Recently, voices have been raised regarding the challenges of Big Data-driven global approaches, including the realization that exclusively tackling the global scale masks social and historical realities. While multi-scalar analyses have confronted this problem, the effects of global approaches are being felt. We highlight one of these effects: as classical scholarship struggles to decolonize itself, the ancient Mediterranean in global archaeology pivots around the Graeco-Roman world only, marginalizing the non-classical Mediterranean, thus foiling attempts at promoting post-colonial perspectives. In highlighting this, our aim is twofold: first, to invigorate the debate on multi-scalar approaches, proposing to incorporate microhistory into archaeological analysis; second, to use the non-classical Mediterranean to demonstrate that historical depth at a micro level is essential to augment that power in our interpretations.

If archaeology is the examination of historical conditions with reference to a surviving material residue, then one way in which these conditions might be characterized is as the different ways they had enabled the development of different forms of humanness. The historical construction of this diversity is discussed here as the ways that the relationships between humans and things had been performed. This means that the practice of archaeology must question the recent desire to adopt a flat ontology that defines archaeology as the ‘discipline of things’. It is argued that it was by means of the performances established between humans and their various objects of concern that different forms of human life were able to define themselves. The implications of this argument for the practice of archaeology are explored.

This paper critically examines how power is understood and used in archaeological interpretation of prehistoric societies. We argue that studies on power within archaeology have been haltered in their interpretive potential, frequently limited to individualizing coercive power with androcentric connotations. We explore new avenues of power through a retrospective view. Drawing on ideas first conceptualized by Hannah Arendt, while also incorporating theoretical ideas from collective action, anarchistic theory and the affective turn, we argue that power as a phenomenon and explanation within archaeology can be refined and nuanced when approached through a lens of collective agency and the affective potential of material culture. This connects, furthermore, to how we today see and act on changing power dynamics.

In the midst of ardent calls for decolonizing and building a more anti-racist archaeology, whiteness has gone largely unacknowledged in the history of disciplinary thought and practice. As a point of departure, this article asks: why are there so many White archaeologists? In addressing this question, I suggest that the development of early archaeological method and thought was deeply affected by White supremacy. In presenting the two case studies of Montroville Dickson and Flinders Petrie, I suggest that a radical new history of archaeology is needed if we are to build a more equitable, anti-racist field in the future. Central to this process to recognizing the role that whiteness has played and continues to play in archaeological practice and pedagogy.

This article recounts an untold chapter in the life of archaeologist Froelich Rainey, specifically his ambition to collaborate with Soviet scholars and deploy his personal networks to foster mutual understanding across the Iron Curtain during the height of the Cold War. The picaresque and implausible life of Rainey, who entered wartime Vienna in the turret of a B-52 bomber and was a State Department consultant with CIA connections, frantic anti-communist and advisor to Henry Kissinger, reveals just what was at stake for research in the frozen north. Here, I uncover Rainey’s work on ice—from his archaeological explorations in Alaska and his vision for a network of Arctic archaeologists to his internationalist aspirations for world peace. Without doubt, Rainey was a fascinating character, but he also occupied a position from which a wide range of values can be excavated—about politics, security, race and global order in mid-century transitions.

Ethics are fundamentally important to all forms of archaeological theory and practice and are embedded within many professional codes of conduct. The ethics of archaeological engagement with conflicts around the world have also been subject to scrutiny and debate. While archaeology and archaeological heritage are increasingly viewed as significant elements of post-conflict work, with much to contribute to rebuilding stable and secure societies, there has been limited acknowledgement and debate of post-conflict ethical issues and challenges for archaeologists. This paper is intended to stimulate discussion around major ethical issues, the problems and possible ways forward for post-conflict archaeology and archaeological heritage.

This article reassesses the social significance of Early Neolithic chambered tombs. It critically evaluates inferences about social organization drawn from tomb architecture and interpretations of kinship based on aDNA analyses of human remains from tombs. Adopting the perspective that kinship is a multifaceted and ongoing field of practice, it argues that the arrangement of tomb chambers was related to the negotiation of Early Neolithic kinship. Drawing together inferences about biological relatedness from aDNA analyses with interpretations of chamber arrangements, it suggests that variation in the architectural arrangements and sequential modification of chambered tombs relates to different ways of negotiating aspects of kinship, particularly descent and affinity. It presents interpretations of how kinship was negotiated at Early Neolithic tombs in different regions of Britain and Ireland and concludes that it is increasingly possible to gauge pattern and diversity in Neolithic negotiations of kinship, descent and affinity by combining different strands of evidence, including architectural arrangement.

Reification of ‘community’ and community engagement by professional curators of material culture has recently been critiqued in ways which highlight the diversity of cultural identities and priorities among the general public. When not acting as coherent local communities under professional supervision, people are otherwise curating culture in public space within frameworks of spiritual and creative expression, place significance and identity. Employing primarily secondary sources, I address recent outdoor public curation practices in the West, and consider such deposits in relation to cultural-heritage management, a perspective in which they have hitherto been little addressed. Although these practices typically use accumulations of themed objects to achieve visibility and audience, I conclude that they are ultimately more focused on the individual than on the community, with linkages within and between them highly digitally enabled. Apparently intensified by the effects of recent COVID-19 travel lockdowns, the practices are also linked by their typical colonization of transit spaces (thereby accessing audiences who are also expected participants), by their conscious ephemerality (with deliberate innocence about end destinations of the objects used), and by their use of mundane consumer artefacts. All these features pose challenges to their management, and curated deposits are often contested or removed by official curators or managers of public space, even as the same entities appropriate similar tropes to engage customers. With resurgent interest in tangible culture and physical place following pandemic-era overloading in the virtual domain, with travel habits potentially using different routes, at altered times, and with use of social media continuing to grow, such activities may see increased participation. This analysis suggests that imaginative proactive official treatment of these curations (e.g. by municipal authorities, heritage site curators, rangers or other property owners/managers) could avoid conflict with creators and also help reduce enduring public ‘innocence’ about the disposability of consumer objects. Treatment could involve encouraging ongoing adaptation (digitally recorded and disseminated) of the curated objects in situ by their transitory public audiences.

In this paper, we argue that closer engagement with the field of new institutional economics (NIE) has the potential to provide researchers with a new theoretical toolbox that can be used to study economic and social practices that are not readily traceable in material culture. NIE assumes that individual actions are based on bounded rationality and that the existence of rules (institutions) and their enforcement – the institutional framework – influences agents’ actions by providing different incentives and probabilities for different choices. Within this theoretical framework, we identify a number of concepts, such as collective identity and mobile jurisdictions, that seem to fit what we know of Viking age economic systems. In applying these models to the available archaeological and textual data, we outline the ways in which further research could provide a new understanding of economic interaction within a rapidly evolving context of diaspora and change.