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XI/1/2020
INTERDISCIPLINARIA ARCHAEOLOGICA
NATURAL SCIENCES IN ARCHAEOLOGY
homepage: http://www.iansa.eu
Editorial IANSA 1/2020
A Jubilee Volume: About Archaeology and Interdisciplinarity – in the
Beginning and Today
Jaromír Beneš
Our journal has crossed the threshold of its frst decade.
We are still a young journal, founded to make a better link
between the mainstream of artefactual archaeology and the
natural sciences. On the one hand, ten years in the history
of a scientifc magazine does not mean so much; on the
other, the past decade has shown that the journal can gain
approval from an international audience. However, let me
ask a question. What did interdisciplinarity mean ten years
ago – and what does it mean today? In this regard, just what
is actually going on in archaeology today? To demonstrate
the recent discourse on this topic is defnitely a task for
an extensive study, and the question certainly cannot be
answered in a short editorial. However, we should at least
try to make a simple comparison between the situation at the
beginning of this journal and the one now.
We present here some of the diferences by comparing
three photos: all three of which have been used as heading
fgures on our web page. The frst photo (Figure 1) is from
2011, when we had just started our public activity; it shows
palynologist Radka Kozáková in the laboratory investigating
her pollen cores. Palynology itself is an old discipline situated
between geology, palaeoecology and botany. The data from
pollen analysis can be used as a framework for the past
human environment, but palynology was regarded as work
quite external to the job of archaeologists. It was simply
outside of archaeology. With this picture, we demonstrated
a strong interest about the past environment – as well as
that Radka Kozáková was a researcher at the Institute of
Archaeology, Academy of Science in Prague – as she still
is today, a palynologist with many respectful publications.
What has moved on in the relationship between palynology
and archaeology in the past ten years? Nowadays, at some
European universities, dissertations have begun to be
created directly in archaeological departments. What is
Volume XI ● Issue 1/2020 ● Pages 3–5
Figure 1.
Cover photo for the IANSA web
page in 2011. Palynologist Radka Kozáková
investigates her pollen cores. Photo Petr
Pokorný.
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Jaromír Beneš: A Jubilee Volume: About Archaeology and Interdisciplinarity – in the Beginning and Today
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more, the palynological record in anthropic sediments is
increasingly being used as a parallel proxy record, which –
unlike that of the more or less random artefactual structures
– is a continuous one. It is able to capture human settlement
activity even in those periods of the past where artefacts are
silent. A specialization called archaeological palynology is
slowly emerging.
The second picture from 2014 (Figure 2) is showing a
pair of young anthropologists, Veronika Lungová and Jiří
Šneberger, studying human skeletal remains at the University
of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic. The photo also
featured on the journal’s website
www.iansa.eu. The activity
represents the scientifc concept of IANSA from its very
beginning, when we, the leaders of the journal – mainly
archaeologists – took due note of the then common message
that we integrate the discipline of anthropology. The young
researchers in the picture are doing basic human skeletal
morphometry and other observations as a fundamental
method of physical anthropology. Such an approach has
been known for more than a century and will defnitely
still be being used in the centuries to come. We wanted to
demonstrate that our archaeological journal is one which
emphasizes physical anthropology in frst place alongside
geoarchaeology, archaeobotany and archaeozoology.
Perhaps this can be said even better: human bioarchaeology
is a part of common archaeology.
This concept has not been an easy one to adopt and is
not so easy even today. In contrast to the Anglo-American
concept, the Central European archaeological tradition
still separates archaeology from anthropology. This is a
consequence of European nationalism, which substantially
infuenced archaeology at the beginning of the last century
and built a discipline difused with a strong ethnic signature.
Anthropological archaeology, as it was constructed in the
United States, was almost completely omitted. The meaning
of this second picture was clear more than ten years ago;
it was part of our efort to welcome back archaeological
anthropology into archaeology together – along with such
other subdisciplines as archaeobotany and archaeozoology.
We regarded them as integral parts of archaeology, and not
just as a service from the natural sciences.
The third picture (Figure 3) is a little bit more spectacular
and mysterious. It was taken by the young etnoarchaeologist
Tereza Majerovičová in Niokolo-Koba National Park,
Senegal, in 2019, during an expedition organised by
archaeologists and natural scientists from the University of
South Bohemia, České Budějovice. The research in southeast
Senegal is concentrated on abandoned traditional villages,
relocated after the park was established in the second half
of the last century. Remains of the abandoned villages are
still visible today under the park’s lush vegetation. The aim
of the project has been to document these villages and study
their archaeologisation over time in the local environment of
woody savannah. The grass in the picture,
Ctenium elegans
,
is called
ndyo
in the local Mandinka language, and plant
populations still cover some areas of the abandoned felds.
This grass is used in the local culture for hut roof covering
and basket making.
What is the message of this picture about contemporary
interdisciplinarity in archaeology? It is considerable, even
though the meaning is metaphorically hidden. Archaeobotany
ofers us a number of interpretations. It is a view of the
abandoned feld, where some plants used in their culture
persisted in large amounts. The topic of past arable land is a
topic in Africa as well as in central Europe, but also in many
other locations across the world. A lot of bioarchaeologists
and environmental archaeologists are currently studying
such common elements in all agricultural landscapes. Living
plants in many parts of the world testify to the past states
of those landscapes: they are living witnesses of the past.
Finally, the interesting spiral shape of the ear seemed to
concentrate us metaphorically into an integral view of the
landscape. Not only artefacts, but also living plants, testify
to the past; the past is entangled not only in artefacts, but is
Figure 2.
Cover photo for the IANSA web
page in 2014. Veronika Lungová and Jiří
Šneberger analyse human bones. Photo by
Patrik Galeta.
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embedded among living plants, animals and humans. This
integral approach is essential – and makes the diference
between the interdisciplinarity of ten years ago and today.
This trait is also evident in the content of this jubilee
volume. Most of the submissions deal with agricultural
landscape. The frst paper by Miroslav Kočić and his
colleagues reports recent feld research in Central Serbia
where Early Neolithic occupation related to the Starčevo
culture has been found by using a systematic pedestrian
survey, artefact spatial analysis, and various kinds of
archaeological geophysics. The following paper by Tereza
Šálková and collaborators presents some very interesting
results from a multidisciplinary study of late prehistoric
and early medieval sunken features from South Bohemia.
Radiocarbon data show that the plant macroremains are
from more time periods than was documented by the artefact
typology. The paper draws attention to the need to make
several independent dating methods, based on artefacts and
bioarchaeological fnds, in order to exclude false, or very
fragmentary, results. The third paper by Alžběta Danielisová
and colleagues deals with archaeometry: presenting the La
Tène spoked-wheel amulets in the context of their chemical
composition and technology in central Europe. Results
of the multiproxy chemistry and isotope study of these
artefacts are discussed with regard to their provenance.
The interesting study presented by Radoslaw Grabowski
brings some extraordinary and important data from the
Iron Age in northern Europe. His analysis of longhouses is
based on charred botanical material, spatially distributed
in the house plans. The paper clearly demonstrates the use
of archaeobotanical data to solve a purely archaeological
question.
Figure 3.
Cover photo for the IANSA web
page 2020. The grass “ndyo” (
Ctenium
elegans
) on an abandoned arable feld,
Niokolo Koba National Park, Senegal.
Photo by Tereza Majerovičová.
Medieval houses and their foors are the focus of a
geoarchaeological study presented by Lenka Lisá and her
collaborators. Two groups of buildings excavated in Brno,
Czech Republic, in superposition within diferent parts of a
single plot, have revealed that it is possible to track diferent
maintenance practices through time and space. The study
from Peťuša Castle, written by Matěj Styk and collaborators
from Slovakia, comprises several methods that were used
to document the castle hill, archaeological contexts and
artefacts. The aim of the paper is to reference the possibilities
of 3D visualization, which provides not only for an interesting
presentation of archaeological results to the general public,
but also serves the work of the archaeologists themselves.
Agrarian landscape transformation of an early modern
village hinterland in the Czech part of Silesia is the focus of
the paper by Ivana Šitnerová and her team. They use a set of
archaeological and environmental methods to enable some
exact dating of the feld system from the 17
th
century. Such
a transformation was typical for vast areas of central Europe
from the high medieval period to early modern times. The
agrarian hinterland of the Czech village of Eibental, in the
Romanian Banat, close to the River Danube, is debated by
the research team headed by Markéta Šantrůčková. They
used soil geochemistry to investigate agricultural signals
still present in the abandoned part of the village hinterland.
The results are compared with a unique historical plan of the
proposed colonization village from the 19
th
century.
The jubilee volume is completed with a review of the book
“Big Men or Chiefs? Rondel Builders of Neolithic Europe”
written by Jakub Novotný, and the backstory by Lenka Lisá
is about the geoarchaeological laboratory in the Institute of
Geology, Czech Academy of Sciences Prague.
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