The importance of archaeological heritage management in a united Europe has increased in recent years, and the archaeological scene is changing drastically. Causes of this development are, among others, the end of the political division of Europe and the ‘green debate’ with its effects on the way in which the archaeological heritage is being treated. Equally important are the effects of the. Malta Convention and the influence of lawmaking within the EU. This paper discusses recent developments and the need for cooperation at a European level, as well as the various opportunities, tasks and challenges of heritage management in the immediate future.

‘The paradox of landscape’ is that, in theory, landscape aspires to a totality of human experience, but in practice it suppresses the complexity of the human experience. By supposing a ‘landscape perspective’ in the past, archaeologists are imposing a modern view of the world. In consequence, more varied perspectives should be considered during any archaeological inquiry. This is not a criticism of the use of landscape as a term to distinguish the wider spatial relationships between places which exist in the present. What is suggested as being unjustifiable is the use of the ‘landscape perspective’ to orientate and contextualize past human experience. This critique is illustrated and complemented by a case-study examining prehistoric land enclosure in Britain.

The authors discuss results of long-term Dutch field projects in three regions in Italy and review case studies taken from these study areas in the light of indigenous developments in early Italian centralization and urbanization. By looking at regional developments in the domains of economy, religious and funerary practice as well as that of social relationships, they arrive at the conclusion that material culture was actively used in indigenous contexts. There is a consequent need for re-definition of centralization and urbanization, which in the Italian context are often seen as non-indigenous achievements. Comparative regional research, as suggested by the authors' case studies on the Sibaritide, the Brindisino and the Pontine region, will reveal both general trends concerning the concepts discussed and regional idiosyncrasies depending on regional traditions, histories and the regional landscape. To this end, a new project was launched, known as the Regional Pathways to Complexity project, that is introduced to the reader at the end of this paper.

In this article, I attempt to show how the Germanic peoples of the Migration Period in Early Chiristian Europe (c. AD 400–500) created – or preserved – a pagan Scandinavian myth of their origin as a, significant part of their identity and perception. The function of the myths as political and ideological legitimations is related to the iconography of the material culture, notably the early animal ornamentation (Salins' Style I). Integration of the written evidence and the archaeological sources makes it possible to demonstrate how origins, myths and iconography together express a formative core of pagan identity in Early Christian Europe.

Recent archaeological discoveries and reinterpretations of written sources supported by the concepts of historical anthropology allow the creation of a new picture about the Goths. Most of the archaeologists studying the cultural situation in northern Poland during the Roman period admit today that the roots of the Wielbark culture commonly identified with the early Goths are to be sought in local traditions. The results of that process, which can be explained in terms of change in symbolic consciousness rather than by a demographic expansion, became archaeologically visible in the mid-first century AD. The decision to leave the Baltic zone could have been taken by a Gothic social elite endangered by tensions resulting from unstable trade relations with the Roman Empire and climatic deterioration. However, a substantial part of the agricultural Wielbark population stayed behind, preferring well-known circumstances than risks of an unpredictable fate in distant lands. Among those people, after some time, the hierarchization process was repeated, leading to the emergence of a new elite, which decided to follow their predecessors by migrating to the south east. They are identified by the sources as the Gepids. There are strong archaeological indications that some part of the Wielbark population must have again stayed behind in Poland maintaining close contacts with their southern ‘cousins’. Archaeologists today suggest that some ‘Gothic’ groups from the Pontic steppes returned to the Baltic. The merging of Germanic and Baltic traditions resulted in a new cultural formation. In the ninth century AD, its material culture became more and more Prussian but there is evidence for lively contacts with western Europe, Scandinavia and the Abbassid Khalifate. A specific tradition recorded in the oldest Polish chronicles and in the twelfth century epitaph of the first Polish king Boleslav the Brave raises the serious possibility that some memory of the presence of Goths east of the Vistula somehow survived over centuries and it was used for construction of the Piasts' dynastic tradition.