{"title":"The Mandate for Speculation: Responding to Uncertainty in Archaeological Thinking","authors":"Tim Flohr Sørensen, Marko M. Marila, Anna S. Beck","doi":"10.1017/s0959774323000525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774323000525","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of the article is to reframe speculation from being seen as synonymous with unacademic conjecture, or as a means for questioning consensus and established narratives, to becoming a productive practical engagement with the archaeological and responding to its intrinsic uncertainties. In the first part of the article, we offer a review of speculation in the history of archaeological reasoning. In the second part, we proceed to discussing ways of embracing the speculative mandate, referring back to our engagements with the art/archaeology project <jats:italic>Ineligible</jats:italic> and reflections on how to work with the unknowns and uncertainties of archaeology. In the third and last part, we conclude by making the case for fertilizing the archaeological potential nested in the empirical encounter, creating more inceptions than conclusions, fostering ambiguities, contradictions and new spaces of experiential inquiry. This leads us to suggest that—when working with the archaeological—speculation should be seen not only as a privilege, but also as an obligation, due to the inherent and inescapable uncertainties of the discipline. In other words, archaeology has been given a mandate for speculation through its material engagements.","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"54 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140340831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Angara Style Rock Art: The Evolution of a Regional Emblematic and Syncretic Style","authors":"Lynda D. McNeil","doi":"10.1017/s095977432300046x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s095977432300046x","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Rebutting previous claims, the paper employs comparative stylistic analysis and palaeoenvironmental data to argue that Angara style rock art originated in the Mongolian Altai during the Upper Palaeolithic (13,000–10,300 <span>bp</span>) where it evolved in situ. Around 8200–7300 <span>bp</span>, drought forced the hunter-gatherers who created Angara style rock art to migrate to the Upper Yenisey and the Selenga and Angara basins. When drought impacted that area c. 7500–7000 <span>bp</span>, Kotoi (Ket) culture descendants sought refuge in the resource-rich Minusinsk Basin. On the Middle Yenisey River, Angara style rock art served as a mnemonic device that encoded the syncretism of proto Ket and Evenki cosmologies and beliefs resulting from their social alliance.</p>","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"2 4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140291903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Vesa-Pekka Herva, Oula Seitsonen, Iain Banks, Gabriel Moshenska, Tina Paphitis
{"title":"Folk Magic and the Haunting of the Second World War in Finnish Lapland","authors":"Vesa-Pekka Herva, Oula Seitsonen, Iain Banks, Gabriel Moshenska, Tina Paphitis","doi":"10.1017/s0959774323000495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774323000495","url":null,"abstract":"This article engages with certain peculiar finds and features that we have documented at former German WWII military camps in Finnish Lapland, with a particular emphasis on an excavated assemblage that has affinities to traditional ritual (sacrificial) practices. The relevant finds and features date from the post-war period, but they are meaningfully associated with WWII sites. We consider the possible connections of these finds and features to folk magic and the supernatural, especially with regard to boundaries and boundary-making. The material is interpreted in relation to the painful histories and memories of WWII in the high North, and in the broader context of northern ways of life and being and perceptions of temporally layered landscapes. More specifically, we focus on how locals have coped with the difficult and haunting presences of WWII in northern landscapes and mindscapes after the war in a particular natural, cultural and cosmological lived environment which people have long co-inhabited with various non-human and spiritual entities. We aim to contribute to the broader discussion of the folklore of WWII as a dimension in conflict heritage and memory.","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140198631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Figurative Representations in the North European Neolithic—Are They There?","authors":"Rune Iversen, Valeska Becker, Rebecca Bristow","doi":"10.1017/s0959774323000537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774323000537","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article offers a comprehensive survey of figurative finds from Neolithic northern Europe. The survey shows that the immediate absence of figurative representation in the region is real and that the almost complete lack of figuration stands out from the previous Mesolithic and the contemporary northern and northeastern European Neolithic hunter-gatherer groups. Furthermore, the absence of figurative representations contrasts strongly with the thousands of clay figurines that characterize the southeastern European and Anatolian Neolithic. The survey provides a well-documented basis for discussing the significant differences between a figurative southeastern European Neolithic and an imageless northwestern European Neolithic. We suggest that the absence of figurative representations indicates that severe socio-cultural and religious/ideological changes took place within the Neolithic communities as agriculture spread from southeastern Europe via central Europe to northern and western Europe.</p>","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140146175","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Future of Periodization. Dissecting the Legacy of Culture History","authors":"Gavin Lucas, Orri Vésteinsson","doi":"10.1017/s0959774324000015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774324000015","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper discusses the future role of periodization in the wake of recent critiques of culture-historical chronologies concurrent with the rise of high-definition radiocarbon dating. It is argued that periodization has two distinct facets, a narrative function and a dating function, which should be separated. Archaeology may eventually be able to abandon the latter, but not the former. However, the two aspects are closely intertwined and the goal of this paper is to disentangle them and, through a case study of archaeological periodization in Iceland, demonstrate the need to re-engage with culture-historical taxonomies by reverse engineering their construction. Only in this way will the utility or poverty of such culture-historical periods be exposed to proper scrutiny and the ground cleared for building new, narrative periodizations.</p>","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"247 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140146162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bridlington Boulevard Revisited: New Insights into Pit and Post-hole Cremations in Neolithic Britain","authors":"Jake T. Rowland, Jess E. Thompson","doi":"10.1017/s0959774323000434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774323000434","url":null,"abstract":"The majority of excavated human remains from Neolithic Britain emanate from monumental sites. However, it is increasingly recognized that multiple funerary practices are often attested within these monuments, and that diverse treatment of the dead is evident contemporaneously at non-monumental sites. In this paper, we highlight such variation in non-monumental funerary practices in Neolithic Britain (<jats:italic>c.</jats:italic> 4000–2500 <jats:sc>bc</jats:sc>) through the biographical study of an assemblage from a large post-hole at Bridlington Boulevard, Yorkshire. Through osteological and taphonomic analysis of the human bones and technological and microwear analysis of the accompanying axehead, we infer complex funerary processes, with the expediently manufactured axehead potentially featuring in the funerary rites and subsequent post-raising before being deposited in the feature. Bridlington Boulevard represents one element of a varied funerary complex—cremations in pits and post-holes—at a time when most individuals were not deposited in monuments, or indeed were not deposited at all. Compiling these non-monumental cremations across Britain causes us to look beyond categorizing these assemblages as funerary contexts, and instead suggests important cosmological associations and forces were brought together in pit and post-and-human cremation deposits.","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140142160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Olivia Rivero, Miguel García-Bustos, Georges Sauvet
{"title":"Wounded Animals and Where to Find Them. The Symbolism of Hunting in Palaeolithic Art","authors":"Olivia Rivero, Miguel García-Bustos, Georges Sauvet","doi":"10.1017/s0959774323000471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774323000471","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Representations of wounded animals and humans in European Upper Palaeolithic art have traditionally been conceived as figures related to the hunting activities of hunter-gatherer societies. In this paper, we propose an analysis of Franco-Cantabrian figurative representations showing signs of violence between 35,000 and 13,000 cal. <span>bp</span> to qualify the interpretations of hunting and death in Palaeolithic art. To this end, both multivariate statistical analyses and hypothesis tests have been used to highlight the formal, thematic, chronological and regional similarities and differences in these types of artistic representations. The results show that wounded graphic units are mythograms coded by different variables that do not seem to reflect the actual hunting of the animal, but rather a more complex meaning. It was also discovered that, in early times, the artist preferred to wound secondary or less frequent animals, like deer. This changed in more recent times, when the main animals, such as bison, are wounded under greater normativity and homogeneity in the Pyrenees or the Cantabrian region.</p>","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140104875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Texts, Politics and Identities: New Challenges on Iron Age Ethnicity. A Case from Northwest Iberia","authors":"Samuel Nión-Álvarez","doi":"10.1017/s0959774323000513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774323000513","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper presents an approach to the study of European Iron Age ethnicity, a core topic for several decades which has begun to lose interest in the last years. A review of some of the uncertainties involved in the archaeology of ethnicity, focused on several key issues, is proposed. Moreover, some relevant topics that are usually undermined are suggested in order to address new challenges in the discipline: the introduction of political identity as a major focus of study, the reassessment of the etic perspective as an inner part of processes of collective differentiation, or the need for a holistic approach to join and combine different forms of expression. Finally, these approaches will be explored in a case study based on the northwest of the Iberian peninsula. This region has been chosen because of the feasibility of combining the results of different studies about social and political organizsation with relevant textual evidence to extract information about their ethnic dynamics.</p>","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"85 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140096837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aris Politopoulos, Catherine J. Frieman, James L. Flexner, Lewis Borck
{"title":"An Anarchist Archaeology of Equality: Pasts and Futures Against Hierarchy","authors":"Aris Politopoulos, Catherine J. Frieman, James L. Flexner, Lewis Borck","doi":"10.1017/s0959774323000483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774323000483","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Scholars of the past frame the ‘origins’ or evolution of inequality, usually using archaeological or anthropological evidence as a basis for their arguments, as an intentional, inevitable, important step towards the development of states, implicitly framed as the pinnacle of human political and economic achievement. Anarchist archaeologies reject the idea of hierarchy as a positive or inevitable evolutionary outcome underlying the path to civilization. We argue instead for a radical reorientation towards archaeologies of equality. We propose a prefigurative archaeology that celebrates the myriad ways that human beings have actively undermined and resisted hierarchical social arrangements. We aim to reorient archaeology's focus towards societies that purposefully prevented or constrained the emergence of inequality. To demonstrate the potential of archaeologies of equality we present case examples from Oceania, Britain, West Asia and the American Southwest. Highlighting the accomplishments of societies of equals in the past demonstrates the contingency and problematic nature of present forms of inequality. It allows us to explore a different set of pasts and thus enact different presents as we imagine different futures.</p>","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"57 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140096979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Juan A. López Padilla, Francisco Javier Jover Maestre, Ricardo E. Basso Rial, María Pastor Quiles
{"title":"An Argaric Tomb for a Carpathian ‘Princess’?","authors":"Juan A. López Padilla, Francisco Javier Jover Maestre, Ricardo E. Basso Rial, María Pastor Quiles","doi":"10.1017/s0959774324000027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0959774324000027","url":null,"abstract":"Around 120 years ago, a burial was discovered in the Argaric settlement of San Antón, 60 km southeast of Alicante (Spain). Although it was similar to many others recorded during more than a century of research, some gold objects found made this burial exceptional in the Iberian Bronze Age funerary record. Based on the most recent archaeological data, this article reviews both the context and the whole set of grave goods. It also explores the intersocial relationships that these gold ornaments suggest, which directly or indirectly seem to point towards both eastern Mediterranean Europe as well as to the Carpathian Basin.","PeriodicalId":47164,"journal":{"name":"CAMBRIDGE ARCHAEOLOGICAL JOURNAL","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140026710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}