ and different types of structure which can be interpreted as places for cults.

‘The paradox of landscape’ is that, in theory, landscape aspires to a totality of human experience, but in practice it suppresses the complexity of the human experience. By supposing a ‘landscape perspective’ in the past, archaeologists are imposing a modern view of the world. In consequence, more varied perspectives should be considered during any archaeological inquiry. This is not a criticism of the use of landscape as a term to distinguish the wider spatial relationships between places which exist in the present. What is suggested as being unjustifiable is the use of the ‘landscape perspective’ to orientate and contextualize past human experience. This critique is illustrated and complemented by a case-study examining prehistoric land enclosure in Britain.

The paper attempts to integrate the results of chemical analyses, which are seriously underused in archaeological discourse, with other classes of information in order to try to interpret ancient metal working behaviour and knowledge within a semiotic framework, adopting the modernist premise that ancient metalworking was both rational and deliberate. A number of case studies from northern Italy is discussed. In the first it is noted that in the Copper Age Remedello culture arsenical copper was used for halberds and daggers while purer copper was used for flat axes; it is suggested that this distinction reflects deliberate choice and explanations are offered for it. The second case study regards the interpretation of the Pieve Albignola early Bronze Age axe hoard; evidence for the workshop practices of ancient bronzesmiths and for the use of axe preforms as ingots is discussed. The third case study concerns the swords and daggers of the middle and recent Bronze Age; finds context (tombs and wetlands) are discussed and it is suggested that metal analyses may indicate that sometimes these artefacts are not primarily functional.

A re-evaluation of how ethnicity is currently understood in archaeology is necessary in view of recent developments in the archaeology of identity. In this article, it will be argued that nationalism has led to an understanding of ethnicity as monolithic, denying in this way its heterogeneous nature. Since the 1920s, archaeologists working under the culture-historical umbrella have explicitly defined ethnicity on the basis of material culture, maintaining endless, and perhaps fruitless, debates. However, as anthropologists have been discussing since the 1970s, ethnicity is perhaps not about material culture, or not necessarily about material culture, but about perception. Archaeologists should consider ethnic identities as fluid and polymorphous, for multiple ethnic affiliations can coexist and overlap in the same individual. Ethnic identification(s) displayed by each individual will change depending on the circumstances, the interlocutor and the situation. In addition, archaeologists cannot study ethnic identity in isolation from other types of identifications – gender, religion, status, etc. – as all of them will be at play, ready to act (or to be hidden), on each particular occasion. These issues will be discussed in this article in relation to Iron Age Iberians.

The authors discuss results of long-term Dutch field projects in three regions in Italy and review case studies taken from these study areas in the light of indigenous developments in early Italian centralization and urbanization. By looking at regional developments in the domains of economy, religious and funerary practice as well as that of social relationships, they arrive at the conclusion that material culture was actively used in indigenous contexts. There is a consequent need for re-definition of centralization and urbanization, which in the Italian context are often seen as non-indigenous achievements. Comparative regional research, as suggested by the authors' case studies on the Sibaritide, the Brindisino and the Pontine region, will reveal both general trends concerning the concepts discussed and regional idiosyncrasies depending on regional traditions, histories and the regional landscape. To this end, a new project was launched, known as the Regional Pathways to Complexity project, that is introduced to the reader at the end of this paper.

The Iron Age Iberian Culture, centred on the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula, is closely connected with other Mediterranean areas. The use of monumental sculpture is one of the parallels we can find with other places, like Greece or Etruria. This has led to the study of Iberian sculptures within the framework of a comparative and diffusionist model. This paper aims to study the Córdoban Pre-Roman sculptures, interpreting them as symbols of power and a reflection of the territorial organization which emerged in this part of Andalusia in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC. It also suggests that, during this period, sculpture was not used purely for funerary purposes, as it had been in the past, but that it was also beginning to acquire a certain public character, although it continued to be associated with the aristocracy.

In this article, I attempt to show how the Germanic peoples of the Migration Period in Early Chiristian Europe (c. AD 400–500) created – or preserved – a pagan Scandinavian myth of their origin as a, significant part of their identity and perception. The function of the myths as political and ideological legitimations is related to the iconography of the material culture, notably the early animal ornamentation (Salins' Style I). Integration of the written evidence and the archaeological sources makes it possible to demonstrate how origins, myths and iconography together express a formative core of pagan identity in Early Christian Europe.

L'étude comparative de deux tombes crématoires de la Vénétie (à Padoue et à Este), chacune datant de la fin du sixième siècle av. J-C, nous permet de mieux comprendre les étapes du rituel mortuaire. La complexité des découvertes archéologiques ne peut s'expliquer qu'au moyen d'une définition tout aussi complexe du système mortuaire, en tenant compte d'éléments tels que: le nombre d'individus à l'intérieur d'une tombe, les modifications apportées à un cercueil ou à une urne cinéraire, le mélange des objets présents dans la tombe et des os incinérés de plusieurs individus à l'intérieur de la même urne etc. Afin de constituer un organigramme, on a pris en compte à la fois les analyses micro-stratigrafiques, la soigneuse restauration des objets découverts, l'analyse de vestiges humains ainsi que des reconstructions expérimentales. Ce travail vise à acquérir une meilleure compréhension des codes/pratiques funéraires dans les sociétés complexes de l'Italie pendant l'Âge du Fer.

This paper explores one aspect of the way in which cult-iconography of the later Iron Age and Roman periods in non-Classical Europe broke the rules of mimetic (life-copying) representation, with, reference to a particular motif: the triple horn. The presence of three-horned images within the iconographic repertoire of western Europe during this period clearly illustrates two aspects of such rule-breaking. On the one hand, the image of the triple-horned bull – well-known in the archaeological record, particularly of Roman Gaul – exemplifies a recurrent Gallo-Roman and Romano-British tradition in which realism was suppressed in favour of emphasis to the power of three. On the other hand, the triple-horned emblem is not confined to the adornment of bulls but may, on occasion, be transferred to ‘inappropriate’ images, both of animals which are naturally hornless and of humans. Such emblematic transference, with its consequence of dissonance and contradiction in the visual message, on the one hand, and the presence of symbolism associated with boundaries and transition, on the other, suggests the manipulation of motifs in order to endow certain images with a particular symbolic energy, born of paradox, the deliberate introduction of disorder or chaos and the expression of liminality. The precise meaning conveyed by such iconographic ‘anarchy’ is impossible to grasp fully but – at the least – appears to convey an expression of ‘otherness’ in which order imposed by empirical observation of earthly ‘reality’ is deemed irrelevant to other states of being and to the supernatural world.

For four years (1940–1944) after its defeat by the Third Reich, France was ruled by an anti-republican government whose active collaboration with the Nazis made a major contribution to the persecution and extermination of the Jews. Through the ‘National Revolution’, the Vichy regime developed an ideology opposed to democracy and republican roots and sought to re-invent its national origins as a justification for Pétainism. Thus, the Gallic past and archaeology in general played an important role in this new ideology by assimilating the defeat of the Gauls by Caesar to that of the French by the Nazis and by then comparing the successful incorporation of Gaul into the Roman Empire with that of France into a ‘new Europe’ dominated by Nazi Germany. At the same time, the Vichy regime provided French archaeology with its first legal and administrative structure, which allowed the development of the discipline. This legislative and administrative framework was preserved intact not only until the liberation but right up to the present day. It is the permanence of this structure which creates the problem of the relationship between current French archaeology and the Vichy regime.

Recent archaeological discoveries and reinterpretations of written sources supported by the concepts of historical anthropology allow the creation of a new picture about the Goths. Most of the archaeologists studying the cultural situation in northern Poland during the Roman period admit today that the roots of the Wielbark culture commonly identified with the early Goths are to be sought in local traditions. The results of that process, which can be explained in terms of change in symbolic consciousness rather than by a demographic expansion, became archaeologically visible in the mid-first century AD. The decision to leave the Baltic zone could have been taken by a Gothic social elite endangered by tensions resulting from unstable trade relations with the Roman Empire and climatic deterioration. However, a substantial part of the agricultural Wielbark population stayed behind, preferring well-known circumstances than risks of an unpredictable fate in distant lands. Among those people, after some time, the hierarchization process was repeated, leading to the emergence of a new elite, which decided to follow their predecessors by migrating to the south east. They are identified by the sources as the Gepids. There are strong archaeological indications that some part of the Wielbark population must have again stayed behind in Poland maintaining close contacts with their southern ‘cousins’. Archaeologists today suggest that some ‘Gothic’ groups from the Pontic steppes returned to the Baltic. The merging of Germanic and Baltic traditions resulted in a new cultural formation. In the ninth century AD, its material culture became more and more Prussian but there is evidence for lively contacts with western Europe, Scandinavia and the Abbassid Khalifate. A specific tradition recorded in the oldest Polish chronicles and in the twelfth century epitaph of the first Polish king Boleslav the Brave raises the serious possibility that some memory of the presence of Goths east of the Vistula somehow survived over centuries and it was used for construction of the Piasts' dynastic tradition.

The following paper aims to take a critical look at the role that can be played within the broad context of landscape based archaeological research by Geographical Information Systems (GIS). It will be argued that the rapid acceptance of GIS by archaeologists has not been without its problems, with a number of archaeologists wondering whether, despite the hype, any new approaches have been introduced at all. This, it will be argued, is a direct result of GIS-based applications tending to work within a largely inherited theoretical framework and, more importantly, lacking at present a critical theory of practice.

The aim of the paper is move beyond critique to suggest how GIS can provide not only an efficient means of generating simple distribution maps, but a flexible environment within which to bridge developments in theory and practice. Using an on-going case-study centred upon flood events in the palaeo-flood plain of the river Tisza, the implications of using GIS to welcome uncertainty into the analytical environment are explored and a number of approaches advocated. The significance these developments have in expanding our interpretive frameworks is explored through the fore-grounding and challenging of a number of dualistic modes of thought in that area actively encouraged and reinforced by the use of traditional GIS.