Far from being a simple annual round determined by the calendar, seasonality in human societies is a complex system of interdependence between humans and non-humans. It requires close attentiveness to the variability of soils, weather, topography, plants, and animals across both time and space. In this article, the author investigates mobile systems of interdependence that take advantage of topographical and seasonal variation. He uses a range of case studies from early modern Scotland and Cyprus, focusing on summer grazing in the uplands and lowland agriculture carried out by mountain communities. After a comparative discussion of seasonality, the article examines the role of topography and movement, and then puts the ‘margins at the centre’ in order to highlight the central role played by seasonal activity and movement in rural society.

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.

In the last decade, the exponential increase in migration studies focusing on the mobility of groups and single individuals—mostly based on aDNA and strontium isotope analyses—has provided an important extra layer of information regarding past social dynamics. The current relatively large quantity of data and their constant increase provide an opportunity to examine human mobility in unprecedented detail. In short, the course of academic dialogue is changing from producing evidence for movement to examining differences or similarities in human mobilities across temporal and geographical barriers. Moreover, the amount and type of new data are beginning to provide new kinds of information that can help us grasp why that movement first came about. We present the first potential mobility model focusing on single individuals during different life stages based on in vivo movement patterns. We draw on previous studies in recent mobility research that provide a variety of case studies to illustrate the model. We hope that this model will prove valuable for future discussions regarding human mobility by integrating the present archaeological contextual discourse with the increasing body of data being produced.

This article addresses questions relating to the ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site’ and seeks to introduce into this initiative some concepts derived from recent writings on contemporary mobilities and bordering, exploring the possibility of creating greater engagement between the two academic fields of ‘border studies’ and ‘Roman Frontier Studies’. By examining the relationship between the Roman Frontiers initiative and the European Union's stated aims of integration and the dissolution of borders, it argues in favour of crossing intellectual borders between the study of the present and the past to promote the value of the Roman frontiers as a means of reflecting on contemporary problems facing Europe. This article considers the potential roles of Roman Frontier Studies in this debate by emphasizing frontiers as places of encounter and transformation.

In the discussion on the causes of the financial crisis three main lines of argument can be distinguished: The „regulatory failure“ argument, the theory of the cyclical instability of financial markets, and analyses of „financialization“. From a sociological point of view, the latter analyses deserve particular interest, as they consider the crisis in the context of the larger structural changes of mature capitalist societies that have developed since the last decades of the 20th century. The paper first provides an overview of the financialization literature, focussing of the interplay between the changes on the macro-, meso- and micro levels of society that led to the present dominance of the financial services sector over the economy. Moreover, the historical analyses of Arrighi and Silver are considered. The second part of the paper offers a theoretical reconceptualization of the empirical findings in the framework of a multilevel model of capitalist dynamics. The model shows how a prosperous capitalist economy like the Western one in the second half of the 20th century can be transformed into a financialized economy due to its own internal dynamics. From a sociological perspective, financialization can thus be understood as a hegemonial regime of financial investors over entrepreneurs.

The Neolithic in the central Balkans saw dramatic changes in settlement forms, architecture, and material culture, with substantial, often long-lived settlements that can reasonably be called villages emerging in the later part of the period. This paper examines the role of herding practices in the development of these large, more-or-less settled communities. Radiocarbon results (including twenty-seven new AMS dates from Gomolava, Opovo, and Petnica) are used to place the available zooarchaeological data into a chronological framework, allowing comparison of inter- and intra-site changes across the region. The data point to the development of large-scale cattle herding in the later Neolithic, the implications of which for mobility and community cohesion are discussed. This trend is seen clearly over time at certain sites but, like the settlement evidence, is neither universal nor synchronous across the region, emphasizing that change occurred, and should be understood, on the level of individual communities.

The assessment of the important changes that occurred in late third and second millennia societies across Europe often emphasizes changes in technology and the emergence of associated objects and art forms, changes in burial rites, and developments in economic practices. Notions relating to the evolution of homo economicus dominate many of the discourses, and the evidence for increased long-distance trade / contact across Europe is used to bolster this assessment. These themes are underpinned by an obsession with ever-refined chrono-typological phases. In an attempt to present a more socially embedded perspective, this paper considers the changes that occurred in the uses of the high-altitude, sub-alpine, and alpine zones in the southern French Alps during the third and second millennia BC. From c. 2500 BC onwards, there was a fundamental change in the use of and engagement with this landscape. The first substantial stone-built pastoral structures at high altitude (2000 m and above), appear at this time. This departure in the use and structuring of the alpine space would have included concomitant changes in the nature of mobility, notions of territory, and memories associated with this area.