This is a bittersweet issue for me because it includes a paper by my late colleague and friend Dr. Lisa Lodwick. Lisa was my first student when she was an undergraduate and I was a doctoral student. As she advanced in her studies, we stayed in touch. I did my best to offer mentorship to her when she asked, but she never needed it – Lisa was always a superstar. She did extraordinary work, and I was so lucky that she agreed to join me in the field for a bit as part of my Cornish research team. Lisa taught me to edit Wikipedia; and, in exchange, I helped her practice job interviews. She had so many exciting plans, so many brilliant research ideas, and so many communities about whom she cared so deeply. Lisa was a brilliant archaeobotanist, a fearsome advocate for open science, and a big believer in community-engaged research. As much as she was a powerhouse of a young researcher, she was an even more brilliant person. She was funny, kind, and deeply talented at building strong relationships. I miss her enormously, and I extend my condolences to all those who knew her, especially her family, close friends, students, and collaborators.
In this issue of the EJA, we feature six research articles as well as five reviews. Reflecting the increasing diversity of EJA's community, four of the articles concern classical and Mediterranean case studies with a fifth focussing on early modern Iberia. The reviews are characteristically diverse as well, ranging in topic from a monograph on first millennium bc Corinthian ceramics to an edited volume presenting a range of alternative ontologies and historicities primarily drawn from South America.
Gron launches this issue with a careful discussion of the impact and scale of feral animals—that is domesticated animals that have returned to the wild—during the early Neolithic in Europe. He argues that understanding the presence of feral animals is fundamental to our ability to understand Neolithization; and develops a careful comparison based on records of and archaeological evidence for the feralization of species introduced by Europeans in early colonial North America. He concludes with two main insights: First, European foragers likely encountered feral individuals of domestic taxa long before they encountered domestication, perhaps reducing the foreignness of animal husbandry; and, second, just because a domestic taxa has an early date, we must be careful about declaring it early evidence of Neolithic subsistence practices.
Shifting forward to the second millennium bc, Youlatos and colleagues describe the depiction of a partial tailed animal in a fresco at the Mycenaean site of Tiryns, which they argue is the first fresco depicting a primate in mainland Europe. They connect this depiction to Minoan styles—both in the artistic conventions chosen and in the depiction of a primate (likely a baboon) in a ritual context. Although primates and monkeys are not mentioned in Mycenaean texts, they suggest that they would have been known, if not entirely familiar, from Aegean artistic traditions as well as wider Mediterranean trade connections, including with Egypt. Youlatos and colleagues close with the hope that their identification of this primate will fuel further research into studies of rare animals in Aegean art.
Lodwick offers a comprehensive analysis of agricultural practices in Roman Britain based on painstaking archaeobotanical analysis. She applies a range of scientific and archaeobotanical methods to study changes in the southern English agricultural system from the Iron Age to the Roman period. Lodwick argues that the Roman agricultural economy in Britain saw a continuation of a range of already established agricultural practices, and was not based on exogenous innovations or a shift in the technology of farming. Instead, she sees an emphasis on extensification, that is the seasonal mobilization of large agricultural workforces to enable large-scale crop processing, an effective but ultimately unsustainable agricultural system. This article was finalized with the generous assistance of Lisa Lodwick's colleagues and husband. The EJA editorial team are deeply grateful to them for their help in bringing this research to publication.
Remaining in the Roman world, Furlan and Andreatta attempt to quantify glass and metal recycling in Roman towns based on the comparison of assemblages from seven urban sites. To construct their model, they compare sealed assemblages from sites like Pompeii with material recovered from extramural waste dumps to explore the impact of recycling on the “waste stream”. They conclude that recycling practices were extensive and their impact on Roman urban economies was likely substantial. Rather than indicating an economic decline, recycling was a normal practice, and one they believe has substantially shaped the archaeological record and thus our previous interpretations of Roman urban society.
Beaujean and Doperé offer us further insights into Roman urban economies with their article on stonemasons’ marks in the Roman city of Sagalassos in southwestern Anatolia. They combine a spatial analysis of stonemasons’ marks with a technological study of stoneworking and masonry techniques to increase our understanding of Roman construction practices and the people who did the hard work of quarrying, working, and laying the stone. They suggest that the position and layout of marked stones gives insight into the number and skill of construction teams as well the manner in which construction activities were divided among separate teams based on specific construction practices or who was paying the bill. Their adoption of 3D modelling and spatial analysis to study labour organization is an exciting new application of these methods.
The final research article in this issue brings us to early modern Portugal where Santos and colleagues have developed a statistical model to identify wealth differences in different households based on excavated ceramic assemblages. Building outwards from the vibrant research field of archaeologies of inequality, they analyse fifteen separate archaeological assemblages ranging from religious institutions to domestic contexts to urban dumps and apply a statistical differentiation technique based in the quantity and quality of ceramics from these sites. This allows them to classify the fifteen sites within five levels of wealth, although the highlight some ambiguities when secular and domestic assemblages are compared. It would be interesting to compare their results with similar analyses of the same sites based on other data, for example evidence of diet or other prestige goods. Indeed, Furlan and Andreatta's warning that invisible recycling practices substantially bias the archaeological record towards pottery and away from economically important materials like glass and metal is likely to be as relevant to this period as to their own.
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://multimediafluids.uam.elogim.com/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.
