Editorial

Abstract

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 European Journal of Archaeology 26 (1) 2023, 1–2