Robin Skeates

Mitogenome Diversity in Sardinians: A Genetic Window onto an Island's Past

Sardinians are “outliers” in the European genetic landscape and, according to paleogenomic nuclear data, the closest to early European Neolithic farmers. To learn more about their genetic ancestry, we analyzed 3,491 modern and 21 ancient mitogenomes from Sardinia. We observed that 78.4% of modern mitogenomes cluster into 89 haplogroups that most likely arose in situ. For each Sardinian-specific haplogroup (SSH), we also identified the upstream node in the phylogeny, from which non-Sardinian mitogenomes radiate. This provided minimum and maximum time estimates for the presence of each SSH on the island. In agreement with demographic evidence, almost all SSHs coalesce in the post-Nuragic, Nuragic and Neolithic-Copper Age periods. For some rare SSHs, however, we could not dismiss the possibility that they might have been on the island prior to the Neolithic, a scenario that would be in agreement with archeological evidence of a Mesolithic occupation of Sardinia.

Axe aesthetics: stone axes and visual culture in prehistoric Malta

Highlighting a theme of visual culture, this paper examines the physical and conceptual transformation of ground-stone axes in the Maltese islands between 5300 and 1500 cal BC: from tools and well-travelled valuables into symbolically-charged objects of social display, spiritual power and ritual sacrifice.

Neolithic Stamps: Cultural Patterns, Processes and Potencies

Decorated clay stamps carrying a culturally filtered range of abstract designs are one of the most visually striking but problematic categories of portable art found at Neolithic and Copper Age sites in western Asia and southern Europe. This article proposes a revised account of their production, consumption and changing values across space and time, by emphasizing their biographies, human relations and cultural embeddedness. They were sometimes worn as amulets, but primarily designed to be hand-held printing and impressing tools, used to reproduce copies of powerful graphic images on the surface of other cultural materials. It is argued that their potent signatures repeatedly attached, revealed and reproduced significant cultural concepts and relations across different people and practices and across the material and supernatural worlds.

Mobility and Place Making in Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Italy

This paper offers a revised overview and model of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunter-gatherers in Italy, one that questions and extends existing materialist, evolutionary and ecological perspectives through an emphasis on the socio-cultural dynamics of mobility and place making. Particular attention is paid to selected caves and rock shelters, which gained an anchoring power through the repeated performance of mundane and ritual practices, but never to the point of immobile sedentism.

Soundscapes of Temple Period Malta

ABSTRACT During the later prehistoric Temple Period (c. 3400–2500 bc) we can begin to discriminate some of the diverse sounds and soundscapes that characterized the Maltese Islands. For example, we can imagine the sounds of the early farming communities, particularly in relation to the architecturally bounded spaces of their dwelling places. These combined the background noise of the subtly distinct island environment with the foreground noise familiar living things and routine activities (for example, the voices of children, women and men, barking dogs, bleating sheep and goats, buzzing flies, scratching hoes, crackling hearths, the slap of daubed clay). This dynamic blend of sound contributed to the islanders’ evolving sense of home. But communication through sound – presumably including music (for which we have no primary archaeological evidence for prehistoric Malta) – really came to the fore during dramatic ritual performances inside and outside the resonant, enclosed, and relatively dark spaces of the stone-walled tombs and monumental shrines (or ‘temples’) of the Temple Period. Here, a high premium is likely to have been attached to the right sounds and words (for example, music, rhetoric, echoes) made and heard at the right times by the right people, instruments, or perceived spiritual forces. These ritual sounds would have intensified the drama of the ceremonies, whilst serving as agents in their control.

Towards an Archaeology of Everyday Aesthetics

The concept of aesthetics has long been marginalized in archaeology. It was originally formulated in the eighteenth century as part of an appreciation of Greek art and was fundamentally concerned with appreciating a quasi-universal idea of beauty; and as archaeologists and anthropologists recognized the distortion created by applying it to material from non-Western and pre-modern art, it fell into disfavour. An alternative anthropological approach pioneered by Howard Morphy regards aesthetics as the study of the affects of the physical properties of objects on the senses and the qualitative evaluation of those properties; this converges with the emerging philosophical study of ‘everyday aesthetics’. This article explores how archaeologists could apply these concepts, particularly through a study of Maltese Neolithic everyday aesthetics.

Fetishism and visual culture in Later Neolithic Southeast Italy.

ABSTRACT The term ‘fetish’ has been used since the sixteenth century to refer to indigenous ‘power objects’, perceived to embody positive supernatural energy. This concept is explored here with reference to the visual culture of the Later Neolithic in Southeast Italy (5800–4100 bc). During this period, many aspects of the material world were ascribed a greater visual significance, being modelled into more varied art-forms and highlighted by more innovative and elaborate decoration, ritual performances and special deposits. A culturally specific range of powerful bodily and abstract symbols unified and animated these material forms, to the extent that we can talk of a fetishistic way of seeing and visual culture. These may have been used strategically to highlight and strengthen social connections, distinctions and boundaries. Ultimately, these social dynamics related to tensions surrounding the final transition to a fully agricultural way of life in Neolithic Southeast Italy.

Book review. Nils Anfinset and Melanie Wrigglesworth (eds) : 'Local societies in Bronze Age Northern Europe'.

lessons are taught in this volume and diverse positions are outlined in the same volume, as noted above, the general theoretical themes have permeated the history of archaeology. I am not sure how novel the theoretical contributions in this book are. This book’s most outstanding value is found in its actual case studies. In themselves, as on-the-ground studies, they demonstrate a range of practices tied to the production, transformation, transmission, use and study of material culture. Perhaps more than the explicit theoretical explications, this aspect of the contributions implicitly impacts on ongoing theoretical and methodological discussions. The book’s subtitle, Breaking down Boundaries, is perhaps slightly misguided in terms of research; it demonstrates where boundaries run, but does not really make them more permeable.

Nils Anfinset and Melanie Wrigglesworth (eds):Local Societies in Bronze Age Northern Europe: Equinox Publishing, Sheffield and Bristol, 2012, 260 pp., ISBN 978-1-84553-742-5

lessons are taught in this volume and diverse positions are outlined in the same volume, as noted above, the general theoretical themes have permeated the history of archaeology. I am not sure how novel the theoretical contributions in this book are. This book’s most outstanding value is found in its actual case studies. In themselves, as on-the-ground studies, they demonstrate a range of practices tied to the production, transformation, transmission, use and study of material culture. Perhaps more than the explicit theoretical explications, this aspect of the contributions implicitly impacts on ongoing theoretical and methodological discussions. The book’s subtitle, Breaking down Boundaries, is perhaps slightly misguided in terms of research; it demonstrates where boundaries run, but does not really make them more permeable.

Nils Anfinset and Melanie Wrigglesworth (eds): Local Societies in Bronze Age Northern Europe

lessons are taught in this volume and diverse positions are outlined in the same volume, as noted above, the general theoretical themes have permeated the history of archaeology. I am not sure how novel the theoretical contributions in this book are. This book’s most outstanding value is found in its actual case studies. In themselves, as on-the-ground studies, they demonstrate a range of practices tied to the production, transformation, transmission, use and study of material culture. Perhaps more than the explicit theoretical explications, this aspect of the contributions implicitly impacts on ongoing theoretical and methodological discussions. The book’s subtitle, Breaking down Boundaries, is perhaps slightly misguided in terms of research; it demonstrates where boundaries run, but does not really make them more permeable.