This pilot study of ten samples from the Early Iron Age ceramic workshop at Augland (c. 200–450 CE) in southernmost Norway identifies the microstructural and geochemical signatures of the main types of wares and relates these to the overall chronology of the site. Having the advantage of an already established chronology and related range of pastes, this study improves our understanding of key factors of the workshop’s technological development. A more detailed geological data set offers new insights into the dynamics between the initial main recipe, a remarkably stable feature throughout the workshop’s lifetime of more than 250 years, and later paste compositions, and into the provenance of imported tempering minerals. A novel mode of production entering Augland in the mid-4th century brought innovative ceramic paste recipes that were used alongside the traditional main recipe in the workshop’s final century. This pilot study adds important insights to the signatures of the two latest recipes during the first part of the 5th century. These recipes have been related to two successive technological pulses entering Augland, both of which were identified in a previous comprehensive statistical cluster analysis. However, our results reveal that these two recipes are both microstructurally and geochemically distinct, indicating the two technological pulses may have different geographical origins. By linking this new geological dataset to the established chronology of the Augland site, we present a framework for future provenance studies and regional database of ceramic material found at the Augland site.

In the last two decades, the mobilities turn in anthropology and archaeology has resulted in a widened scope for mobility studies. This includes a renewed interest in ontological questioning of the human condition, new methods for mapping humans and nonhumans (things, materials and ancestral beings) alike, and a wider range of scalar levels of analysis. Somewhat paradoxically, however, given this widened scope, during the same period African archaeology has undergone a main crisis, characterised by inter- and intra-disciplinary siloing and seclusion from stakeholders and policymakers. Geospatial technologies have a vast potential in contributing to solve this crisis. However, after more than a decade of promising geoarchaeological approaches seeking to harness universalist geospatial technologies into localised, context-sensitive insights, the potential remains unfulfilled, as geospatial archaeology is largely detached from other ways of doing archaeology. In this article, we evaluate the status thereof more than 10 years after a major call for alternatives and identify a continued epistemic standstill as a main cause for the siloing of geospatial archaeology from other research fields that may offer the necessary empirical, methodological and theoretical grounding. We explore ways to generate digital archives that enable not only the incorporation of existing archives from various disciplines but also critical, decolonialising evaluation of such archives, thereby offering new platforms on which to engage in mutually informing collaboration across disciplinary divides and with the wider public. Anchored in a prism case in southern Africa, we offer a set of waypoints for a theoretically grounded geospatial archaeology that promotes analysis of richly textured past movement on African soils instead of universalist and sterile still-images from above.

What happens to material knowledges and practices in the aftermath of involuntary uproot and relocation? How do displaced newcomers weave their lifeworlds, knowledges and practices into a novel context in the early stages after arrival? Anchored in a contemporary prism case in Zimbabwe, this archaeological study employs a temporally layered approach to displaced communities in southern Africa experiencing intense mobility in a dense political landscape with one or more dominant political entities. Extending the temporal scope and analytical relevance back to at least the early nineteenth century ce, our primary aim is to understand craftspeople's practical problem-solving when coping with loss and absence while seeking to re-weave their social webs. The case examples share a common focus on earth materials (mud, soil, clay), stone and wood-easily available, low-cost or cost-free materials frequently used by displaced and refugee communities. Key analytical concepts are epistemic encounters, social memory, resistance and Achille Mbembe's necropolitics. The approach seeks to merge two domains that are rarely combined: craftspeople's engagements with their socio-ecological landscapes and the relevance of ancestral commemoration.

While sought for over a century, the birth of the distinctive bucket-shaped ceramic technology on the Scandinavian Peninsula has been overshadowed by its enigmatic senescence or 'death' in the sixth century AD. This omnipresent Migration Period container was in use for two centuries, from the mid-fourth to the mid-sixth centuries AD, spreading quickly and widely from the western region to the east and the far north. Its second century is better understood than the first, primarily because of the high-resolution chronology for the decades after AD 450, due to entanglements with Style I metalworking and the well-documented demise of both technologies in the wake of the AD 536-41 climatic events. But where and how did the technology emerge and spread? This comprehensive batch-study traces the origins and unravels the connectivity of the knowledge networks responsible for paste-recipes during the first century bucket-shaped technology (c.AD 350-450). Using a combined macroscopic and handheld-XRF approach that allows for large-scale analysis with high chronological resolution, we present a contextually grounded synthesis that relates the technological development to emerging nodal points of societal power during the fifth century and locates the origins of recipes in their clay- and mineral-rich hinterlands.

This article presents key results of the excavations of the unique H & oslash;lland site in Ogna, J ae ren in southwest Norway (cal. date range 203 BC-AD 553). Strategically located in a core region for ceramic production in western Scandinavia, H & oslash;lland's pyrotechnology peaked in the troubled Migration Period (AD 400-550). Its status as the only well-documented workshop site of this kind underscores H & oslash;lland's importance for future research. This study aims (1) to establish a firm pyrotechnological and ceramic production chronology for H & oslash;lland and (2) to situate the site within a wider frame of craft knowledge networks and sociopolitical dynamics during a key transitional and formative phase in Scandinavia. Our results provide a vital alternative to retrospective narratives of such crafts' demise as part of a 6th-century societal collapse. This study argues for the importance of understanding the dynamics of the preceding 5th century. We present a social chronology of resilience and senescence for the two centuries leading up to the mid-6th century, situating H & oslash;lland in regional power dynamics, long-distance connectivity and the main flows of craft knowledge, ideas, and materials.

Comparative studies of inequality based on archaeological data rely on universal notions of status or prestige that are not always meaningful across diverse cultural contexts. Here, the authors evaluate three broadly contemporaneous urban communities (Marothodi, Molokwane and Kaditshwene) in the southern African interior in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries AD. The study combines a statistical measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient, with insights from the rich ethnohistorical archives of African knowledge systems. The results suggest markedly different levels of inequality, but contextualisation points to divergent social strategies for settlement organisation and for managing sociopolitical insecurity. The findings raise important questions about cross-cultural indices of social inequality.

What happened in the hinterland? A batch study of early bucket-shaped pots from the 4th and 5th centuries AD in Southwest Norway

This book is a timely and important contribution to knowledge production in archaeology. Firmly grounded in the two authors’ own teaching experience and previous conversations about pedagogy, the book makes a convincing case for the value of assemblage approaches. The solution offered requires a rethinking of teaching, training, and practice in archaeology, turning the very discipline into the subject of investigation. Facing neoliberal political economy and its narrow-minded demands for humanistic disciplines to be ‘useful’, there is a need to resituate and re-weave the web of relations between archaeological teaching and research. At its core, the book addresses the undervaluing of teaching. As the authors point out, such undervaluing has seriously affected the fundamentals of contemporary archaeological practice and is anchored in a lack of diversity in disciplinary demographics. Overall, the book is well written, well-structured, and well researched. Its greatest merit, however, is that it offers a sympathetic view that takes students – including their various viewpoints and points of entry into archaeology – seriously. From early on this reader is struck by two key qualities. The first is how useful the book is for teachers of archaeology. Not only in giving practical advice, but also in providing a much-needed comprehensive status for pedagogical research of particular relevance for the discipline. The second quality is how refreshingly clear the authors are in their criticism of neoliberalism. The core message is well summarized in the concluding chapter: ‘a fundamental way to challenge neoliberal agendas [...] is to recognize [...] that a place in which learning emerges is through research, and that research often emerges through teaching’ (p. 153, orig. emphases). Cobb and Croucher’s departure point for this book might humble even the most experienced teachers of theory in archaeology. Such readers will quickly recognize the philosophical heritage of the assemblage framework, drawing primarily on Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) but referring to a wide array of ‘assemblage thinkers’ like DeLanda, Latour, Barad, and Bennett (cf. Hamilakis and Jones 2017, pp. 80–81). A key concept is rhizomatic learning, ‘something which develops along messy, non-linear, complicated, and unpredictable routes’. This fuels the authors’ rethinking of ‘both interpretations of the past and practice in the present in realist, new materialist, non-anthropocentric ways’ (pp. 46–47). While this wonderfully ‘messy’ approach levels with students’ experiences of uncertainty and unpredictability, it is not the easiest to convey in an accessible manner. In my opinion, Cobb and Croucher manages this quite well, first and foremost because they never lose sight of what they really want to achieve: a concrete archaeological pedagogy that takes students’ everyday challenges and life-worlds seriously. The book consists of 10 chapters and has a cumulative structure. Five of the chapters are relatively conventional book chapters: an Introduction (Chapter 1) followed by three central theoretical discussion chapters (Chapters 4, 6 and 8). The title of Chapter 8, ‘A Thousand Learning Assemblages: Teaching Learning and Scale’, is a nod to Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The final Chapter 10 offers a set of concluding reflections and recommendations. Interestingly, the authors’ weave a student narrative into this more traditional textbook structure. The five chapters carrying this narrative are generally shorter and are all

Abstract Pottery has been part of daily life in southern Africa for the last two millennia. The frequent occurrence at settlement sites and its resistance to decay makes pottery the most common proxy for past food-producing communities (farmers and livestock herders), who made containers for cooking, serving, and storing foods and liquids. Provided that pots and sherds have enough diagnostic features to indicate décor patterns and vessel shape, trained eyes can get an instant and literally cost-free peek into past movement and interaction. Various material sciences offer high-precision dating and insights into less visible characteristics, and ethnographic insights are helpful for understanding more intangible aspects, such as the organization of production, pots’ roles in social practices and belief systems, and the transmission of knowledge and skills through apprenticeship. Potting has been a highly gendered activity, and attention to social identity is instrumental in widening the range of lenses through which archaeologists view past material culture. In this manner, by focusing on skilled craft networks dominated by women, ceramic research can provide a critical corrective alternative to more traditional top-down narratives that trace the evolution and interaction of (male) elites. However, the European and North American legacy of archaeological classification in southern Africa cannot be overlooked. Ceramic classification may still unwillingly project a Western-centered understanding of the human condition, mobility, and social change. While unacceptable labels that refer to outmoded notions of tribalism have long been replaced by more neutral terms, this does not mean that ceramics provide archaeology with a neutral “tracking device.” A continual key challenge for practitioners in southern Africa is to situate ceramic analysis within a wider thematic and disciplinary nexus in order to construct convincing deep time narratives while also exploring new pathways to insights that can give voices to otherwise silent or subaltern members of past societies.

Among Simon Hall's influential contributions to historical archaeology are two research agendas: the need to focus attention on lower scalar levels of analysis, and broadening the concept of ceramic style to include less visible technological qualities. The latter is of particular importance to the stylistically bland and less decorated assemblages from the 18th and 19th centuries. Combining and developing the two agendas further, this article presents a new set of analyses of ceramic material from the stonewalled sites Marothodi and Lebenya in the Magaliesberg region, dating to the decades leading up to the difaqane in the 1820s. We explore households as flexible spaces for making, creativity and memory-work in turbulent times. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw an accelerated development of pyrotechnologies such as metalworking and ceramics. This happened in tandem with significant changes to the built environment and spatial organisation of the household, which was the primary arena for craft learning. Frequent relocation and alteration of learning spaces put transmission and teacher-apprentice ties under serious strain. Seeking to trace connections across a complex and layered political landscape, we tentatively hypothesise that ceramic craftspeople became relatively less reliant on locally anchored insights and placed more emphasis on sharing knowledge and materials within extended craft-learning networks. The study includes a comparison of the results of petrographic and geochemical laboratory analyses with those from a handheld XRF device. Offering instant feedback while still in the field, such mobile tools can help in developing sampling strategies that also include a higher percentage of undecorated ceramic material.

This review of ethnoarchaeology in southern Africa focuses on the main developments of the subdiscipline in the two first decades of the 21st century and seeks to point out key directions for future research. A key question is why there has been a seemingly reluctant attitude toward ethnoarchaeology among practitioners in the region. The research status is viewed against its temporally deeper regional background and situated in the wider archaeological debates in and on Africa and beyond.

Abstract Studies of social practices that include the making and use of ceramics constitute a significant part of the subfield of ethnoarchaeology. Pottery is still the archaeological artifact par excellence in many parts of the world, not least in Africa. Because of its omnipresence, pottery not only persists as a convenient way of dating but is also a frequently used point of entry to meaning in the archaeological record. Ethnoarchaeology gained momentum in the 1960s to improve reasoning and inference, by conducting studies of 21st-century practices viewed as providing analogical insights of value for archaeology. Needless to say, this studying of Others in the 21st century to understand Others in the past is a source of severe critique. However, since the late 1990s ethnoarchaeology has transcended the handmaiden role. The debates are not only critical but also vibrant and forward-looking. Key issues relate to ethics, the use and continued development of postcolonial critique, the archaeology of technology, and new forms of interdisciplinarity in the wake of increasing amounts of data coming from laboratory disciplines. The latter issue compels the question what a “slow” science field like ethnoarchaeology can and should offer, not least since there is a clear tendency for modeling and syntheses of past societal change to be constantly “lagging behind.” Viewing research within the field in Africa so far in the early 21st century against a geographically wider and temporally deeper backdrop, comprising key developments in the research field globally since the 1960s: what are its main contributions and challenges? What is the status in the early 21st century, and what can and should the near future hold?

The primary case study in this chapter is based on recent fieldwork in southwestern Zimbabwe. The rural area has a history of relocation and translocality that results in novel practices. Although predominantly Ndebele-speaking, the community is highly multi-lingual. A significant number of current local residents have only recently settled in the area, for various reasons. This study centres on locals participating in ceramics production workshops, instigated and aided by an external project with the aim of supporting local capacity-building. We explore the aftermath of such well-meant initiatives, after outside support has ceased. This study facilitates a comparison with a similar project across the Limpopo River border, in neighbouring South Africa. A common challenge in both instances is what the term 'local' means to different people. It is important for craft traditions to be anchored in a deep past and thus for the items that craftspeople make to look old and be 'locally made'. This study offers a critical view of how local community dynamics and knowledge change and adapt to new situations in unexpected ways, how outside interventions become catalysts for local invention, and how various and often dissonant voices relate to issues that have to do with heritage and the past.

SummaryThe unique ceramic production site at Augland in southernmost Norway thrived for more than 250 years until its demise in the troubled Migration Period. Contrary to previous opinions, we argue that production ended around AD 450–460 and not in the sixth century. Our approach, based on the craft practices, reveals that the introduction of a novel technology accelerated the process, fuelled by a regional power shift that severed once‐resilient ties to south Scandinavia. This outcome is based on the analysis of Augland’s terminal century: 1) re‐analysis of radiocarbon data; 2) ceramic macroscopy; and 3) fine‐sorting of pastes using handheld XRF data.

The human condition in various parts of the globe has dictated that since time immemorial our species has interacted with the physical environment in different ecological contexts. Such interaction...