Across Iron Age Europe the human head carried symbolic associations with power, fertility status, gender, and more. Evidence for the removal, curation and display of heads ranges from classical ...literary references to iconography and skeletal remains. Traditionally, this material has been associated with a Europe-wide 'head-cult', and used to support the idea of a unified Celtic culture in prehistory. This book demonstrates instead how headhunting and head-veneration were practised across a range of diverse and fragmented Iron Age societies. Using case studies from France, Britain and elsewhere, it explores the complex and subtle relationships between power, religion, warfare and violence in Iron Age Europe.
The impact of rapid climate change on contemporary human populations is of global concern. To contextualize our understanding of human responses to rapid climate change it is necessary to examine the ...archeological record during past climate transitions. One episode of abrupt climate change has been correlated with societal collapse at the end of the northwestern European Bronze Age. We apply new methods to interrogate archeological and paleoclimate data for this transition in Ireland at a higher level of precision than has previously been possible. We analyze archeological ¹⁴C dates to demonstrate dramatic population collapse and present high-precision proxy climate data, analyzed through Bayesian methods, to provide evidence for a rapid climatic transition at ca. 750 calibrated years B.C. Our results demonstrate that this climatic downturn did not initiate population collapse and highlight the nondeterministic nature of human responses to past climate change.
Significance The impact of rapid climate change on humans is of contemporary global interest. Present-day debates are necessarily informed by paleoclimate studies in which climate is often assumed, without sufficient critical attention, to be the primary driver of societal change. Using new methods to analyze paleoclimatic and archeological datasets, we overturn the deterministic idea that population collapse at the end of the northwestern European Bronze Age was caused by rapid climate change. Our work demonstrates the necessity of high-precision chronologies in evaluating human responses to rapid climate change. It will be significant for geoscientists, climate change scientists, and archeologists.
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The past two decades have seen important changes in the ways in which archaeologists perceive interpersonal violence in the past. Prehistoric archaeology in particular provides a unique long-term ...perspective on the development and institutionalization of violence in human societies, adding a further dimension to the work of cultural anthropologists studying more recent non-state societies. Evidence can be drawn from a range of sources, including material culture, settlement patterning, iconography and (crucially) patterns of trauma in human remains. The interpretation of such evidence remains inseparable from wider contextual understandings of prehistoric social forms and practices. This paper considers the specific role of archaeological evidence in establishing a broader historical context for the study of violence.
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Little is known about the early history of the chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus), including the timing and circumstances of its introduction into new cultural environments. To evaluate its ...spatio-temporal spread across Eurasia and north-west Africa, the authors radiocarbon dated 23 chicken bones from presumed early contexts. Three-quarters returned dates later than those suggested by stratigraphy, indicating the importance of direct dating. The results indicate that chickens did not arrive in Europe until the first millennium BC. Moreover, a consistent time-lag between the introduction of chickens and their consumption by humans suggests that these animals were initially regarded as exotica and only several centuries later recognised as a source of ‘food’.
Recent aDNA analyses demonstrate that the centuries surrounding the arrival of the Beaker Complex in Britain witnessed a massive turnover in the genetic make-up of the island's population. The ...genetic data provide information both on the individuals sampled and the ancestral populations from which they derive. Here, the authors consider the archaeological implications of this genetic turnover and propose two hypotheses—Beaker Colonisation and Steppe Drift—reflecting critical differences in conceptualisations of the relationship between objects and genes. These hypotheses establish key directions for future research designed to investigate the underlying social processes involved and raise questions for wider interpretations of population change detected through aDNA analysis.
Prispevek predstavlja dognanja interdisciplinarne raziskave človeških kostnih ostankov, odkritih leta 2011 na grobišču iz starejše železne dobe na Cesti Borisa Kidriča v Zagorju ob Savi. ...Študija je del obsežnejšega projekta osteoloških in izotopskih analiz kostnih ostankov iz bronaste in železne dobe (14–4. st. pr. n. št.) z območij Slovenije in Hrvaške.
Osteološka raziskava šestih oseb je pokazala, da gre za ostanke enega mlajšega odraslega moškega, enega zrelega odraslega moškega in dveh zrelih odraslih žensk ter dveh otrok nedoločljivega spola. Pri vseh šestih osebah so bile na kolagenu, pridobljenem iz kosti in/ali dentina, opravljene analize stabilnih izotopov ogljika in dušika. Na podlagi rezultatov lahko pri vseh osebah sklepamo na kopensko prehrano, ki vključuje živalske proteine (meso in/ali mlečne izdelke) in rastlinske sestavine tako iz rastlin C3 kot C4.
Ancient DNA is a valuable tool for investigating genetic and evolutionary history that can also provide detailed profiles of the lives of ancient individuals. In this study, we develop a generalised ...computational approach to detect aneuploidies (atypical autosomal and sex chromosome karyotypes) in the ancient genetic record and distinguish such karyotypes from contamination. We confirm that aneuploidies can be detected even in low-coverage genomes ( ~ 0.0001-fold), common in ancient DNA. We apply this method to ancient skeletal remains from Britain to document the first instance of mosaic Turner syndrome (45,X0/46,XX) in the ancient genetic record in an Iron Age individual sequenced to average 9-fold coverage, the earliest known incidence of an individual with a 47,XYY karyotype from the Early Medieval period, as well as individuals with Klinefelter (47,XXY) and Down syndrome (47,XY, + 21). Overall, our approach provides an accessible and automated framework allowing for the detection of individuals with aneuploidies, which extends previous binary approaches. This tool can facilitate the interpretation of burial context and living conditions, as well as elucidate past perceptions of biological sex and people with diverse biological traits.
From the Callanish stones and the great ritual monuments of the Neolithic, the broch towers and the wheelhouses of the Iron Age, through to the arrival of the Norse and the Lords of the Isles, this ...book explores the history of human settlement and society from the first hunter-gatherers to the Clearances. What emerges is a Hebridean archaeology as distinctive as those of Orkney and Wessex.
To explore kinship practices at chambered tombs in Early Neolithic Britain, here we combined archaeological and genetic analyses of 35 individuals who lived about 5,700 years ago and were entombed at ...Hazleton North long cairn
. Twenty-seven individuals are part of the first extended pedigree reconstructed from ancient DNA, a five-generation family whose many interrelationships provide statistical power to document kinship practices that were invisible without direct genetic data. Patrilineal descent was key in determining who was buried in the tomb, as all 15 intergenerational transmissions were through men. The presence of women who had reproduced with lineage men and the absence of adult lineage daughters suggest virilocal burial and female exogamy. We demonstrate that one male progenitor reproduced with four women: the descendants of two of those women were buried in the same half of the tomb over all generations. This suggests that maternal sub-lineages were grouped into branches whose distinctiveness was recognized during the construction of the tomb. Four men descended from non-lineage fathers and mothers who also reproduced with lineage male individuals, suggesting that some men adopted the children of their reproductive partners by other men into their patriline. Eight individuals were not close biological relatives of the main lineage, raising the possibility that kinship also encompassed social bonds independent of biological relatedness.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
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