In ten days, I'll be on a plane to Europe to join many of you at the EAA annual conference in person for the first time since we met in Bern in 2019. I've missed seeing so many friends and colleagues in person, but I also know that the accessibility of hybrid conferences to lower income and disabled archaeologists as well as those with caring responsibilities is not something we want to lose. There is also the environmental impact of people like me flying around the world for a conference, and that is no small thing. If there's one lesson to learn from the past two years (and there are, of course, many more than one), it's that just because something has always been done in a given way, that's not necessarily the only or the best way. As we face the effects of climate change head on, flexibility, community support, and the power to imagine and work towards a better world are some of our strongest virtues.
In this issue of the European Journal of Archaeology we feature six articles and five book reviews. The articles this issue have a strong prehistoric focus but also include an important quantitative analysis of early medieval dietary changes and the reviews are extremely diverse, ranging from Bronze Age metallurgy to analytical methods. These include two further reviews in our special ‘Reviewing the Classics’ section.
Januszek and colleagues start this issue with a topic near and dear to my heart: third millennium bc lithic technology. They apply a variety of macroscopic and microscopic analyses to 24 ground flint arrowheads from Supraśl 3 in north-eastern Poland to explore the unique chaîne opératoire and the significance of these pieces. This analysis is further nuanced as the arrowheads themselves are from ritual contexts. They connect these arrowheads to innovative practices by people on the periphery of the Bell Beaker world. This sort of creative reinterpretation is increasingly recognized as a special feature of communities in margins or frontier zones, and the arrowheads presented here neatly support the model.
Instead of identifying a new type of grave, Brück and Booth return to a very well-studied assemblage of British Bronze Age burials with new methods to ask: what if these burials don't represent a single moment in time? Building on a major radiocarbon dating campaign as well as histological and contextual analysis, they argue that some individuals seem to have been buried one or more generations after death. This implies a period during which human remains circulated in the community, perhaps remaining somewhat ‘alive’ in a social sense; and it further calls into question our attempts to understand individual identity through the analysis of grave goods.
Schaefer-Di Maida also offers a re-evaluation of a known type of Bronze Age site, in this case the so-called ‘cooking stone pits’ from northern Europe. These pits of fire-cracked stones vary in size, shape, layout, and age. A function in food preparation or feasting activities has long been hypothesized, but remains contested. Through a carful re-evaluation of the available data, Schaefer-Di Maida argues that these are not random constructions, but that trends in shape, arrangement, and dating are present. She suggests these trends relate to changes in communal activities in both the ritual and quotidian sphere, and some may be related to wider practices, such as the shift to flat cremation cemeteries.
Remaining in northern Europe, Moen and Walsh examine the fragmented human remains from Norwegian bogs to consider how these might relate to conceptions of personhood in Scandinavia during the Iron Age. Grounding their analysis in relational models, they argue we should see the deposition of fragments of human remains in bogs as a complex process drawing on local perceptions of identity or value, the importance of liminal landscapes, and lineages of ritual practice that connect past and present people through both the sacrificial act and the place of sacrifice.
Shifting our focus south, Gosner draws together craft technology and environmental study to explore the curious shipwreck finds of Iron Age lead ingots cast in Pinna nobilis shells. Not only do these ingots indicate the exploitation of Pinna nobilis, a mollusc whose by-products may be used in other (archaeologically invisible) industries, such as cooking or the production of nacre, pearls, and sea-silk; they also suggest patterns of trade and metal extraction regions. She draws these observations together with a discussion of circular economies and reuse or recycling in prehistory, practices which deserve considerable attention.
In our final article, Leggatt takes a quantitative approach to shifting patterns in diet across western Europe in the first millennium ad. She uses statistical analysis and machine learning to tackle the increasingly large quantity of collogen isotopic data available for analysis in order to identify transitional events and model regional and temporal differences in diet. Her statistical meta-analysis is carefully explained and fully discussed in light of specific archaeological and social models. As we move into the brave new world of Big Data, we should count ourselves lucky that this style of analysis is leading the way. This article won the EAA student award at the 2020 annual conference, and we are pleased to see it published.
Our reviews section this issue is characteristically diverse. Siklósi offers strong praise for a new volume on early metallurgy in southeast Europe; and a monograph on the emergence of pig taboos in the Near East is warmly welcomed by Anicetti. Vander Linden draws our attention to a new handbook for agent-based modelling in archaeology which, albeit imperfect, he sees as an important contribution to computational archaeology. In the “Reviewing the Classics” section, Furholt considers the strengths and limitations of Eggert's foundational text Prähistorische Archäologie: Konzepte und Methoden and Hjørungdal returns to Dobres’ important Technology and Social Agency through a relational lens.
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 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.
