Yes

Yes / DNA analysis demonstrates that all seven individuals buried in an Early Iron Age barrow at Dolge njive, southeast Slovenia, are close biological relatives. Although group composition does not suggest strict adherence to a patrilineal or matrilineal kinship system, the funerary tradition appears highly gendered, with family links through both the male and female line being important in structuring communities. We explore the implications for our understandings of kinship and funerary practices in Early Iron Age southeast Europe. / This research forms part of ENTRANS: a collaborative project involving the Universities of Bradford, Zagreb and Ljubljana, and the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia. ENTRANS (PI: Armit) received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 291827. The project is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, BMBF via PT-DLR, DASTI, ETAG, FCT, FNR, FNRS, FWF, FWO, HAZU, IRC, LMT, MHEST, NWO, NCN, RANNÍS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socioeconomic Sciences and Humanities programme. Research for this paper also received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 834087 (COMMIOS). The ancient DNA work was supported by NIH grant GM100233, John Templeton Foundation grant 61220, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Allen Discovery Center program, a Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group advised program of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Yes / Previous research on the Iron Age in Britain has argued that no fishing occurred during this period in Britain. This argument has now been complicated by large assemblages of fish bones that have been excavated from Iron Age sites in the Northern Isles. Further investigation into this issue became the focus of the author's MSc dissertation research in 2016, specifically on the recently excavated fish bone assemblages from the site of Swandro on Rousay, Orkney. Analytical methods, including stable isotope analysis and scanning electron microscopy, were applied in an attempt to determine how the fish may have been utilised at the site. Results have revealed evidence that could be interpreted as fishing activity and possible consumption by humans at Swandro. This paper disseminates and further examines these results and considers how this particular project is useful as a pilot study in the application of analytical methodologies to problematic faunal remains such as fish, and why this could be important to future zooarchaeological and environmental archaeological research.

This study looks at the Iron Age fortress at Tell el-Hesi as a borderlands site between Judah and Philistia in order to understand the cultural and political role of the site and the role it may have played in state formation in the southern Levant. I analyzed the pottery found in the construction and earliest occupation phases of the Iron Age fortress at Tell el-Hesi in an attempt to date the phases. The results of the pottery analysis and its implications are then compared with recent scholarship on the site.

This thesis considers the development of settlement landscapes in the Iron Age across two adjacent regions, the upland eastern Cotswolds and lowland upper Thames valley. Previous studies have focused on the differences in settlement form, economic practice and social development and therefore the possible dichotomy of heartland and hinterland landscapes. It is clear, however, that this is due to an imbalance of research brought about as a result of the natural landscape, interests of antiquarians and archaeologists and modern settlement focus and development. A new dataset of cropmark and geophysical survey material is presented as a way of redressing the imbalance. The focus within this study on banjo enclosures also provides an opportunity to analyse what remains a relatively enigmatic and understudied site-type that appeared during the Middle and Late Iron Age. The results illustrated and discussed here provide the chance to outline new narratives that take into account both practical and non-functional interpretations. From this, more is elucidated regarding these sites within the context of Middle and Late Iron Age settlement landscape developments. By integrating this new dataset within the wider context of the upper Thames and immediate environs a number of further and more general questions have been raised. These focus on the chronology of settlement development, the appearance and growth of exchange networks and the changing significance of open and enclosed settlements throughout the period. Differences have been used in the past to symbolise alternative social systems apparent across two settlement landscapes. However, as a result of the evidence presented here these perceptions are no longer viable as an interpretive framework. Instead, aspects of chronological development, settlement space and sphere of influence and interaction are discussed in relation to the evidence from Midlands and central southern Britain.

This thesis is concerned with the earliest picture stones on Gotland. The study will focus on the interpretation of the motives and symbols that are shown on the stones. This will partly be done by compounding the various motives into one synchronic statement and also partly by studying the manifests of the contemporary roman armed forces on the continent. Instead of earlier interpretations, suggesting that the expressions of the picture stones basically are about religion, myths, sagas and conceptions about the death, my idea is that the expressions shows coherence with roman warfare. My aim in this thesis is to propose that the motives on the picture stones of the Migration Period on Gotland deals with the organisation of power and warfare in this time, both on and outside the island.

No / The soils surrounding three Iron Age settlements on South Mainland, Shetland, were sampled and compared for indicators of soil amendment. Two of the sites (Old Scatness and Jarlshof) were on lower-lying, better-drained, sheltered land; the third (Clevigarth) was in an acid, exposed environment at a higher elevation. The hypothesis, based on previous regional assessments, soil thicknesses, and excavations at Old Scatness, was that the lowland sites would have heavily fertilized soils and that the thin upland soil would show little if any amendment. Our findings indicate that the Middle Iron Age soils at Old Scatness had extremely high phosphorus levels, while the soil at Jarlshof had lower levels of enhancement. At Clevigarth, where charcoal from the buried soil was 14C dated to the Neolithic and Bronze Age, there was no evidence of arable activity or soil amendment associated with the Iron Age phases of settlement. These observations indicate that not all sites put the same amount of effort into creating rich arable soils. The three sites had very different agricultural capacities, which suggests the emergence of local trade in agricultural commodities in Iron Age Shetland.

This thesis addresses the lacuna in the study of Greek terracotta figures and figurines corresponding to the transitional period between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages (1200-700BC). It provides a comprehensive synthesis of all available data, with particular reference to material from recently excavated sites in mainland Greece and its islands (Euboea, the Northern Aegean islands, the Dodecanese and the Cyclades). The study is framed according to the relationship between terracotta <b>figures</b> (those made on the potter's wheel) and <b>figurines</b> (those made by hand). The observation that the technological distinction between these two types is reflected in their different and separate functions has been sustained in scholarship for the past three decades, but only for the Mycenaean period. Handmade figurines and wheelmade figures occurred in different and restricted contexts in the Mycenaean world: the former in settlements, cemeteries and religious locations, and the latter exclusively in religious contexts. It is therefore inferred that they had different socially embedded values or 'meanings'. However, the extent to which such a distinction applies to figures and figurines in the Early Iron Age has hitherto not been explored. Initial evidence indicates that by the 8th century, handmade figurines and wheelmade figures were deposited together at selected sites, suggesting that their inherent socially embedded meanings were the same, and that they represented "different levels of [financial] investment in what is essentially the same category of votive". This thesis therefore determines the levels of co-occurrence of wheelmade figures and figurines, thus identifying how distribution relates to usage. Changes are observed over time and space and between different types of functional contexts, and the meanings of these patterns are investigated. The results of this study provide a chronological and geographical overview of the distribution of figures and figurines, and also indicate that figures and figurines had consistently multivariate relevance in multiple types of contexts. The functional dichotomy of figures and figurines observed for the Mycenaean period cannot be sustained beyond 1200 BC. Moreover, study of the contexts from which the material originates indicates that the significance of secondary deposits of religious nature has been consistently overlooked, and that figures and figurines were used in an active and meaningful sense even during the act of their discard. This type of activity is a distinctive one that can be characterised and defined functionally, geographically, temporally and quantitatively. The socially embedded meaning of figures and figurines was fluid and related to an action being performed; their meaning was not linked exclusively to an aspect of the object itself, and was therefore not static.

A phenomenon during the late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age which in its simplest form could be called ‘a culture of the Baltic Sea’ is an idea which many archaeologists have favoured. However, the term ‘a culture of the Baltic Sea’ is not the most ideal to use when discussing the Baltic Sea during this time in prehistory, as the term is rather simplifying from what would be the more diverse truth. The term entails that there should have been a cultural homogeneity across the Baltic Sea as it most certainly was not. This thesis complicates this otherwise simplified term and calls the cultural phenomenon ‘a cultural hybrid of the northern Baltic Sea area’ (i.e. the northern part of the Baltic Sea including its neighbouring gulfs). A cultural hybrid, in this sense, allows there to be cultural differences within an area. These differences are accepted by the people within the cultural hybrid which in turn allow people to live among each other, rather than to become a social obstacle making the people separate into smaller and more homogenous cultural groups. This assumed existence of a cultural hybrid is put to the test as a hypothesis. To answer the hypothesis, the cultural hybrid is studied from the perspective of the tarand-graves (an Estonian originating grave type erected and used around the shores of the northern Baltic Sea area during 500 BC–500 AD) which in turn is interpreted according to ritual practice theory. The hypothesis is proven to be true which makes it possible to apply the concept of cultural hybridity, and its connection with tarand-graves in the northern Baltic Sea area, to the Åland Islands. Although the islands have a very promising geographical position in the middle of the northern Baltic Sea area, interestingly, no tarand-graves have been registered there. Grave field Ec 6.6 on the western side of the Åland Islands becomes the object of study mainly due to grave 14, which placed on that particular grave field, carries a high tarand-grave potential. The material is partly collected from two field visits to Ec 6.6 and partly from an excavational report from 1949 of the same grave field. The result shows that the Åland Islands, as well as Ec 6.6, have a very high likeliness of being hosts for tarand-graves.

The main focus of this thesis is the study of the burned bones from Uppgarde, Vallstena, on the island of Gotland. Vallstena is a place where artifacts, graves and other activities are dated from the Stone Age to the Late Iron Age. This indicates that Vallstena was a place humans frequently used for a long period of time and a prominent remain is a Stone Ship Setting that once was placed here but when excavations were carried out in the 1970s only the depressions of the stones became visible. The purpose of this study is toco-analyse osteological and archaeological material found, to obtain a clearer image of the place and contribute to the existing research of this area. The goal study is to determine the nature of the activities seen in relationship to the analysis of the cremated bones found here and how they were connected to the surrounding landscape. The basis for this analysis is a combination of thorough examinations of the osteological material, archaeological features as well as relevant literature.