Although archaeological heritage forms an important part of cultural heritage, its value remains largely unknown and underappreciated in Poland. There is a notable lack of social research on this topic, which hinders the development of effective strategies for the protection, dissemination, and promotion of archaeological assets. In this article, we present an analysis of a 2024 CATI survey on Poles’ knowledge, attitudes, and engagement with archaeological heritage, based on a representative sample of 1,080 adults. We discuss the results in the context of broader challenges related to the protection, management, and promotion of archaeological heritage, offering recommendations for improving current strategies and actions in this field. Additionally, we advocate for further social research in this area.
Flooding has long shaped human lives and landscapes – and those risks and challenges are now increasing at a global scale under all climate change scenarios. Yet archaeological evidence for past flood events and risk management remains under recognized and under utilized. This paper offers the first synthesis of material traces of past flooding and flood mitigation in medieval and post-medieval England (ca. 1200–1700 CE). Drawing on publications, development-led archaeological reports, Historic Environment Records, and national datasets, we identify and analyze three major categories of evidence – flood and storm deposits, evidence of post flood recovery efforts, as well as flood management infrastructure. Bringing these categories of evidence together provides a rare deep-time perspective on flood risk management, revealing how communities adapted to, resisted, and sometimes reshaped watery landscapes over millennia. In doing so, our overarching goal is to identify archaeological evidence from the human-environmental past that can inform contemporary flood risk management in England and assist present-day attempts to promote climate resilience in flood prone areas. Our hope is that this paper will promote better documentation and interpretation of the "flood record" in archaeology, and wider use of the available datasets and information by contemporary risk management authorities, policymakers, and national governments.
The mid-1820s marked a defining moment in the history of the United States. Between 1812 and 1820 the new republic saw its resolve tested by a war with Britain who burned much of its capital city. By the 1820s, political elites in the United States began to embrace a republican nationalism that rejected the Revolutionary generation’s focus of agrarian ideals in favor of a romantic progressivism and majestic wilderness. At the same time, the figureheads of the Revolution including Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette, were celebrated as the founders and elder patriarchs at the nation’s semicentennial birthday. British potters took advantage of this moment by producing transfer-printed ceramics with American scenes that largely celebrated a White nativist nationalism. Three early nineteenth-century ceramic assemblages from New York suggest purchasing motives related to household position within this nationalist narrative.
Nineteenth-century Québec experienced rapid population growth seen in the arrival of new immigrant populations, primarily from Great Britain and Ireland. A series of cholera and typhus outbreaks also characterized this period, contributing to the modification and diversification of burial practices and cemetery management as people sought to quickly dispose of the deceased. This paper explores how the methods of funerary archaeoentomology can document burial processes during this period as the identification of insects preserved in coffins and adjacent to bodies may offer valuable insight into peri- and postmortem circumstances surrounding death. Samples of 43 burials from three cemeteries in Québec City and Montréal were analyzed. The identification of relevant insect groups allowed for a discussion on burial management, seasonality of death, and hygienic conditions, while contrasts between entomological evidence from parish burials compared to mortality-crisis related burials are also highlighted. Despite sampling bias and certain interpretative limitations, we argue that this approach offers new methodological contributions to historical archaeology, which remain unexplored to date in Canada.
Archaeological studies of the transatlantic slave trade in West Africa have traditionally focused on coastal and discrete sites of slavery, leaving interior communities comparatively underexplored. This paper advances methodological frameworks for the archaeology of transatlantic trade that move beyond the search for direct material signatures of enslavement to examine the circulation, appropriation, social valuation, and consumption of imported trade goods, and how they shaped political and economic landscapes in Peki, an Ewe-speaking polity in southeastern Ghana. Drawing on archaeological data from sacred sites, burial contexts, and domestic middens, complemented by oral traditions and historical sources, we examine how participation in the Atlantic trade reshaped political authority, consumption practices, and everyday life between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Archaeological materials from Peki, including liquor bottles, tobacco pipes, and European ceramics, demonstrate a shift from elite-controlled access to broader community consumption during the nineteenth century, coinciding with the transition from slave trading to “legitimate commerce.” By situating local material practices in Peki within wider Atlantic political economies, the paper shows how inland African communities actively navigated global economic forces and suggests that the Peki community be regarded as an important node in the network of places connected to heritage tourism and the UNESCO Slave Routes Projects related to the transatlantic trade in Ghana.
