This introductory chapter identifies the principal issues and themes in the public archaeology of the Early Middle Ages, exploring the specific and compelling challenges of investigating and evaluating the early medieval past in contemporary society mediated by archaeology. In doing so, we review and contextualise the contributions to the 3rd…[Read more]

How museums and heritage sites in England display the early medieval past is the focus of academic and public interest and debate. Despite ever-pressured budgets and limited resources, the stories told about the early medieval past in these environments are of key importance for the story of this island, and have become increasingly important in…[Read more]

Opening the first volume of a new open-access peer-reviewed academic publication, we are pleased to introduce the Offa’s Dyke Journal. This venture stems from the activities of the Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory, a research network founded in April 2017 to foster and support new research on the monuments and landscapes of the Anglo-Welsh bor…[Read more]

By way of introduction to the book, this chapter sets out the principal recent developments and characteristics of public archaeology, focusing on the UK. By contextualising the chapters which originated as presentations in the 2017 student conference, as well as those contributions subsequently commissioned for the book, the specific theme of…[Read more]

The chapter outlines the rationale for the 2nd University of Chester Archaeology Student Conference – Archaeo-Engage: Engaging Communities in Archaeology. It serves as a companion chapter to this book’s Introduction. It reviews and contextualises the student presentations and keynote talks in relation to key current debates in public arc…[Read more]

Failing Gloriously and Other Essays documents Shawn Graham’s odyssey through the digital humanities and digital archaeology against the backdrop of the 21st-century university. At turns hilarious, depressing, and inspiring, Graham’s book presents a contemporary take on the academic memoir, but rather than celebrating the victories, he reflects on…[Read more]

Forthcoming in Wells, J. (ed) Archaeological Informatics Ethics in Practice. Springer.

A meditation on the ethics of archaeology within videogames.

Book review of Archives, Ancestors, Practices: Archaeology in the Light of Its History, edited by Nathan Schlanger and Jan Nordbladh

Ideally it would be fantastic to reconstitute the life history of a visual artefact, such as a pictograph site in the hope that it may help in es-
tablishing the meanings of these images, their role in the mental and physical landscape as well as the likely sensory and soundscape. This
is because human beings rely on their senses to understand…[Read more]

The act of classification has the widest implications for scholarship. Whatever the format, it involves the totality of our being. The use of our eyes indicates that decisions about whatever it is that we observe have already been made. Yet the interaction between the mechanical act of seeing and the mind or memory has rarely been registered. An…[Read more]

The boreal forest is a vast region. Therefore, the archaeological record, like anywhere else in the globe, is subject to revision as additional evidence is gathered. By conducting research in the same location over a long period of time, Hyslop was able to alter the methodological approach that he utilized while surveying the shorelines of Lac…[Read more]

Published in Sächsische Leute und Länder Benennung und Lokalisierung von Gruppenidentitäten im ersten Jahrtausend, and a considerably expanded version of a paper delivered at the Internationales Sachsensymposion in Leipzig, 2015.

The article considers the literary representation of Saxons in the works of the late antique authors Sidonius Ap…[Read more]

Illustration of various features in the arrangement of Linear B tablets in the photo plates of Scripta Minoa II, and a proposed rationale in terms of underlying art.

During the third millennium B.C.E., Tell Mozan, ancient Urkesh, expanded to include an extensive outer city. A variety of investigations in the outer city reveal a complex urban environment: a mix of planned and unplanned activity with the environment and large municipal works acting as constraining factors on more localized activity.

This volume comprises the conference proceedings of the international and interdisciplinary meeting held in Leipzig from November 9 to 11, 2015. Scholars from different research areas present masks from Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Greece, mainly from the third to the first millennium BCE. The masks are…[Read more]

The paper describes an archaeological experiment which was conducted during the course “Experimental Archaeology” held at the Department of Prehistory and Historical Archeology at the University of Vienna from June 30th to July 2nd 2017. The aim of the experiment was to provide new insights on handling cooking pits which formed an integral part of…[Read more]

The Last of Us shows human society severely decimated by the Cordyceps infection, a fungal pathogen that attacks insects but manages to jump onto human hosts. Metaphorical in nature the infected represent “the dying remnants of a past society,” (Farca and Ladeveze 2016, p.8)

This article examines the description of Persepolis, one of the capital cities of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550–330 BCE), by Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651–1725) in his illustrated travelogue Giro del mondo (1699–1700). Gemelli Careri’s extensive description of the site—some twenty pages of text accompanied by two plates en…[Read more]

Identifying trends is an important element of archaeology, but there is often a lack of regional and inter-regional analyses with regard to the available evidence. This paper attempts to shed light on one aspect of burial practice in Scotland by investigating geographical trends in Bronze Age burials that contain bronze artifacts.

The relationship between the ‘Two Brothers’ Nakhtankh and Khnumnakht has been heavily debated since the discovery of their mummies in 1907. Re-examining the coffin inscriptions of these two individuals reveals that Nakhtankh and Khnumnakht were likely uncle and nephew.