Braden Cordivari

28 August 2026

SAS is happy to spotlight the work of member Silvia Amicone (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), who recently published “Ritual and Connectivity in Nuragic Sardinia: An Interdisciplinary Study of Ceramics and Metalwork from Nuraghe Barru” in Open Archaeology.

Highlights

• Interdisciplinary analysis of ceramics and metal artefacts from Nuraghe Barru provides new evidence for structured depositional and ritual practices during the Final Bronze–Early Iron Age transition in Sardinia.
• Petrographic and pXRF analyses point to connections between Nuragic communities through the movement of objects, materials, technologies, and ideas across and beyond the island, showing how archaeological science can illuminate connectivity and rituality.
• The study shows that nuraghi continued to play important ceremonial and social roles during a period of broader political and cultural transformation, highlighting the changing social life of monuments in later Nuragic society.

This paper presents an interdisciplinary study of ceramics and metal artefacts from Nuraghe Barru (Sardinia), dating to the transition between the Final Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. Combining archaeological analysis, ceramic petrography, and pXRF, the study investigates depositional practices, material circulation, and the social significance of the site. The evidence points to the intentional deposition of selected objects within a structured context, suggesting that the nuraghe retained an important ceremonial and communal role during a period of broader cultural transformation. Petrographic and compositional analyses indicate connections between Nuragic communities through the movement of objects, materials, technologies, and ideas across and beyond the island. Rather than viewing Nuraghe Barru as an isolated site, the paper situates it within wider networks of interaction and exchange, contributing to ongoing debates on ritual practices, connectivity, and social change in later Nuragic Sardinia.

Congratulations to Silvia and her colleagues! Find out more about how to share your work with a Spotlight.

Amicone, S., Tiezzi, V., Broisch-Höhner, M., Freund, K.P., Heinze, L., Morandi, L.F., Salis, G., Pilo, C., 2026. Ritual and Connectivity in Nuragic Sardinia: An Interdisciplinary Study of Ceramics and Metalwork from Nuraghe Barru. Open Archaeology 12. https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2025-0078

Braden Cordivari

24 August 2026

This month’s Reading Recommendation comes from VP for Member Communications Braden Cordivari, who has chosen a newly published paper in Journal of Archaeological Science on the trade in amber by Zuzana Golec Mírová and colleagues, “Amber workshops in Central Europe during the Early Iron Age. Technology, chemical analyses, and Amber Roads.”

The Amber Roads leading from the Baltic to the Mediterranean have long fascinated archaeologists, yet many aspects of the trade remain unclear. This paper is an interesting and thorough synthesis of the latest excavation and chemical data underpinning the discourse. This paper discusses workshop evidence from 41 different sites, showing how amber was worked into beads. Well-preserved and well-excavated workshop sites allow for a step-by-step reconstruction of the chipping, grinding, and drilling that went into turning raw amber into finished objects. The study also combines Raman and infrared spectroscopy as a means for differentiating between eastern and western Baltic sources of amber, allowing for a more detailed look at sourcing and trade. The authors then integrate this chemical data with quantitative modeling of sites and landscape features to show how amber moved across the continent.  

Golec Mírová, Z., Golec, M., Kučera, L., Chytráček, M., Hagemann, K., Mischka, D., Dienstpier, M., Martínek, J., Zemek, V., Přichystal, M., Čižmářová, H., Čižmář, I., Popelka, M., Lečbych, M., Fojtík, P., Parma, D., Sovová, K., Zeman, J., Tomešová, B., Dufek, J., Novák, R., Valentová, J., Hiltscher, T., Krausse, D., Hansen, L., Hoppe, T., Wendling, H., Koch-Waldner, T., Trebsche, P., Praprotnik, T., Potrebica, H., Perkić, D., Dizdar, M., Dmitrović, K., 2026. Amber workshops in Central Europe during the Early Iron Age. Technology, chemical analyses, and Amber Roads. Journal of Archaeological Science 191, 106569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2026.106569

Golec Mírová et al. 2026, Fig. 11. Supplementing the input data for amber roads with strategic chemical analyses that distinguish the origin of amber from Early Iron Age Europe (800‒370 BC; numbers according to Fig. 1) into “Eastern Amber Road” (eastern Baltic Sea) displayed red ‒ Gdańsk, Lithuania and Kaliningrad source; “Western Amber Road” (North Sea and western Baltic Sea) displayed blue ‒ Denmark and northern Germany source (after Supplement 5).

Braden Cordivari

27 July 2026

July’s Reading Recommendation comes from SAS President-Elect Paul Szpak, who shares a pair of exciting articles on advances in nitrogen isotope research. Paul writes:

We have known for 40 years that nitrogen isotopes can provide us with information about the trophic position of an animal – where it sits in the ‘food chain’. This has been very useful for studying past human populations, allowing us to make inferences about the relative importance of, for example, animal and plant foods. One limitation, however, is that we require well-preserved protein in our ancient samples (most commonly collagen in bones), which almost never survives beyond 100,000 years. A series of recent studies have used an ingenious and novel approach to get around this problem. They’ve targeted tooth enamel, which contains very little organic material and therefore also very little protein, and adapted a method that uses bacteria to convert nitrate into nitrous oxide, which can then be used to determine the ratio of nitrogen isotopes in the same. This method was originally designed to measure nitrogen isotopes in seawater nitrate and can work with extremely small quantities of nitrogen, which is an absolute game changer for those interested in studying the deep past. One early application analyzed nitrogen isotopes in the tooth enamel analyzed the enameloid (similar to enamel) in megatooth sharks (Kast et al., 2022), finding that the famous megalodon (Otodus megalodon) was a top predator, feeding on baleen whales. The ancestor of ‘the meg’, the slightly smaller Otodus chubutensis, fed even higher up in the food chain, consuming predatory sperm whale-like creatures that prowled the seas millions of years ago. More recently, this technique was applied to South African australopithecines (Lüdecke et al., 2025) , revealing a predominantly plant-based diet, suggesting limited consumption of animal proteins. This study provided unprecedented insight into the diets of our hominid ancestors and future studies are sure to shed further light on this issue of meat consumption in our hominid ancestors from a quantitative perspective. When did it really become important and how might that connect to other major developments in human history?

Kast, E. R., Griffiths, M. L., Kim, S. L., Rao, Z. C., Shimada, K., Becker, M. A., …
Sigman, D. M. (2022). Cenozoic megatooth sharks occupied extremely high trophic positions. Science Advances, 8(25), eabl6529.

Lüdecke, T., Leichliter, J. N., Stratford, D., Sigman, D. M., Vonhof, H., Haug, G. H., …
Martínez-García, A. (2025). Australopithecus at Sterkfontein did not consume substantial mammalian meat. Science, 387(6731), 309–314.

Lüdecke et al. 2025, Fig. 1: Sterkfontein Member 4 and modern enamel nitrogen isotope data

Braden Cordivari

20 July 2026

SAS has been highlighting research facilitated by our Student and ECR Research Support Award. We are excited to share a paper by 2021 award winner Ahana Ghosh (Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar). Ahana’s paper “Does form entail function? Understanding pottery functionalities through absorbed residues within ceramics from the Harappan sites of Karanpura and Ropar in India” was recently published in Quaternary Environments and Humans.

Highlights

• Uses organic residue analysis (ORA) to directly determine pottery function, moving beyond traditional form-based interpretations.
• This study demonstrates that Harappan pottery was multifunctional, used for processing plant, animal, and possibly aquatic resources. It reinterprets perforated vessels, showing they were not exclusively for dairy but also used for non-dairy/oily substances.
• Highlights the importance of ceramic porosity and environmental factors in lipid absorption and preservation.
• Provides new insights into Harappan foodways and subsistence practices through integration of lipid, faunal, and botanical data

This paper investigates the function of Harappan pottery from Karanpura (Rajasthan) and Ropar (Punjab) using organic residue analysis (ORA) of absorbed lipids. Moving beyond traditional typological approaches, the study directly examines chemical traces within ceramics to identify vessel use. Analysis of 15 potsherds reveals evidence of plant, animal, and possibly aquatic resource processing, indicating that Harappan pottery was multifunctional rather than form-specific. Perforated vessels, often associated with dairy production, show signatures of non-dairy and oily substances, challenging earlier assumptions. The study also highlights the role of ceramic porosity and environmental conditions, such as soil pH, in lipid preservation. By integrating residue data with faunal and botanical evidence, the research reconstructs aspects of Harappan subsistence and culinary practices. Overall, it demonstrates the value of scientific techniques in reinterpreting ancient material culture and provides new insights into foodways and technological practices in the Harappan Culture.

Ghosh, A., Prabhakar, V.N., Reber, E.. A., Liston, H., Kirubakaran, S., K.s., S., Talekar, U., Bhardwaj, M., Vishwakarma, A., Channarayapatna, S., 2025. Does form entail function? Understanding pottery functionalities through absorbed residues within ceramics from the Harappan sites of Karanpura and Ropar in India. Quaternary Environments and Humans 3, 100050. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.qeh.2024.100050

Fig. 5. Ropar: (a) Map of the site representing the layout of the trenches and the sample collection areas for the present study; (b) Present-day photograph of the site showing the exact location of the excavated trench from where the samples were collected (C) Histogram representation of RPR152 (d) Histogram representation of RPR98.

Braden Cordivari

29 June 2026

Happy summer! SAS Representative on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Archaeological Science Ester Oras has passed along an exciting new paper for June’s Executive Board Reading Recommendation. Ester writes:

The paper "Four centuries of commercial whaling eroded 11,000 years of population stability in bowhead whales" by Westbury et al. (Lorenzen's group at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen) stands out as a unique integration of palaeoenvironmental, biological, historical, biomolecular and ecological records. It shows how human induced population decline through commercial whaling has had a direct influence on the demography and genetic diversity of bowhead whales, in fact, even more than the long-term climatic changes throughout the Holocene. An intricate and nuanced insight into human-animal-environment interactions with a serious cautionary tale.

Westbury, M.V., Brown, S.C., Cabrera, A.A., Morales, H.E., Parreira, B., Ma, J., Coll Macià, M., Rey-Iglesia, A., Dyke, A., Scharff-Olsen, C.H., Scott, M.B., Wiig, Ø., Bachmann, L., Kovacs, K.M., Lydersen, C., Ferguson, S.H., Szpak, P., Fordham, D.A., Lorenzen, E.D., 2026. Four centuries of commercial whaling eroded 11,000 years of population stability in bowhead whales. Cell 189, 2040-2053.e19. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2026.02.022

Braden Cordivari

24 June 2026

It is with great pleasure that we share this year’s recipients of the Student and ECR Research Support Award! This year’s awardees are Agustina Vazquez Fiorani (Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame), Madison J. McCartin (University of California, Davis), and Miriam Vílchez-Suárez (University of Valladolid). We look forward to following the progress of their work! Congratulations to Agustina, Madison, and Miriam!

Agustina Vazquez Fiorani (Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame)

The study of ancient foodways—with a focus on the long-term relationships between daily decisions and socio-economic settings—offers a powerful lens for understanding how human groups faced past and present climatic crises. This project investigates the long-term crafting of enduring indigenous foodways in Argentina between 200 and 1476 CE, a period of radical transformations including increasing social differentiation, economic intensification, population aggregation, and climate change. SAS funding will cover my post-doc research at Notre Dame, where I integrate biomolecular (GC-MS), isotopic (GC-C-IRMS, EA-IRMS), and archaeological (ceramic analysis) methods to examine how ingrained food habits shaped human capacity to navigate increasingly complex and shifting circumstances. With SAS’s help, Agustina seek to contribute to worldwide anthropological debates on social complexity and climate change by applying scientifically robust methods that have not been widely employed in South American archaeology.

Agustina’s research broadly explores two enduring questions of anthropological archaeology: how did agropastoral lifestyles emerge, and under what conditions did social inequality take root? Drawing on social theory (relationality, practice, and materiality) alongside molecular, isotopic, experimental, and archaeological methods, she examines the interplay between social change, human-environment relations, and complexity in shaping long-term dietary patterns in the Southern Andes. Working in Argentina, she studies small-scale communities that inhabited the region during 200–1476 CE, a period marked by profound socioeconomic and climatic transformations. By reconstructing what people produced and ate, Agustina bridges methodological and theoretical approaches to reveal how cooking and eating actively shaped Andean communities' long-term resilience and adaptation.

Madison J. McCartin (University of California, Davis)

“Who took the first bite? Investigations of hominin subsistence and paleoecology at Trou Al’Wesse (Belgium) via zooarchaeology and stable isotope analyses""

The Middle-Upper Paleolithic (MP-UP) transition represents a tipping point for biological and cultural evolution, characterized by early human dispersals and Neanderthal extinction. This project focuses on the MP-UP fauna from Trou Al’Wesse, a cave site in central Belgium dated to 54-36 ka cal BP. Zooarchaeological analyses will elucidate hominin subsistence practices, as well as the taphonomic history of the site. Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analyses will establish an environmental baseline and clarify the ecological niche of key taxa, especially large carnivores whose niches overlapped with hominins. By generating new insights on hominin subsistence and paleoecology, this project aims to improve our understanding of the MP-UP transition in northwestern Europe.

Madison’s interests lie in the use of faunal remains to investigate hominin subsistence practices, paleoecology, and human-animal relationships during the Late Pleistocene (~100-10 ka BP), a period characterized by notable changes in hominin demography and global climate systems. Methodologically, she focuses on classic zooarchaeological techniques, namely taxonomic and taphonomic analyses, as well as biomolecular approaches including proteomics and stable isotope analysis. Her dissertation focuses on faunal remains from Middle-Upper Paleolithic sites in Spain, Belgium, and Mongolia to investigate the range and trajectory of subsistence practices at the time of the last Neanderthals and the earliest humans in Eurasia.

Miriam Vílchez-Suárez (University of Valladolid)

“ARGAR-CHILD. Uncovering gender roles of the childhood in the Argaric Bronze Age: Bioarchaeological insights from peptide-based sex analysis”

This research aims to come closer to an emic understanding of the gender system of Argaric Bronze Age societies in southeastern Iberia. The expression of gender identity at El Argar cemetery (Almería, Spain) rites was clearly a concern within the burial community, achieved by placing the body on the gendered side, in the appropriate orientation, and with gender-specific and typical grave goods. A comparison between this gendered funerary treatment with the estimation of biological sex based on the remains of buried non-adult individuals remains allows investigation of gender as the cultural classification and elaboration of sex-based differences.

Miriam’s research focuses on the bioarchaeological study of prehistoric populations from the Iberian Peninsula, particularly those from the Copper and Bronze Ages. Through the integrated analysis of human remains and funerary contexts, she investigates mortuary behaviour, social organization, and cultural practices in prehistoric communities. She is especially interested in the relationship between biological sex, gender identities, and funerary treatment, combining osteological, biomolecular, and archaeological approaches. Miriam’s work also explores childhood, non-masticatory dental wear, and ritual variability in collective burials, with the aim of better understanding social identities and lived experiences in prehistoric Iberia.