Welcome to the final issue of the European Journal of Archaeology (EJA) for 2019. In this issue, we present six articles and eight book reviews. Below, we summarize their contributions to our understandings of European archaeology.
Drawing on the theoretical perspective of new mobility studies and the growing body of data derived from human isotope studies, Samantha Reiter and Karin Frei present a model of the mobility of single individuals (as opposed to groups), with particular reference to archaeological examples from later prehistoric Europe. Their model distinguishes among four mobility patterns: 1) non-migratory, characterised by individuals who were born, lived and died in the same geological area; 2) point-to-point migratory, exemplified by individuals who moved from one geological area to another; 3) back-and-forth, in which the mobile individual returned to their starting point; and 4) repeated mobility, comprising either cyclical or non-cyclical movements over an individual's lifespan between two (or more) areas. The authors acknowledge that this is a simple model, but it does have the advantage over more sophisticated theoretical accounts of being grounded in the specificities of the archaeological data, which will no doubt add to its complexity in due course.
Dušan Borić and colleagues offer a new perspective on the Mesolithic and earliest Neolithic in the Dinaric Alps of Montenegro, together with new data from the Odmut rock shelter and from Vruća and Vrbička caves. Instead of taking at face value the scarcity of Mesolithic sites in this interior region of the Balkans, compared to the eastern Adriatic coast, the authors emphasize the limitations of the existing archaeological data plus the economic diversity and connectivity of Mesolithic groups in this area, as well as their cultural continuity into the early sixth millennium BC, when novel elements from Neolithic cultural repertoires were first adopted. The unresolved question of demographic continuity seems like an obvious focus for future aDNA analysis.
Using an empirically based multi-proxy approach, Marta Cintas-Peña and Leonardo García Sanjuán assess the development of gender inequalities in Neolithic Iberia. They quantified, for a sample of 515 buried individuals from 21 sites, six bioarchaeological variables linked to individuals’ living conditions and seven mortuary variables linked to the social management of death. These data do not provide incontrovertible evidence of gender inequalities in Iberian Neolithic society, although a number of indicators do point to increasing differentiation of social roles, with, for example, women associated with ceramic vessels more than men in the Late Neolithic, and men becoming increasingly associated with violent hunting and warfare. It is consequently inadvisable to speculate here on the origins of patriarchy.
Aina Heen-Pettersen draws on the evidence of 16 burials in Norway containing (exotic) Insular-style metalwork to strengthen the case for a pre-Viking phase of voyaging and contact west across the North Sea to northern Britain and Ireland in the decades immediately prior to the first recorded Viking attacks at places like Lindisfarne in ad 793. She argues that advanced seafaring knowledge, skills and experience, previously gained navigating the Nordvegr route which extended for over 1000 km from south-west Norway into the unfamiliar seascapes and coastal environments of northern Norway, enabled Norse seafarers to undertake relatively dangerous voyages of exploration across the open North Sea and to move around in the challenging coastal waters of the northern British Isles (which they could previously have learned about during less risky journeys to markets in Denmark and continental Europe). Unfortunately, the new radiocarbon determinations obtained for a burial with an early Insular bowl at Geite in western Norway are too imprecise to offer support for this plausible model.
Duncan Sayer and colleagues bring together the literary and archaeological evidence concerning Anglo-Saxon and Viking-age swords in the UK and Scandinavia to deepen our understanding of how these preeminent weapons were used to construct identities, both in life and in death. Swords were evidently special, biographical objects, capable of symbolically expressing a plurality of social, economic, and religious meanings, identities, relations, and memories, both in their own terms and in association with their owners―all the more so when placed as close companions to the bodies of the deceased in graves. Occasionally, they were also deposited in unconventional positions that might have challenged mourners’ expectations. Further exploration of their variability over space and time has the potential to deepen these general statements.
Yftinus van Popta sheds new light on the dynamic late medieval maritime culture in the area of the former Zuiderzee, a large tidal lagoon of the North Sea in the northwest of the Netherlands, part of which was reclaimed as land during the twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the drowned medieval settlement of Fenehuysen, which van Popta discovered through the application of a layered GIS-model that combined a wide range of datasets from geology, geography, history, and maritime archaeology. This interesting, high-quality study won the EAA's Student Essay Prize in 2017, and we are pleased to publish it here.
In our reviews section, we begin with a thoughtful discussion of a thought-provoking book that seeks to show how archaeologists can help deliver sustainability in the face of contemporary global challenges. The following two reviews praise books that deepen our understanding of human-animal interactions, both in theory and in the case of the donkey. Next, Brian Hayden's new book on secret societies and the origins of social complexity in prehistory is described as his magnum opus but also criticised for being too generalizing. Prehistorians will also appreciate the next three books to be reviewed, spanning high-precision chronologies for Neolithic Europe, socio-cultural developments in the Iberian Chalcolithic, and two recently excavated La Tène cemeteries in western Switzerland. Finally, we break new ground with a critical review of a book about archaeology in and of video games.
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
Robin here: Having completed my third and final term of office as EJA General Editor, this is my final Editorial. I would like, briefly, to express my sincere gratitude to the many people who have contributed to the growing success for the EJA over the last nine years: the two entirely supportive Presidents of the EAA, Fritz Lüth and Felipe Criado-Boado, together with the Executive Board of the EAA, who helped reshape the EJA; the hard-working Administration of the EAA; our publishing partners at Maney, Routledge and Cambridge University Press; our painstaking Editorial Assistant, Madeleine Hummler; the highly committed members of the EJA Editorial Board; our EJA Advisory Board members; our numerous authors and readers, without whom the EJA would not exist; my colleagues at Durham University, who genuinely valued my work as editor; and, last but not least, Co-editor, Cate Frieman, who now takes over as General Editor of the EJA. It has been a pleasure and an honour to work with, and serve, you all in a project that remains as vital now to European archaeology as it did 25 years ago.
