Among the most complex and specialized hunter-gatherer-fisher societies in the New World, the peoples of the Santa Barbara Channel region of California were considered exceptional by early explorers because of their intense interest in valuables, beads and trade. During the last several centuries before European contact, sedentary populations on the offshore islands and mainland coast participated in an intensive regional exchange network that emerged from important earlier developments in transportation, craft specialization and labour organization. Especially significant in the sociopolitical evolution of this region were changes in the manipulation of domestic labour by a rising elite, expressed through increasing control over the production and distribution of status-rich valuables and critical resources. At historic contact, the Chumash who occupied the mainland coast and the northern Channel Islands (FIGURE 1) were probably organized into several interlinked small chiefdoms.

This paper is a summary of a more extensive study (Meduna & Černá in press), subsuming the results of investigations of settlement structure of the early Middle Ages in northwest Bohemia.

The archaeological remains of the Early Slav Culture (ESC), which dates to the 6th and 7th centuries AD, cover a substantial area of Europe ranging from eastern Byelorussia and the Ukraine to central Germany and Lower Austria, and from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Aegean. The Polish area is crucial for the clarification of the extremely unclear origins of the Slav ethnic group and the circumstances of its expansion around the middle of the 1st millennium AD. Traditionally, Polish scholars have viewed the lands lying athwart the basins of the Odra and Vistula rivers as the cradle of Slavia. This belief has to be subjected to closer scrutiny.

This contribution intends to present, very briefly, one of the facets of medieval archaeology in Bohemia, a land which to this day bears the marks of having belonged to ‘the other Europe’. I will focus on a short phase of Bohemian history and within it, I will take out just a small portion that is accessible via the archaeological evidence. In spite of all the material limitations, I want to show that in this theme Bohemian archaeology documents one of the components of the gradual emergence of Europe, a continent so varied and yet so internally coherent.

In this paper we use osteological data to evaluate theories about the rise of chiefdoms in southern California. To do this, we examine skeletal evidence for changes in diet, disease and violence in Santa Barbara Channel area populations. These collections date from before and after the development of large, sedentary coastal villages and a political system that facilitated inter-village economic interaction. Our data show that the health consequences of the development of these chiefdoms are comparable to those seen with the development of complex agricultural societies. They also provide insights into the causes of social complexity in non-agricultural societies.

The Jatvings, closely related to the Old Prussian, Lithuanian and Latvian tribes, belonged to the Baltic branch of the Indo-Europeans who, in the 5th century BC, migrated north up the Driieper river to settle the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. (Die Balten 1987: 18, 20). On the evidence available, Jatvingia as a complex of tribal communities emerged in the second half of the 1st millennium AD. The historical home of the Jatvings was in the northeastern corner of modern Poland and in the adjacent parts of modern Lithuania. It stretched eastwards across the Masurian Lakeland to the river Neman, touching on the Biebrza river valley in the south and the upper Sheshupa valley in the north (FIGURE 1). Information on Jatvingians survives in early mediaeval written sources: Polish documents, the chronicles of the Ruthenian Dukes and the Teutonic Order, Papal Bulls, etc. Interestingly enough, one of the oldest mentions in western European sources comes from an English source – the Otia imperialia written by Gervase of Tilbury.

The settlement of Janów Pomorski was discovered in the spring of 1982 during the AZP field survey (cf Introduction) 7 km southeast of the town of Elbląg in fields adjacent to the village of Janów Pomorski (FIGURES 1,2). An area of over 10 ha produced a wealth of animal bone, raw and worked amber and pottery that indicated a date between the late 8th and loth centuries.

It has been apparent for some time that the overbearingly rich ethnographic record from the west coast has had an almost numbing effect on thinking about later prehistory from Alaska to the Mexican border. ‘The tyranny of the ethnographic record’ has been a war-cry in archaeology for some time, so there is nothing new in this observation. ‘I hear very little about olden times’, said Franz Boas of the Kwakiutl as long ago as the 1880s, but the archaeologists that followed in his footsteps seem to have forgotten his remark. There has been a tendency to think of the ethnographic record of the 17th-19th centuries AD as a true record of the state of native American society along the west coast before European contact. As Maschner and Ames point out in their papers, nothing could be further from the truth. Ann Ramenovsky (1984), among others, has pointed out that indigenous populations were decimated by smallpox and other infectious diseases very soon after contact, and sometimes even before actual physical meetings with the newcomers. Some of the elaborate cultures observed by Boas and others were, in themselves, responses to changing conditions. The elaboration of the Northwest potlatch is, of course, a well known example of this phenomenon. Here, Ames and Maschner point out that populations may already have been in decline prior to Columbus.

At a time when the whole of Europe is growing ever more united, the study of cultural phenomena observable all over the continent gains in importance. One such phenomenon is the occurrence of earthworks of both prehistoric and historical date. Initially associated with tribal Europe and with that period of its history when early states began to emerge, these defensive features began to decline with progressing feudalization. Within Latin Europe they were replaced by imperial ‘pfalze’, feudal seats of the motte type, and castles. Built by rulers, ecclesiastical dignitaries and knights all over the area stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Russia, they were the most outstanding feature of the cultural landscape of medieval Europe. With the decline of the Middle Ages, changes began to affect those castles that were built on an extensive scale as well as smaller defensive features such as the keep on a mound. The picture of European defensive architecture also changed under modern cultural influences from transalpine Italy. One trend led towards ‘military architecture’ in the narrow sense of the word. Modern fortifications became the concern of specialists: engineers and practicians of the battlefield in the period termed by Michael Howard the era ‘of wars of mercenaries, merchants and professionals’ (1976). The other trend was to shape modern civilian architecture, in terms of the development unfortified palaces. The division between architectura civilis and architectura militaris became a fact.