As has become normal the past few years, I’m writing this editorial while in the field directing our annual summer field school (although, at the moment, the Australian summer I’m experiencing is a very British 16 degrees and overcast! Brr!). I do, however, find very warming (see what I did there?) the exciting news that we are appointing Dr. Zena Kamash, EJA’s present Deputy Editor, as the next General Editor. The applications process was competitive, but Zena offered a compelling vision of widening EJA’s scope, impact, and author-base. I will let Zena introduce herself in a future editorial, but I want to note that working with her the past few years has been a deeply satisfying intellectual and collegial experience. I promise you will all be in the best of hands when Zena takes over in September.
We start this issue in Poland where Cnuts and colleagues present new residue data from an old collection of Mesolithic flints collected in an unfavourable environment. The authors present their work as a preliminary analysis to test whether organic residues remain on legacy collections of lithics from the sandy soils of the Tomaszów II site in south-eastern Poland. While they were initially skeptical they would observe any preserved residue, but were surprised and pleased to find some plant traces remaining despite the sandy find context and extensive history of handling and cleaning as part of the curatorial process. This article offers yet more reasons to encourage robust support for collections-based work and the novel insights it can offer!
Shifting a bit eastwards, Ahola and colleagues develop a new framework for understanding the Typical Comb Ware culture (TCW), the eastern Baltic iteration of the wider Comb Ware traditions of the fourth millennium bc. They argue that the rich TCW burials are evidence of a shared but only sporadically used mortuary rite that endured for only two or three centuries in which special individuals were symbolically overloaded at death with elaborate materials and funerary performances. Ahola and colleagues link the emergence of this rite to the interaction of new communities driven by the large-scale population movements of the fourth millennium bc.
Moving into the third millennium, Waterman and colleagues present and isotopic study of the individuals buried in the Rego da Murta dolmens (Alvaiázere, Portugal). Dietary isotopes suggest a diet high in C3, a common pattern in Chalcolithic Iberia, but somewhat variable in protein intake—likely reflecting age or status differences. Strontium data suggest most of those interred were reasonably local to the dolmens’ location, but several individuals and also some fauna were likely from farther away. Beyond the new information about these sites and their occupants, a particularly valuable element of this article is that the authors use their close analysis of human and animal remains from a single site to both critique and build on the less detailed strontium baseline work that has come out of Iberia in the last several years.
Sand-Eriksen draws our attention back up to the far north where she applies quantitative methods to the later prehistoric settlement evidence from Norway to argue for unique cultural and social trajectories in this region, distinct from nearby southern Scandinavia. As she points out, the increasing size and area of longhouses during the second millennium has long been argued to represent an increasing stratified society in the Nordic Bronze Age. However, she finds no such trend of increasing size or area in Norwegian Bronze Age longhouses, which she interprets as evidence that, unlike in more southerly areas, Norwegian Bronze Age society was more egalitarian even while the houses themselves show architectural features common to the wider Nordic zone. Sand-Eriksen’s work provides a good reminder that every grand narrative conceals as much as it illuminates, and each must be carefully balanced with attentiveness to local variations and ways of being.
Remaining in the far north, Rimpi details hunting strategies and landscape management of Artic hunter-gatherer people through a careful mapping and analysis of hunting pit systems. These large hunting pits date from the Late Neolithic to the Middle Ages with a peak in construction in the first centuries bc and ad. They were often constructed to form alignments, so that migrating large game animals could be easily driven through them. Rimpi proposes we understand this long-term management of the landscape through the lens of landscape domestication, in which human activity reshapes whole landscapes in both subtle and large ways. She convincingly argues that the landscape of hunting pit systems was a constructed and managed one, carefully maintained and transformed by hunter-gatherer people over millennia.
The final research article in this issue takes us far eastwards as Strupler investigates the construction of historical narratives around the monumental Hittite stone engraving at Karabel in western Türkiye. Through careful archival work, she delineates the various individuals thought to be depicted in the relief by different historical interpreters, and links these to shifting threads of power, identity, racism, and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In concluding, she makes the important argument that archaeologists should not only be responsible for understanding what monuments were to people in the deep past, but also for how they continue to be interpreted, visited, and mobilized by people in their various presents.
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 Monika 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.
