With its twenty-sixth volume, the European Journal of Archaeology, enters a new era in its journey towards becoming a digital publication. After several years of discussion and a poll of EAA members in 2019 regarding their experience of the print journal, the EAA executive made the decision to go (mostly) digital as part of EAA's commitment to sustainable practice. Print copies can be purchased, but are no longer included in membership by default. This move greatly reduces both plastic waste and air-miles associated with the journal's production and dissemination, while also being a key step in the process of transforming EJA into a fully open access journal. We are undertaking this process with care and in close collaboration with our publisher Cambridge University Press, with the goal of creating an accessible (to both readers and all potential authors) and extremely high-quality journal for the twenty-first century. I am both proud and slightly intimidated to be the person at the helm, charged with navigating the EJA into its new future. In this issue of the European Journal of Archaeology, we feature six articles ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Early Medieval period and from Italy and Anatolia to Scandinavia and Ireland.
García-Diez and colleagues start this issue with a new chronological interpretation of rock art from Las Chimeneas in Cantabria, Spain. On the basis of four new AMS dates, in combination with two older AMS dates and a contextual comparison of the Las Chimeneas panels with Iberian Palaeolithic portable and parietal art, they argue that the site's art can be dated to the lower Magdalenian, 19,000-17,500 bp. Although four dates is not many, the authors make clear the value of combining AMS and stylistic data to date rock art; and, moreover, they convincingly argue that the future of rock art chronologies lies in the transparent exegesis of the process and materials used to date these types of sites.
Shifting several millennia into the future, Haughton brings us to Early Bronze Age Britain and Ireland where he investigates the funerary rites at a number of different sites to argue that people in these areas had diverse locally significant and culturally contingent gender systems. He suggests that ideas of homogeneous Bronze Age social conformations, including gender, developed by archaeologists based on a Central European core region, can be productively challenged with outlier data from social and geographical margins, such as Britain and Ireland. Indeed, to my mind, he returns us to an important broader debate: to what extent are funerary practices useful for the reconstruction of living societies in the past?
Dardeniz brings us on a tour of salt production and use in Bronze Age Anatolia. She productively synthesizes archaeological, textual, ethnographic, and geographic data to reconstruct the production and circulation of salt in the third and second millennia bc to hypothesize its role in the various political economies of the time. She argues that, in Anatolia, salt was an abundant resource collected or produced and controlled at the community level. Thus, rather than being an elite prestige good or early state commodity as in Europe and Mesopotamia, salt remained largely invisible—if important on the level of community subsistence—in pre-state Anatolia.
Moving northwards, Horn provides us with another strongly argued and well-substantiated case study investigating Bronze Age Scandinavian rock art—in this instance, the relationship between rock art imagery and warriors. He bases his discussion in the now well-known suggestion that some people, largely men, left their communities for longer or shorter periods of time to engage in violent activities, such as raiding and warfare. Horn suggests that active strategies were necessary to reintegrate these warriors to their home communities, without bringing the threat of violence into the family hearth, and that rock art production (and other activities, such as weapons depositions) may have formed part of rituals of reintegration, contributing to social cohesion. This is a refreshingly complex approach to rock art studies, and one that is sure to inspire further discussion.
Shifting our attention south, Kansa and Tuck investigate hunting activities at Poggio Civitate, a 6th century bc Etruscan settlement in Murlo, Italy. They combine zooarchaeological analysis of faunal remains from the settlement with iconographic and artefactual data to argue that local masculine elites consolidated power and influence, in part, through hunting dangerous game animals. Hunted animals would have yielded both meat for elite banquets and trophies to wear on the body to demonstrate one's power and virility. Of particular interest here is the careful delineation of how power was articulated in this particular hierarchical community. While there is an increasing interest in the archaeology of inequality, case studies such as this one help us understand the social mechanisms through which inequality is naturalized, enforced, and maintained.
Remaining on the Italian peninsula, in our final article, Boschetti and colleagues offer a beautifully detailed, highly scientific analysis of Early Medieval garnets which, they argue, give us particular insight into supra-regional patterns of trade and exchange. They conduct the first chemical trace element analysis of garnets from a variety of contexts, from graves to lapidary workshops, and identify gems from Bohemia and South Asia and glass from Egypt, all set in ornaments produced in Merovingian and Italian workshops. From this evidence, they argue that the Italian peninsula remained a key node in Eurasian trade networks well into the 6th and 7th centuries ad, and that the control of exotic gems like these garnets may have been a key strategy for local elites seeking to consolidate power, particularly at the intersection of Mediterranean and Alpine trade routes.
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://www.cambridge.org/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 Marta and Maria at [email protected] and [email protected] 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.
