Editorial

Abstract

In ten days, I’ll be on a plane to Europe to join many of you at the EAA annual conference in person for the first time since we met in Bern in 2019. I’ve missed seeing so many friends and colleagues in person, but I also know that the accessibility of hybrid conferences to lower income and disabled archaeologists as well as those with caring responsibilities is not something we want to lose. There is also the environmental impact of people like me flying around the world for a conference, and that is no small thing. If there’s one lesson to learn from the past two years (and there are, of course, many more than one), it’s that just because something has always been done in a given way, that’s not necessarily the only or the best way. As we face the effects of climate change head on, flexibility, community support, and the power to imagine and work towards a better world are some of our strongest virtues. In this issue of the European Journal of Archaeology we feature six articles and five book reviews. The articles this issue have a strong prehistoric focus but also include an important quantitative analysis of early medieval dietary changes and the reviews are extremely diverse, ranging from Bronze Age metallurgy to analytical methods. These include two further reviews in our special ‘Reviewing the Classics’ section. Januszek and colleagues start this issue with a topic near and dear to my heart: third millennium BC lithic technology. They apply a variety of macroscopic and microscopic analyses to 24 ground flint arrowheads from Suprasĺ 3 in north-eastern Poland to explore the unique chaîne opératoire and the significance of these pieces. This analysis is further nuanced as the arrowheads themselves are from ritual contexts. They connect these arrowheads to innovative practices by people on the periphery of the Bell Beaker world. This sort of creative reinterpretation is increasingly recognized as a special feature of communities in margins or frontier zones, and the arrowheads presented here neatly support the model. Instead of identifying a new type of grave, Brück and Booth return to a very wellstudied assemblage of British Bronze Age burials with new methods to ask: what if these burials don’t represent a single moment in time? Building on a major radiocarbon dating campaign as well as histological and contextual analysis, they argue that some individuals seem to have been buried one or more generations after death. This implies a period during which human remains circulated in the community, perhaps remaining somewhat ‘alive’ in a social sense; and it further calls into question our attempts to understand individual identity through the analysis of grave goods. Schaefer-Di Maida also offers a re-evaluation of a known type of Bronze Age site, in this case the so-called ‘cooking stone pits’ from northern Europe. These pits of fire-cracked stones vary in size, shape, layout, and age. A function in food preparation or European Journal of Archaeology 25 (4) 2022, 417–418