This is a review of In the Footsteps of the Etruscans: Changing Landscapes around Tuscania from Prehistory to Modernity by Graeme Barker and Tom Rasmussen, published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.

Price and Jaffe (2023) argue that acknowledging failure humanises the past. It can also serve as a lens through which to reflect on archaeological reasoning. Here, we turn to the Roman world, and the frontier of northern Britain in particular, to consider how intentionality, distributed agency and moral judgement intersect with the recognition of failure in the past—and with the failures of archaeologists themselves.

ABSTRACT Studies of archaeology publishing demonstrate a persistent imbalance in the ratio of male and female authors. We present an analysis of the world archaeology journal Antiquity using submissions and editorial decisions data (2015–2020). We identify a recurrent ratio of one female for every two male authors across measures including all listed authors, solo and first-named authors, and team authorship. Disaggregating author gender by country and region of corresponding author, however, reveals substantial variation, opening a new avenue for understanding of global trends in archaeology publishing. We also assess peer review and editorial decision-making in relation to author gender, finding no evidence of bias and, using the 2020 data, we look for any potential gendered impact of Covid-19, finding solo female authors may have been more affected than those working in teams. We contextualize the results in relation to initiatives to diversify authorship, including capacity-building programs for early career researchers.

The Tiber constituted a fundamental axis of transport and trade to Rome that made possible its subsistence and development in antiquity. However, different trajectories of research in the upper/middle and lower Tiber valley have led to an apparent perception of both stretches playing different roles in the supply of Rome, a perception not supported by wider archaeological evidence. This chapter explores the different factors influencing research in the lower and upper/middle Tiber as a first step towards the reintegration of both sections and the re-analysis of the role of Rome within this system. Next, a new model of mobility is described and developed by considering multi-modal mobility across the Tiber valley between locations in the lower valley (i.e. Rome and Portus) and the middle valley (i.e. Lucus Feroniae and Castellum Amerinum). In doing so, the chapter aims to examine the role of Rome as a transhipment port and to explore the relationship between road and river transport across the Tiber valley. As a result, this study will highlight the complexity of this transport system and the multiple possibilities it offered for addressing the supply needs of Rome and the towns in the Tiber valley.

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This article presents the background to and prospects for a new initiative in archaeological field survey and database integration. The Roman Hinterland Project combines data from the Tiber Valley Project, Roman Suburbium Project, and the Pontine Region Project into a single database, which the authors believe to be one of the most complete repositories of data for the hinterland of a major ancient metropolis, covering nearly 2000 years of history. The logic of combining these databases in the context of studying the Roman landscape is explained and illustrated with analyses that show their capacity to contribute to major debates in Roman economy, demography, and the longue durée of the human condition in a globalizing world.

This paper examines the patterns of Etruscan urbanism by the innovative use of newly available rural data, employing rank size, and indices of centralization. The detailed case study looks at the development of urbanism of pre-Roman Etruria where both robust and delicate urbanism were present alongside one another. To achieve this end, the paper will draw on the complementary features of two recent articles—Redhouse and Stoddart (2011) and Palmisano et al. (2018)—to provide a synthesis that both examines the large places and the supporting rural settlement. The territorial boundaries of the major urban places were predicted by the XTENT model in the first article. The cumulative numbers of rural settlement (and other proxies of population) over time were examined in the second article. This paper will look at the regional variation in landscape organization within the predicted territorial boundaries of the major robust centres and the more delicate transitory centres, as well as the buffer zones in between. At least three phases of boundary development can be examined, equivalent broadly to the Iron Age, Orientalizing/Archaic and Post Archaic periods, seeking to match these with the correspondingly dated rural settlement. The results will be critically examined in terms of broader knowledge of the economic and political development from current fieldwork in Etruria. The ethnographic analysis of Kopytoff (1989) will also be applied to assess the application of the internal African frontier to the central Italian context. In this way, the quantitative will be matched with the qualitative to provide a deeper understanding of urban development in an under-assessed example within the Mediterranean world.

The transformation of the material traces of the past into archaeological narrative is a fundamentally creative act. But what happens when archaeologists engage with the work and methods of historical novelists and filmmakers? Do they risk transgressing the long-established and widely perceived borderline between fact and fiction? In this introductory chapter, we explore these questions through an analysis of the intertwining of archaeological research and fiction writing to demonstrate both the risks and the tangible benefits involved. In practice, we find a surprisingly long, if contested, history of archaeological engagement with fictive techniques, which transcends shifting theoretical orientations. The second half of the chapter reviews some of the varied expressions of the use of fiction in archaeological research (e.g. fictive vignettes, imagined journeys) and discusses these authors' motivations and intended outcomes. Finally, we address some of the key objections and challenges to the use of fictive techniques, before outlining examples of the great potential of archaeological engagement with historical fiction.

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This chapter explores the suggestion that empathy underlies much of the power of (historical) fiction to engage readers with the lives of past people, and that it may therefore offer useful insights for archaeological researchers as well. By imagining oneself in someone else's shoes, empathy yields potential understanding of others' motivations, actions and even emotions. But while the general scholarly literature on empathy is extensive, the subject is much less well covered in archaeological publications; where it is discussed, it is often quickly discounted as either too complex to define or work with, impossible to achieve or simply undesirable. At the same time, others have argued that empathetic thinking is core to all archaeological interpretation. Rather than the outright rejection of the role of empathy in the study of the past, which risks leaving its pervasive influence unaddressed, we argue for the need for more substantial research. Drawing on the broader empathy literature, and concentrating on the works of Collingwood and Gadamer, we argue that, while there are ethical and epistemological questions about the use of empathy to understand the past, there is also potential. Empathy does not offer a direct or instantaneous connection with someone else's mind. Rather it is both process and outcome, motivation and solution; its use requires the constant tacking back and forth between past and present, self and other. Fictive techniques offer one way of making this imaginative process explicit and more rigorous.

Reflecting on his motivations for writing a history of tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari (2017: 68) observes that: “historians are asked to examine the actions of our ancestors so that we can repeat their wise decisions and avoid their mistakes. But it almost never works like that because the present is just too different from the past”. What then would Harari make of the new archaeology books reviewed in this instalment of NBC, concerned as they are with the present day and the future as much as they are with the past?