Although the study of emotions in archaeology has increased considerably in recent years, loneliness remains understudied. This paper aims to challenge that bias and demonstrate how identifying and exploring loneliness can provide invaluable insights into the human experience, enabling a greater understanding of past societies and their social dynamics. This study, bridging sciences and humanities, aims to promote a debate to address the gap in the archaeological study of loneliness. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, with insights from history, anthropology, and psychology, two case studies are presented using three different lines of archaeological analysis: one from architectural structures which contribute to the feeling of loneliness; one from lonely landscapes that may contribute to the same negative feeling; and one from the social (or individual) strategies used to fight that feeling.

Final Jōmon ceramic figurines known as shakōki dogū have been incorporated into popular culture for decades in Japan, but few studies have examined how these sources represent shakōki dogū or how they contribute to public meaning making about the past. Using perspectives from archaeological representation studies, this paper explores trends in when, where, and how shakōki dogū appear in Japanese media, such as anime, manga, and games. In didactic sources, shakōki dogū are predominantly characterized as female figurines connected to Jōmon ritual and Japanese cultural origins. While the dogū observed here were often depicted as ancient and magical, they were more likely to be masculine, antagonistic, and generic symbols of a distant past, rather than references to the Jōmon or Japanese heritage. This departure from a divine feminine interpretation is discussed in relation to the video game industry, science fiction and fantasy genres, and Arahabaki in the popular mind.

Environmental relationships were critical to most early colonial encounters, especially for those involving permanent settlements. The ability to successfully establish a colony required developing relationships with plants, animals, and the land because they were central to providing for the colonists’ basic subsistence needs. The ways European colonizers developed these new relationships rested on their moral ecologies, a mix of beliefs and practices which give a sense of right and wrong to actions that are informed by ontologies. In this paper we use the concept of moral ecologies to explore the relationships that two empires—the British in New England and the Spanish in New Mexico—created as they established colonies that also entangled Indigenous peoples. The differences in moral ecologies between these empires and the peoples they invaded help explain tensions in the past that remain powerful today.

The grave damage to Syrian antiquities inflicted during the war has demonstrated the failure of international organizations and cultural agreements to protect antiquities in Syria and highlighted the divergent attitudes of Syrians themselves regarding their antiquities. Initiatives were undertaken in some areas to safeguard antiquities, but were lacking in others, and some Syrians were themselves involved in plundering and destruction actions. This paper aims to identify the reasons for such stark differences in local communities’ responses to safeguarding Syrian antiquities. A total of 46 semi-structured interviews were conducted with residents of Idlib and northern rural Aleppo, including local archaeologists. The study demonstrated differences between the two areas regarding knowledge and attitudes and revealed that a range of factors led to clear differences in the responses of the local communities in Idlib and those of northern rural Aleppo regarding antiquities protection. Some factors were anticipated, such as the impact of war, the security situation, and the deteriorating economic situation, while new factors have been identified. Understanding the local attitudes to antiquities, including the reasons for its protection or destruction, will support plans for enhancing the role of local communities in preserving their antiquities during the conflict.

Old Dongola, with a history reaching back to the 5th century AD, was originally the capital of Makuria, one of the three medieval Nubian kingdoms. After the collapse of Makuria, its capital city saw migratory movements and political changes that resulted in the emergence of new power relations. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the city was the seat of a local ruler subordinate to the Funj Sultanate. New communities that emerged in this setting inhabited the city until the colonial era. This paper examines the ways in which Funj-period households, as fundamental social units in Old Dongola, were mutually constitutive with houses, engaging with their spatiality and materiality through social practices. The authors investigate domestic labour, which was an essential factor in the negotiation of social differences and identities within the household. Differences in building techniques are analysed to compare various ways in which dwellers engaged with houses and to assess their implications for social differentiation within the city.

In this paper, we discuss how the history of our discipline continues to shape how we think with material culture to produce narratives. We argue that recent developments in scientific dating—in combination with New Materialist and Big Data approaches—offer the potential to produce radical new interpretations. However, we can only achieve this if we adopt ‘ethically Bayesian’ approaches which recognise that some of the most fundamental aspects of our epistemological structures are highly situated, reflecting a Eurocentric, colonial legacy. This legacy is especially important when we study societies that did/do not produce texts—so-called ‘prehistoric’ societies. We suggest that the revolutionary potential of radiocarbon dating on archaeology has not been fully achieved, precisely because chronometric data have not yet been made sufficiently independent from materials-determined narrative structures. We outline the importance of ethically Bayesian approaches as means to challenge this disciplinary inheritance. We argue that we need to describe the richness and specificity of the pasts we bring into being in ways that take better account of the historical processes through which heterogeneous assemblages emerge, rather than to search for preconfigured entities (like ‘the Bronze Age’). Times have changed; we need our approaches to time to catch up.

We highlight the significance of process, event, and context of human practice in Indigenous Creation traditions to integrate Blackfoot “Napi” origin stories with environmental, geological, and archaeological information pertaining to the peopling of the Northwestern Plains, where the northern Rocky Mountain Front may have played a prominent role. First, we discuss the potential and limitations of origin stories generally, and Napi stories specifically, for complementing the fragmentary records of early human presence in the Blackfoot homeland. Second, we demonstrate the intimate connection among processes, events, place-making practices, and stories. Last, we aim to expand multivocality in the interpretation of the deep past through an archaeological practice that considers Indigenous philosophies and stories to be as valid as non-Indigenous ones.

All approaches to understanding the past must work with limited data. Like many other kinds of evidence of past peoples, the relation between ancient DNA and past events is intermediated by complex models that bear many assumptions, some untested or untestable. Statements about the past from this evidence are thus accompanied by uncertainty, some quantified and some unquantifiable. Accurate communication of this uncertainty is essential to effective cross-disciplinary collaboration and public understanding. Here I examine one well-studied case of ancient DNA inference: the inference of Neandertal ancestry for today’s African peoples. In this case study, scientific predictions about Neandertal introgression and the genetic variation of all living people both gave consistent predictions before the sequencing of Neandertal DNA. Still, at the time that a draft Neandertal genome was published, a myth became established among the public that today’s Africans are different from all other living humans in that they lack Neandertal ancestors. This contribution reviews public statements, press releases, and press accounts to understand the origin of this story and why it became widespread. I review the ultimate impact of this story and the path toward correcting it. In light of this example, I provide some guidelines on how to recognize accurate depiction of uncertainty and examples of how effective engagement with content experts in archaeology and biological anthropology can lead to stronger and more easily communicated scientific outcomes.

Navigable waterways were essential to European colonization of the South Carolina Lowcountry beginning in the late 17th century. Despite early attempts by colonial leaders to keep land grants within close proximity to Charleston, colonists quickly began to establish plantations where the land was amenable for commodity production and scattered throughout the region. Consequently, colonists and enslaved individuals utilized navigable waterways by extending the built environment into the water through wharves, landings, and watercraft, as well as modifying the waterways themselves for irrigation, agriculture, and mobility. Despite the importance of waterways in the function of plantations, most landscape studies have focused on terrestrial contexts. This paper proposes that waterway assemblages should be integrated into plantation landscape studies as a means of understanding the role of movement in commodity production, surveillance, and communication to better reconstruct everyday life, focusing on the preliminary remote sensing fieldwork of two antebellum plantation waterfronts as case studies.

This article builds a framework for the analysis of the Inka Empire’s (1400–1532 CE) expansion in the Peruvian highlands. Drawing from recent archaeological excavations at the site of Canchaje (Huarochirí), I propose that the Inka built upon cultural familiarities between them and their subjects by using ritual emplacements (rock outcrops and plazas) as arenas of mediation. At the same time, the construction of mutual legibility enabled subjected communities to maintain and redefine their cultural practices in ways that survived the Inka Empire. By recasting the Inka from foreign conqueror to new kin within local ritual systems, the people of Huarochirí reinvented their traditions to garner political agency. Using archaeological data and colonial-period documents, I show that local agency informed empire-building, leading to the reinvention of local traditions. Ultimately, my work shows how mutual legibility was built on the ground while exploring specific instances of negotiation through ritual.