Over 120 prehistoric pottery sherds from mainland Finland and the Åland Islands in the north Baltic region were studied for their organic residue content. Preserved fat residues found in these vessels indicated that the food procurement pattern was broad during the Neolithic and Early Metal periods. Based on previous research and these results, it appears that animal husbandry came to Finland with the Corded Ware culture. Groups using the succeeding Late Neolithic Kiukainen Ware did not, however, practice animal husbandry to any great extent, as there is an indication of dairy fats in only a single sherd. In general, even after dairy farming arrived in the area, prehistoric groups in southern and south-western Finland continued or returned to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. During the Early Metal period, animal husbandry increased in importance among the groups living in the area, and the level of dairying then intensified.

Isotope ratios of tooth enamel from ten Early Neolithic individuals buried in a long cairn at Whitwell in central England were measured to determine where they sourced their childhood diet. Five individuals have low Sr concentrations (11–66 ppm) and high 87Sr/86Sr ratios (0.7164–0.7212). Three individuals have relatively low 87Sr/86Sr ratios (0.712–0.711) and Sr concentrations ranging between 54 and 109 ppm. Two individuals have strontium isotope values that bridge the gap between the isotope compositions of these two groups. The high 87Sr/86Sr values are rare in human enamel and exclude sources within the biosphere of central England. Oxygen isotope values are comparable to those found within human archaeological populations buried in temperate regions of Europe. The strontium isotope results should be interpreted in the context of other evidence for migration from northern France to Britain during the Early Neolithic.

The Late Glacial, that is the period from the first pronounced warming after the Last Glacial Maximum to the beginning of the Holocene (c. 16,000–11,700 cal bp), is traditionally viewed as a time when northern Europe was being recolonized and Late Palaeolithic cultures diversified. These cultures are characterized by particular artefact types, or the co-occurrence or specific relative frequencies of these. In north-eastern Europe, numerous cultures have been proposed on the basis of supposedly different tanged points. This practice of naming new cultural units based on these perceived differences has been repeatedly critiqued, but robust alternatives have rarely been offered. Here, we review the taxonomic landscape of Late Palaeolithic large tanged point cultures in eastern Europe as currently envisaged, which leads us to be cautious about the epistemological validity of many of the constituent groups. This, in turn, motivates us to investigate the key artefact class, the large tanged point, using geometric morphometric methods. Using these methods, we show that distinct groups are difficult to recognize, with major implications for our understanding of patterns and processes of culture change in this period in north-eastern Europe and perhaps elsewhere.

In the last few decades, the discovery of large ditched enclosures in Iberia has revealed the diversity and complexity of deposition and manipulation of human bone remains. Alongside traditional ritual burials (mainly megalithic tombs and hypogea), fragmented and scattered human bones mixed with other kinds of material culture began to appear in many features. This is the case for Ditch 5 at Marroquíes, which offers an excellent opportunity to explore this ritual behaviour. Based on a multi-proxy approach, three main conclusions can be drawn: 1) the skeletal elements present show deliberate selection of particular categories of bones; 2) depositional episodes included the remains of people who died at different points in time and were subject to different taphonomic processes, and 3) mobility patterns indicate that all individuals, with one possible exception, were local. The movement and manipulations of body parts may reflect the active role of people after death as social and symbolic elements that retain agency and capacity for action.

Among the most prominent prehistoric features in the boreal forests of northern Sweden are trapping pits or pitfalls used for hunting elk and/or reindeer. Even if often ascribed to the Viking Age and its trade in furs and other animal products, the chronology of these features has long been a matter of debate. In this article, a database of 370 dated radiocarbon samples from excavated pitfalls has been compiled and analysed using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) modelling to create the most elaborate chronology of Swedish trapping pit systems so far. The analysis shows that the most intensive period of construction of trapping pits was in the centuries before the Viking period. This challenges previous interpretations of Viking Age resource exploitation but is in line with several other recently published studies concerned with resource exploitation, non-agrarian production, and trade connecting northern Scandinavia with inter-regional trade networks.

The rock art of southern Scandinavia is characterized by depictions of watercraft. The majority are close to the coast, and they have been the primary focus of research. Less attention has been paid to similar representations associated with two large inland lakes in southern Sweden. In this article we present the results of fieldwork around Lake Vänern and Lake Vättern and consider the relationship of this rock art to the better-known images on the coast. We explore the practicalities of navigating between the sea and the interior and suggest that there was an important contrast between an early eastern sphere extending to Lake Vättern from the Baltic and a later western sphere connecting Lake Vänern with the Atlantic.

By the time the Roman empire reached its greatest extent, in the early decades of the second century ad, wooden barrels were a key part of a trade network that supported a complex extended economy. These objects do not, however, routinely survive in the archaeological record and very few sites have yielded large, multi-phase, assemblages for study. Although relatively rare, individual finds and assemblages have been found sufficiently regularly to allow us to consider barrel production and use during the Roman period. These objects can have complex cultural biographies from their original production to their final deposition. Current and previous research at Vindolanda, a Roman fort in northern Britain at the edge of the Roman empire, provides a context for reflection on these objects and their biographies. Emphasis is given to whether this material demonstrates repeated, possibly habituated, practices of adaption and recycling.

The Low Countries' Early Iron Age is marked by the emergence of lavish burials known as chieftains’ graves or princely burials. These extraordinary elite burials of the Hallstatt C/D period contain weaponry, bronze vessels as well as decorated wagons and horse-gear imported from the Hallstatt culture of Central Europe, where the same objects are found in the famous Fürstengräber. While the connection between these regions has long been recognized, the nature of this contact remains poorly understood. Here we present the preliminary results of an on-going re-examination of elite funerary practices in both regions and the likely direct long-distance interactions reflected in them. Similarities and differences in the treatment of objects and the dead in funerary rituals indicate that, to a certain extent at least, these geographically separated social groups were integrated in a specific elite burial practice, indicating frequent contact across hundreds of kilometres.

The point of departure for this article is the excavation of two burial mounds and a trackway system in Bamble, Telemark, Norway. One of the mounds overlay ard marks, which led to speculation as to whether the site was ritually ploughed or whether it contained the remains of an old field system. Analysis of the archaeometric data indicated that the first mound was related to a field system, while the second was constructed 500–600 years later. The first mound was probably built to demonstrate the presence of a kin and its social norms, while these norms were renegotiated when the second mound was raised in the Viking Age. This article emphasizes that the ritual and profane aspects were closely related: mound building can be a ritualized practice intended to legitimize ownership and status by the reuse of domestic sites in the landscape. Further examples from Scandinavia indicate that this is a common, but somewhat overlooked, practice.

Environmental information from place-names has largely been overlooked by geoarchaeologists and fluvial geomorphologists in analyses of the depositional histories of rivers and floodplains. Here, new flood chronologies for the rivers Teme, Severn, and Wye are presented, modelled from stable river sections excavated at Broadwas, Buildwas, and Rotherwas. These are connected by the Old English term *wæsse, interpreted as ‘land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly’. The results reveal that, in all three places, flooding during the early medieval period occurred more frequently between AD 350–700 than between AD 700–1100, but that over time each river's flooding regime became more complex including high magnitude single events. In the sampled locations, the fluvial dynamics of localized flood events had much in common, and almost certainly differed in nature from other sections of their rivers, refining our understanding of the precise nature of flooding which their names sought to communicate. This study shows how the toponymic record can be helpful in the long-term reconstruction of historic river activity and for our understanding of past human perceptions of riverine environments.

At the end of the first century and especially throughout the second century ad, a public building programme was largely responsible for the transformation of Saguntum's urban planning, especially, outside the walls of this well-known Hispano-Roman city. The aim of this article is to present the features of the monumental landscape outside the city walls, including an outstanding honorary construction, which strongly influenced the design of public architecture at a time of political and socio-economic change.

The (re)occupation of hillforts was a distinctive feature of post-Roman Europe in the fifth to seventh centuries ad. In western and northern Britain, hillforts are interpreted as power centres associated with militarized elites, but research has paid less attention to their landscape context, hence we know little about the factors that influenced their siting and how this facilitated elite power. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide opportunities for landscape research, but are constrained by limitations of source data and the difficulty of defining appropriate parameters for analysis. This article presents a new methodology that combines data processing and analytical functions in GIS with techniques and principles drawn from ‘traditional’ landscape archaeology. A case study, focused on Dinas Powys, suggests that the strategic siting of this hillfort facilitated control over the landscape and has wider implications for our understanding of patterns of power in post-Roman Britain.

Previous research has shown that physical violence had a normative presence in medieval Nordic societies. In this study, weapon-related trauma (WRT) was examined in human skeletal assemblages from two religious houses, Skriðuklaustur in Iceland, and Västerås in Sweden. The aims were to identify patterns of WRT and to relate these to the masculinities of different groups of men. Violence was a prominent component of identity among lay men, especially for men with warrior experience. The use of violence was more problematic among clerics. The hypothesis that these notions of ideal masculine behaviour would affect the ways in which masculinities were enacted and would be reflected in the patterns of WRT was borne out by the results of this study. No WRT was identified among the canons and lay brothers in Skriðuklaustur, but it was present in about thirty per cent of the males interpreted as belonging to the lay elite buried in the northern part of the church at Västerås.

Between the sixth and eighth centuries ad, the practice of furnished burial was widely abandoned in favour of a much more standardized, unfurnished rite. This article examines that transition by considering the personhood and agency of the corpse, the different ways bonds of possession can form between people and objects, and what happens to those bonds at death. By analysing changing grave good use across western Europe, combined with an in-depth analysis of the Alamannic cemetery of Pleidelsheim, and historical evidence for perceptions of the corpse, the author argues that the change in grave good use marks a fundamental change in the perception of corpses.

In this article I explore different ways archaeologists can contribute to and learn from theorizing the digital world beyond the traditional functionalistic means of applying computational methods. I argue that current digital technologies can be a very constructive tool to create non-human experience and awareness. I pursue this argument by presenting ideas from a work-in-progress project experimenting with the post-human and the virtual, and by exploring significant otherness in Roman religion and the dark spots in human perception, through the analysis of an absent temple in Rome. Applying post-human philosophies and an expanded concept of virtuality beyond the digital makes it possible to change our approach to object/human/divine relations in Roman cults and how we present Roman heritage towards a post-humanist framework. Through this, digital archaeology can become one of the ways of re-examining and reinventing our ideas of the human, the past and the digital.

Bog bodies are among the best-known archaeological finds worldwide. Much of the work on these often extremely well-preserved human remains has focused on forensics, whereas the environmental setting of the finds has been largely overlooked. This applies to both the ‘physical’ and ‘cultural’ landscape and constitutes a significant problem since the vast spatial and temporal scales over which the practice appeared demonstrate that contextual assessments are of the utmost importance for our explanatory frameworks. In this article we develop best practice guidelines for the contextual analysis of bog bodies, after assessing the current state of research and presenting the results of three recent case studies including the well-known finds of Lindow Man in the United Kingdom, Bjældskovdal (Tollund Man and Elling Woman) in Denmark, and Yde Girl in the Netherlands. Three spatial and chronological scales are distinguished and linked to specific research questions and methods. This provides a basis for further discussion and a starting point for developing approaches to bog body finds and future discoveries, while facilitating and optimizing the re-analysis of previous studies, making it possible to compare deposition sites across time and space.