Welcome to the fourth issue of the European Journal of Archaeology for 2016. Since this issue contains seven articles, we have insufficient pages to publish our regular reviews section, but this will return in the next issue.
Before I comment on these contributions, I would like to remember Alan Saville, who passed away on the 19 June 2016, aged 69. Alan was the General Editor of the EJA between 2004 and 2010. I could not have wished for a more supportive predecessor. Alan was also President of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Senior Curator at National Museums Scotland, a lithic technology specialist, a field archaeologist, and much more besides. On behalf of the EJA, I would like to note our appreciation of Alan as a highly regarded long-standing member of the European Association of Archaeologists and to offer our condolences to his family.
Alan would have been particularly interested in the first of our articles. Heidi Breivik and Martin Callanan consider the Postglacial colonization processes that took place in contrasting ecozones in central Norway during the Early Mesolithic (c. 9500–8000 cal bc), which emerged after the retreat of the Scandinavian ice sheet. They pay close attention to site organization, artefact assemblage composition, projectile metrics, and lithic raw material use. Despite some variation in tool assemblages, they find little evidence of adaptation to, or of separate populations inhabiting, coastal and mountain ecozones. They conclude that, by maintaining small group size, high mobility and a generalized lithic industry, hunter–gatherer groups overcame the challenges associated with colonizing new, ecologically varied landscapes. The applicability of this model to the Postglacial colonization of other parts of Europe is certainly worth considering.
Daniela Hofmann, Renate Ebersbach, Thomas Doppler, and Alasdair Whittle draw upon a high-resolution chronology to offer a challenging new narrative of the Neolithic of the northern Alpine foreland (c. 4300–2700 cal bc), constructed by combining different timescales. They argue that, as a consequence of considerable fluidity in social relations at the local level, individual lakeshore houses and settlements were generally short-lived (houses rarely lasted more than 10–15 years). By contrast, they identify longer-term investment in the wider landscape, perhaps involving a networked collective of several communities. This dynamic social narrative offers a thoughtful alternative to traditional culture-history and to the climatic and environmental determinism of recent literature on the lake-dwellings of the Alpine foreland.
Rodrigo Villalobos García and Carlos Odriozola report on the spatio-temporal patterns emerging from their fieldwork in northwestern Spain at the Neolithic and Copper Age variscite mines of Aliste and ornament production sites of Quiruelas de Vidriales, situated some 40 km apart. They reveal that, during the fourth millennium cal bc, the production of plaques and beads of green variscite was limited and dispersed, while in the third millennium it intensified and became concentrated at a few settlements, fuelling the growth of long-distance exchange networks and material displays of social prestige. Hopefully, with further fieldwork, we will begin to understand these spatial patterns in more detail, including why the mines and production sites were located so far apart.
A comparable artefact study is provided by Bela Dimova. She analyses tools such as loom-weights and spindle-whorls to shed light on the production of (poorly preserved) textiles at three Iron Age towns in Thrace. Dimova argues that, over the course of the first millennium bc, the Thracian textile economy became more diversified and intensive in response to growing social demand amongst urban elites for visually expressive, fine and colourful, cloth and clothing. In future research, investigation of other textile-related tools and further consideration of the deposition contexts of the loom weights might lead us to a deeper understanding of the organization of Thracian textile production.
Jan-Henrik Fallgren and John Ljungkvist draw attention to the repeated deposition of ‘hoards’ of ornate silver relief brooches and other female ornaments within Migration-period forts on the Swedish island of Öland in the Baltic Sea. At least five such assemblages dating to the fifth and sixth centuries ad were recently discovered in the right corner inside the entrance of houses at Sandby fort. The authors acknowledge the possibility of a connection between the hoards and a deadly military attack on the Sandby fort, but favour an alternative interpretative scenario in which both the hoards and the forts also served symbolic, ritual purposes. This perspective raises further questions about the connections between elite ornaments, gender, ritual practices, and assembly places in the Migration Period.
Roos van Oosten investigates the causes and consequences of the replacement of traditional cesspits by drains or sewers in the Dutch pre-industrial towns of Leiden and Haarlem during the ‘golden’ seventeenth century. She details how this shift in hygienic infrastructure was the result of interaction between stakeholders comprising tenants, housing developers and landlords, local government, and either textile entrepreneurs (in Leiden) or brewers (in Haarlem). She also reveals that the discharging of human excrement from the new sewers into canals unintentionally led to unsanitary conditions, which were only seriously tackled in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is an important post-medieval study, which successfully combines documentary and archaeological evidence.
James Flexner and Andrew Ball offer a subtly sophisticated account of the use and impact of British mass-produced, transfer-printed ceramics in and around a nineteenth century Presbyterian mission house on Tanna Island in the South Pacific Vanuatu archipelago. They argue that protestant missionaries used objects such as these conspicuously, both as a marker of their own ‘civilised’ British culture in contrast to that of the local populations and as a means of engaging these communities with capitalism and Christianity, although the objects’ meanings were complicated by multiple cultural identities and interactions. Leaving aside the curious absence of any teawares amongst the excavated ceramics, what is particularly valuable about this article is that it successfully pushes the boundaries of the EJA to engage with the entanglement of European things in remote colonial contexts.
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 http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yeja20. Please note that, from 2017, our publisher will be Cambridge University Press.