Chalcolithic religious practice at the site of Çadır Höyük (central Anatolia) included the insertion of ritual deposits into the architectural fabric of the settlement, “consecrating” spaces or imbuing them with symbolic properties. These deposits ar...
Most studies of ritual and symbolism in early complex societies of the Near East have focused on elite and/or public behavioural domains. However, the vast bulk of the population would not have been able to fully participate in such public displays....
The article presents the palaeobotanical investigations of a remarkable discovery from the Early Chalcolithic settlement of Isaiia–Balta Popii (Romania), a multi-layered site. The excavation of a dwelling brought to light a rather rare finding,...
The excavation of residential areas is a growing focus of research in Andean archaeology. Studies reveal that interpreting household remains from some prehispanic societies can be complex because of the nature of abandonment ritual, which may involve...
This paper investigates plant remains at three ritual sites from Bronze Age Crete: Kophinas, Knossos Anetaki and Petras. To date, ritual contexts on the island have been little investigated from an archaeobotanical standpoint. Analysis of the plant m...
The aim of the paper is to discuss mortuary contexts and possible related ritual features as parts of sacred landscapes in Late Bronze Age Cyprus. Since the island was an important node in the Eastern Mediterranean economic network, it will be explor...
This article presents the first results of the zooarchaeological analysis of Chalcolithic levels of the Barrio del Castillo site (Torrejón de Ardoz), located within the Aldovea complex, which also contains evidence from other prehistoric perio...
There is a rich iconographic tradition demonstrating the importance of animals in ritual in the Dolenjska Hallstatt archaeological culture of Early Iron Age Slovenia (800–300 bce). However, the role of animals in mortuary practice is not well r...
Some of the deposits of animal remains documented throughout prehistory and history are clearly something other than ordinary waste from meat consumption. For the Roman period and based on their characteristics, these assemblages have been classified...
The ‘terre di rogo’ (pyre debris) are black-coloured layers resulting from the crematory pyres, placed inside graves within the ritual of secondary deposition and containing different materials, including cremation slags. The characterisa...
This study aims to present a comparative analysis of the Bayesian regularization backpropagation and Levenberg–Marquardt training algorithms in neural networks for the metrics prediction of damaged archaeological artifacts, of which the state o...
Several different types of burial were identified during the excavation of the Roman military cemetery associated with the fort at Birdoswald, on Hadrian’s Wall (UK). Fragments of glass vessels and glass beads were recovered from many of the cr...
Knowledge about horses from early medieval (10th–13th c.) Poland has been largely based on historical and archaeological data. Archaeozoological information has only been used to a limited extent. Therefore, this article aims to present the cur...
The article considers a new approach for determining the functional zones of the prehistoric archaeological sites in Eastern Europe by the method of geochemical indication: the use of mathematical statistics for processing the geochemical data of cul...
This study focuses on the contemporary use of two well-known Sámi offering sites in Alta, Finnmark, Norway. Today, these are hiking destinations and sightseeing points for both the Sámi and the non-Sámi local population, as well...
Prehistoric communities had strong ties with the animal world that surrounded them—animals were prey, sources of food, and raw materials, but also threats and mysteries, and certain animals often had an important place in the symbolic realm. Wi...
We examine the processes that resulted in the deposition of bones of at least three anuran genera on four archaeological sites associated with the Tiwanaku culture occupied between 700–1100 CE in the Moquegua Valley of far southern Peru. We rev...
There is a mounting body of evidence for somatic exchange in burial practices within later British prehistory. The title of the present paper was sparked by a recent article in The Times (Tuesday 1 September 2020), which contained a description of hu...
The late second and first millennium BC witnessed extensive economic, cultural, and political exchanges between pastoralists and sedentary farming states in East Asia. Decades of archaeological fieldwork across northern China have revealed a large nu...
In zooarchaeological research, animal bone fractures can result from various processes including slaughtering, dismemberment, marrow/grease extraction, craft processing, carnivore gnawing/trampling, sediment compression, bioturbation, and recovery bi...