This paper analyses the occupation sequence documented in the Roman house of La Fortuna (Cartagena, Spain). We use a contextual approach to study all the material culture documented in the domus. We start with a complete re-documentation of the stratigraphic record, in order to match the finds to their provenance. As a basis for this documentation, we discuss the abandonment typologies and the formation processes documented in the house. Using this framework we make a detailed examination of the artefact assemblages documented and we apply a quantitative study of the production, redistribution and consumption patterns during the different occupation phases. The ultimate objective of this paper is to provide a social and economic reading of the household activities carried out by the successive inhabitants in their own historical context.

The archaeological study of recent periods in Malta is in its infancy. Despite the high potential for an historical archaeology of Malta contributing to broader issues, such as an understanding of Mediterranean trade and colonialism, as well as the cultural history of Malta, the archaeological resource has remained under-explored. The aim of this article is to address the situation and offer an initial classification and interpretation of local and imported red earthenware ceramics. It will demonstrate the need for such work in relation to answering questions relating to local production, international trade, and foodways.

Much research has been carried out on identifying gendered iconography on statue-menhirs. This paper seeks to develop this perspective by considering the broader body concepts. Body concepts are of interest to archaeologists because they are closely connected to issues of sex, gender, and age. By investigating stone sculptures, however, we are looking at an ideological view of the body that was produced by reducing the stone from its natural form into a statue-menhir. The presence of bodily features on the statue-menhirs suggests that it was important to construct a body, and that certain aspects of the body were chosen to be represented, either through the size and shape of the stone or iconography, while others were neglected. We propose this is a significant means by which stones were made into bodies and gendered beings. To investigate body concepts, we pose two questions: how was a statue-menhir body made, and how was it gendered? By following the reduction sequence of the stone as the technique of production, we investigate which bodily features were important in constructing a body and in gendering it. We do this through analysing and comparing three regional examples of anthropomorphic statue-menhirs: (1) The Lunigiana groups A and B in northwestern Tuscany and eastern-most Liguria, (2) the Atesino group in Trentino-Alto Adige, and (3) the Sion Type A in the Swiss Valais and the Aosta Style I in northern Italy. Although there is a shared statue-menhir tradition in the three regions and beyond, the observations in this paper suggest that the bodily gender categories were negotiated regionally.

This paper presents some new observations concerning the construction of the Sutton Hoo helmet, as a point of entry to a wider discussion of pre-Christian religious and ideological links across Scandinavia. It will be argued that in certain circumstances and locations, such as the firelit interior of the hall, the wearer of the helmet was seen as both war leader and war god, a literal personification of Odin. This interpretation is supported and extended with a variety of Scandinavian finds from the sixth to tenth centuries, and arguably represents an unusually physical manifestation of the ritual border-crossing between human and divine elites. In the socio-political context of early medieval kingdoms, the dramatic imagery of the helmets and related military equipment had a critical role to play in the communication of power, the origin of military prowess, and the religious allegiance of a warlord.

This paper focusses on a set of anthropomorphic figurines. It suggests that realistic human proportion and canonical body posture were pursued in the carving of these objects as a means of expressing ideology, in a context of diversified forms of manipulation of bodies in funerary practices. It is argued that, against a background of predominantly schematic art, the more realistic and canonical anthropomorphic representation of the human body was used to communicate a set of ideological statements in a more controlled and immediate way, in a period of ontological and cosmological transition.

With the commemoration of World War I (WWI) under way, a preliminary stocktaking can be made of archaeological research into the physical remains of this war. The question is to what extent the perspective on the study of WWI heritage, and consequently the way in which archaeological research into WWI remains has been conducted, has evolved over the last ten years. Are relics from WWI seen as a legitimate subject of inquiry or does its archaeology as a discipline still strive for recognition? This paper deals with the practices surrounding WWI archaeology in Flanders, Belgium, as well as the (methodological) problems concerning the study of WWI archaeological remains, based on the reports resulting from fieldwork carried out by professional archaeologists.

In recent years, scientific methods of bio- and geoarchaeology have become increasingly important for archaeological research. Political changes since the 1990s have reshaped the archaeological community. At the same time environmental topics have gained importance in modern society, but the debate lacks an historical understanding. Regarding medieval rural archaeology, we need to ask how this influences our archaeological research on medieval settlements, and how ecological approaches fit into the self-concept of medieval archaeology as a primarily historical discipline. Based mainly on a background in German medieval archaeology, this article calls attention to more complex ecological research questions. Medieval village formation and the late medieval crisis are taken as examples to sketch some hypotheses and research questions. The perspective of a village ecosystem helps bring together economic aspects, human ecology and environmental history. There are several implications for archaeological theory as well as for archaeological practice. Traditional approaches from landscape archaeology are insufficient to understand the changes within village ecosystems. We need to consider social aspects and subjective recognition of the environment by past humans as a crucial part of human–nature interaction. Use of the perspective of village ecosystems as a theoretical background offers a way to examine individual historical case studies with close attention to human agency. Thinking in terms of human ecology and environmental history raises awareness of some interrelations that are crucial to understanding past societies and cultural change.

The aim of this paper is to investigate body-related beliefs and practices in relation to society in Middle Bronze Age Transylvania (central Romania between c. 1900 and 1450 BC), known as the area of the Wietenberg Culture. The low number of human remains and their treatment (through cremation and fragmentation of inhumed bodies) has been interpreted by some authors as a willingness to do away with the physical body. In contrast to this opinion, I try here to show that quite the opposite was the case. The body not only stood at the centre of a variety of rituals (funerary and otherwise), but it also constituted a powerful means for maintaining social order, providing people with an understanding of their place in the world, as well as renegotiating positions and meanings.

This paper was conceived as a keynote lecture for the Medieval Europe Research Congress (MERC) 2012 in Helsinki. The author himself has gone a long way from the more or less exclusively ship-functionalist perspective he presented at the first conference of this kind, Medieval Europe in 1992 in York. The intention here is to inspire other maritime archaeologists who may be stuck in studying ship technologies to apply their knowledge in contextual and cross-disciplinary approaches to ships, landscapes, and the human mind of the Middle Ages. A few examples of possible ways are discussed, albeit admittedly incompletely. These include a number of examples from the author's own research, which were strongly under the influence of a functionalist and techno-practical perspective in the 1990s.

This paper assesses the applicability of modern notions of gender identity and individuality, and examines ‘relationality’ as a key dimension structuring social identity during the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Early Iron Age in western Iberia through a focus on funerary practices and stelae- and statue-menhir-making. It is argued that these practices were involved in the recollection of genealogical and mythical pasts. They entailed the creation of the dead and the ancestors as relational entities through the explicit inscription of graphic and spatial relations. Ultimately, these practices were structured by, and structured, shared understandings of the self and the roles of the deceased and the ancestors in social life—understandings in which ‘relationality’ played a seminal role.