Anything related to underwater archaeology, either survey, excavation, or documentation processes, poses important challenges that were already once tackled and overcome in ground archaeology. While the archaeological and historical goals of researching the underwater heritage have already been defined and studied in the last decades, i.e. maritime economy, archaeology of harbour constructions, or life within ancient vessels, some of the methodological aspects that we consider normal in the surface are still a matter of concern for underwater archaeologists. Most of these issues are related to a general question: how to acquire geospatial data below the surface. That question related to the problem of acquiring spatial data with GPS data that could be analysed through established tools such as GIS. One could get spatial data with relative positions. However, it has to be inserted in a GIS using a projection.

Drones and GPS are one of the most significant archaeological documentation advances in the last decades. Both systems have become available due to the popularisation of affordable systems and software and the widespread use of GPS for civil uses. Recently, different scholars (Campana, 2017; Stek, 2016; Verhoeven et al., 2021; Waagen, 2019) have elaborated on the use of drones in (Mediterranean) archaeology and beyond. Nevertheless, once one starts working in a completely different setting as underwater archaeology, the need to answer the same methodological questions emerges one more time. How to create digital models of the (sea bottom) surface that could be useful to answer archaeological questions? Those questions could be posed in intra-site contexts (shipwrecks) of “submerged landscape” contexts, like a harbour context, an anchorage area, or a bay used through the past due to favourable conditions.

The paper by Diamanti and colleagues (2024) tackles these issues related to drone-based SfM in underwater archaeology. First, they introduced, albeit generally, drone imagery in archaeology to jump into the evolution of drone technology and its applications to marine archaeology. In this section, the main issues regarding the application of drones underwater are familiar to drone practitioners, such as payload capacity, portability, or affordability; other problems are mostly related to underwater devices, such as dive keep, real-time assessment or positioning using USBL (Ultra short baseline). 

Diamanti and colleagues present two study cases stemming from an ongoing project conducted in the Phournoi archipelago in the North Aegean Sea, Greece. The first study case is a Late Roman/ Early Byzantine shipwreck, and the second case study is an anchorage area. Both cases are relevant to the paper's overall scope and fit the reader's interest in how to apply underwater drone archaeology in a site context, the shipwreck, and in a broad context/ landscape, the anchorage point. The former a fascinating topic that has been tackled systematically in other areas of the Mediterranean sea (Quevedo et al., 2024)

I won’t explain both cases deeply, but both demonstrate the capabilities of drone-based SfM in underwater contexts. The authors use different devices with different cameras and make an interesting comparison with diver-based 3D models, perhaps the most used method to produce orthophotography of the sea-bottom surface for more than half a century (Drap, 2012; Yamafune et al., 2017). The authors lost a good opportunity to present a more exhaustive comparison of dive-based and drone-based SfM results besides the textual explanation. As a reviewer commented a summary table with camera characteristics and data from the processing results could have given way more depth to that interesting analysis. The authors present a workflow of the process when dealing with complex technological elements, starting with the hardware components such as drones, USBL, and cameras, and the software component of the process, from frame extraction to SfM. This addition contributes to the reproducibility of methodologies, as it is expected from methodological paper as this one. Kudos for that.

In general, Diamani et al.'s paper is a valuable contribution to understanding the impact of drone surveys underwater. It offers information about two relevant study cases that could be used as paradigms for upcoming innovation in underwater archaeology. The recommendation remains to elaborate further on the comparative perspective as the only way to make the research truly innovative.

References

Campana, S., 2017. Drones in Archaeology. State-of-the-art and Future Perspectives. Archaeol. Prospect. 24, 275–296. https://doi.org/10.1002/arp.1569

Diamanti, E., Ødegård, Ø., Mentogiannis, V. and Koutsouflakis, G. (2024) Underwater Drones as a Low-Cost, yet Powerful Tool for Underwater Archaeological Mapping: Case Studies from the Mediterranean. Zenodo, ver.3 peer-reviewed and recommended by PCI Archaeology https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13460949

Drap, P., 2012. Underwater Photogrammetry for Archaeology, in: Special Applications of Photogrammetry. IntechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/33999

Quevedo, A., Aragón, E., de Dios Hernández García, J., Rodríguez Pandozi, J., Mukai, T., Segura, A., Bellviure, J. and Muñoz Yesares, R., 2024. Isla del Fraile. Reconstructing Coastal Dynamics in Southeastern Spain Through Underwater Archaeological Survey. Archaeol. Prospect. 31, 149–170. https://doi.org/10.1002/arp.1937

Stek, T., 2016. Drones over Mediterranean landscapes. The potential of small UAV’s (drones) for site detection and heritage management in archaeological survey projects: A case study from Le Pianelle in the Tappino Valley, Molise (Italy). J. Cult. Herit. 1066–1071. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2016.06.006

Verhoeven, G., Cowley, D. and Traviglia, A., 2021. Archaeological Remote Sensing in the 21st Century: (Re)Defining Practice and Theory. https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-0365-1376-8 

Waagen, J., 2019. New technology and archaeological practice. Improving the primary archaeological recording process in excavation by means of UAS photogrammetry. J. Archaeol. Sci. 101, 11–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2018.10.011

Yamafune, K., Torres, R. and Castro, F., 2017. Multi-Image Photogrammetry to Record and Reconstruct Underwater Shipwreck Sites. J. Archaeol. Method Theory 24, 703–725. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-016-9283-1

Proteomics is an increasingly applied field of study in archaeology. The characterisation of proteins in ancient biomaterials has been used extensively to determine the sex of certain animals (from dental enamel) or to identify species from non-diagnostic bone pieces or fragments of organic materials (glues and residues, for example). Paleoproteomics has been accompanied by methodological developments, in particular to reduce the size of samples affected by destructive analyses and to refine the level of species determination. The article by Joannes Dekker and colleagues (2024) - "Palaeoproteomic identification of a whale bone tool from Bronze Age Heiloo, the Netherlands" - provides a relevant and innovative example, incorporating ZooMS and SPIN techniques as well as the creation of a database of new reference collagens (cetaceans) specific to the site's natural environment (North Sea coast). The interest of this study also lies in the contribution of a use-wear analysis carried out prior to the sampling. This comparison of multidisciplinary data is essential for understanding the links between man and his natural environment and the technical and economic production that is closely linked to it. The tool studied (ca. 1500 BCE) comes from a coastal Bronze Age site in the Netherlands, where the economy was highly diversified, involving the exploitation of wild and domestic animals in both terrestrial and marine environments. The study shows that the bone of a North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) was shaped into a tool that was probably used to process plant fibres. This discovery supports other studies highlighting the intensive and non-opportunistic exploitation of whales in the North Sea since the Pleistocene.

Dekker, J. A. A., Mylopotamitaki, D., Verbaas, A., Sinet-Mathiot, V., Presslee, S., McCarthy, M. L., Olsen, M. T., Olsen, J. V., van den Hurk, Y., Brattinga, J. & Welker, F. (2024) Palaeoproteomic identification of a whale bone tool from Bronze Age Heiloo, the Netherlands. BioRxiv, ver. 2 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Archaeology.  https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.15.589626

“Hypercultural types: archaeological objects in fast times” by A. Ribeiro (1) offers some timely, critical and creative reflections on the manifold struggles of and disappointments in type-thinking and typological approaches in recent archaeological scholarship. Ribeiro insightfully situates what has been identified as a “crisis” in archaeological typo-praxis in the historical conditions of postmodernity and late capitalism themselves. The author thereby attempts what he himself considers “quite hard”, namely “to understand the current Zeitgeist and how it affects how we think and do archaeology” (p. 4). This provides a sort of historical epistemology of the present which can of course only be preliminary and incomplete as it crystallizes, takes shape, and transforms as we write these lines, is available only in fragments and hints, and is generally difficult to talk about and describe as we (the author included) lack critical distance – present-day archaeologists and fellow academics are both enfolded in postmodernity and continue to contribute to its logics and trajectories. Ribeiro’s key argument is provocative as it is interesting: he contends that archaeologists’ difficulties of coming to terms with types and typologies – staple knowledge practices of the discipline ever since – are a symptom of the changing cultural matrix of our times. 

The diagnosis is multilayered and complex, and Ribeiro at times only scratches the surface of what may be at stake here as he openly admits himself. At the core of his proposal is a shift in attention away from classical questions of epistemological rank, which in archaeology have tended to orbit the contentious issue of the reality of types (see also 2). Instead of foregrounding the question of type-realities – whether types, once identified, can be meaningfully said to exist and to represent something significant in the world – archaeologists are urged to recognize that typo-praxis is culturally saturated in at least two profound ways. First, devising and mobilizing types and typologies is a cultural practice itself – it may indeed have long been a foundational ‘cultural technique’ (Kulturtechnik) (3) of archaeology as a disciplined community-venture of methodical knowledge production. Typo-centric understandings of the archaeological record are quite akin to definition-centric apprehensions of the same as in both cases order, discreteness, and one-to-one correspondence are considered overriding epistemic virtues and credible pointers to a subject-independent “reality”. As such, these practices have a location of their own and they may thus notably conflict with the particularities of alternate and ever-mutating phenomenal realities and historical conditions. Discreteness may for instance lose its paradigmatic status as a descriptor of worldly order, and this is precisely what Ribeiro argues to have happened in the wake of postmodern transformations, influentially said to have deeply reconfigured the relation between the local and the global, at times even superseding such distinctions altogether. When coupled to questions of reality, types, in a similar fashion as definitions, quickly become vehicles to affirm epistemic power and knowledge authority and so help certify certain kinds of realities while supressing others. This is the paradox of modernity: to insist on monolithic understandings of the world while professing radical difference. 

Second, and for Ribeiro more importantly, typo-praxis is not just subject to cultural variation and thus by implication is plural, it also always has its proper associated cultural milieu in which it exerts some sort of efficacy, i.e. enables action and insight. Ribeiro maintains that this sort of efficacy has become contentious under postmodern conditions and this is because culture, under the gaze of global consumerism, has lost much of its classical significance, and as “hyperculture” (4) developed new logics, significations, and material culture correspondences, essentially “flattening” the highly textured and differentiated world of modernity (p. 6). Some of these new configurations sharply violate the expectations of traditional views of culture. The postmodern situation has in this way effectively emerged as a resistant force proffering much caution and growing scepticism among archaeologists and other academics alike as received ideas about “types” and “cultures” do not seem to work anymore the same way as before. The credibility of different modes of typo-praxis, archaeological or not, in other words, may depend much more on the cultural ecology of lived experience and contemporary diagnosis than is often realized. With Ribeiro, we may say that culture concepts and type concepts are indeed co-constitutive, and what sort of types and typologies archaeologists can persuasively deploy thus also depends greatly on how we construct the link between culture and type, and how (well) we grapple with our own realities and the lessons we draw from them – yet another important reminder of how our own subjectivities figure in such foundational debates (see esp. 5).

The crisis of typo-praxis in archaeology, then, is intricately linked to the crisis of modernity, broached by Ribeiro with the labels of postmodernity and late capitalism. Upon reflection, this is not surprising at all since Tylor’s (6) influential definition of culture for example, which is extensively referenced in the paper, was both reflective of and conducive to the project of modernity and its distinctive historical formations such as empire and colonialism. Ribeiro reminds us that questions of justification and credibility, be it in the domain of type-thinking or other epistemic contexts, can never be fully divorced from the contemporary situation, and archaeologists thus need to be vigilant observers of the present, too. Typo-praxis ultimately is motivated by and draws authority from what Foucault (7) has called épistémè, the totality of pertinent parameters forming the historical a priori of understanding or the guiding unconsciousness of subjectivity within a given epoch. The crisis of archaeological typo-praxis, in this view, signifies a calling into question of the historical a priori on which much traditional type-work in archaeology was premised. Archaeologists still have to come to terms with the implications and consequences of this assessment. “Hypercultural types: archaeological objects in fast times” offers a first poignant analysis of some of these challenges of postmodern archaeological type-thinking.

Bibliography

1. Ribeiro, A. (2024). Hypercultural types: archaeological objects in fast times. Zenodo, 10567441, ver. 3 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10567441

2. Hussain, S. T. (2024). The Loss of Typological Innocence: An Archaeology of Archaeological Typo-Praxis. Zenodo, 10567441. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10547264

3.  Macho, T. (2013). Second-Order Animals: Cultural Techniques of Identity and Identification. Theory, Culture & Society 30, 30–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413499189

4. Han, B.-C. (2022). Hyperculture: culture and globalization (Polity Press).

5. Frank, A., Gleiser, M. and Thompson, E. (2024). The blind spot: why science cannot ignore human experience (The MIT Press). https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/13711.001.0001

6. E. B. Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (J. Murray).

7.  Foucault, M. (2007). The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences, Repr (Routledge).

It currently seems obvious that the Mediterranean basin is a place of great exchanges of cultures, populations and goods. Although studies have focused quite extensively on the archaeology of maritime exchanges [1–3], it is challenging to assess archaeologically to what extent these networks had an influence on the biology of domesticated animals in the past, or even if animals were part of the trip. The question of past populations establishing extensive connections in the Mediterranean basin during the Iron Age and Persian period and especially, if these population exchange livestock and how these connections contributed to the animals phenotype or morphotype diversity is still difficult to document in the (zoo)archaeological record. These are amongst the questions Harding et al. [4] are making an attempt at documenting. Focusing on archaeological deposits from Cyprus and Israel in the eastern part of the Mediterranean basin, they use sheep astragali as a proxy to explore the potential connections that might have existed between evolution of the animals’ morphology and exchanges through sea travel. Postulating that animals from inland sites should have variant morphology from those of coastal sites due to more intensive exchanges for the latter, mainly because of the incorporation of non-native animals, they conducted geometric morphometrics analyses to make an attempt at documenting the phenomenon. Observing changes in size and shape, but also an increased morphological variability within the assemblages from coastal sites, they nicely discuss and put their results in perspectives with the archaeological record and literature [5,6]. Although, as they acknowledge, their sample size is rather limited to draw any general conclusion, this paper sheds new lights on the influence of maritime transport and its influence over domesticated sheep diversity between Cyprus and the southern Levant, paving the way for future studies.

References
1.     Leidwanger, J. and Knappett, C. (2018). Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World. (Cambridge University Press). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108555685
2.     Leidwanger, J. (2020). Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies. (Oxford University Press). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190083656.001.0001
3.     Bernard Knapp, A., Russell, A. and van Dommelen, P. (2022). Cyprus, Sardinia and Sicily: A Maritime Perspective on Interaction, Connectivity and Imagination in Mediterranean Prehistory. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 32, 79–97. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774321000330
4.     Harding, S. A., Hadjikoumis, A., Vermeersch, S., Shafir, R. and Marom, N. (2024) The contribution of Mediterranean connectivity to morphological variability in Iron Age sheep of the Eastern Mediterranean. bioRxiv2022.12.24.521859 https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.24.521859.
5.     Price, M. D., Perry-Gal, L. and Reshef, H. (2023). The Southern Levantine pig from domestication to Romanization: A biometrical approach. J. Archaeol. Sci. 157, 105828. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105828
6.     Vigne, J., Zazzo, A., Cucchi, T., Briois, F. and Guilaine, J. (2014). The transportation of mammals to Cyprus shed light on early voyaging and boats in the mediterranean sea. Eurasian Prehistory 10, 157–176.

The archaeological record comes in many forms. Some, such as buried sites from volcanic eruptions or other abrupt sedimentary phenomena are perhaps the only ones that leave relatively clean snapshots of moments in the past. And even in those cases time is compressed. Much, if not all other archaeological record is a messy affair. Things, whatever those things may be, artifacts or construction works (i.e., features), moved, modified, destroyed, warped and in a myriad of ways modified from their behavioral contexts. Do we at some point say the record is worthless? Not worth the effort or continuing investigation. Perhaps sometimes this may be justified, but as Daffara and colleagues show, heavily impacted archaeological remains can give us clues and important information about the past. Thoughtful and careful prehistorians can make significant contributions from what appear to be poor archaeological records. 

            In the case of Daffara and colleagues, a number of important theoretical cross-sections can be recognized. For a long time surface archaeology was thought of simply as a way of getting a preliminary peak at the subsurface. From some of the earliest professional archaeologists (e.g., Kidder 1924, 1931; Nelson 1916) to the New Archaeologists of the 1960s, the link between the surface and subsurface was only improved in precision and systematization (Binford et al. 1970). However, at Hatchery West Binford and colleagues not only showed that surface material can be used more reliably to get at the subsurface, but that substantive behavioral inferences can be made with the archaeological record visible on the surface.

            Much more important are the behavioral implications drawn from surface material. I am not sure we can cite the first attempts at interpreting prehistory from the surface manifestations of the archaeological record, but a flurry of such approaches proliferated in the 1970s and beyond (Dunnell and Dancey 1983; Ebert 1992; Foley 1981).  Off-site archaeology, non-site archaeology, later morphing into landscape archaeology all deal strictly with surface archaeological record to aid in understanding the past. With the current paper, Daffara and colleagues (2024) are clearly in this camp. Although still not widely accepted, it is clear that some behaviors (parts of systems) can only be approached from surface archaeological record. It is very unlikely that a future archaeologist will be able to excavate an entire human social/cultural system; people moving from season to season, creating multiple long and short term camps, travelling, procuring resources, etc. To excavate an entire system one would need to excavate 20,000 km2 or some similarly impossible task. Even if it was physically possible to excavate such an enormous area, it is very likely that some of contextual elements of any such system will be surface manifestations. 

Without belaboring the point, surface archaeological record yields data like any other archaeological record. We must contextual the archaeological artifacts or features weather they come from surface or below. Daffara and colleagues show us that we can learn about deep prehistory of northern Italy, with collections that were unsystematically collected, biased by agricultural as well as other land deformations agents. They carefully describe the regional prehistory as we know it, in particular specific well documented sites and assemblages as a means of applying such knowledge to less well controlled or uncontrolled collections.

References

Binford, L., Binford, R. S. R., Whallon, R. and Hardin, M. A. (1970). Archaeology of Hatchery West. Memoirs of the Society for American Archaeology, No. 24, Washington D.C.

Daffara, S., Giraudi, C., Berruti, G. L. F., Caracausi, S. and Garanzini, F. (2024). First evidence of a Palaeolithic frequentation of the Po plain in Piedmont: the case of Trino (north-western Italy), OSF Preprints, pz4uf, ver. 6 peer-reviewed and recommended by Peer Community in Archaeology. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/pz4uf

Dunnell, R. C. and Dancey, W. S. (1983). The siteless survey: a regional scale data collection strategy. In Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, vol. 6, edited by Michael B. Schiffer, pp. 267-287. Academic Press, New York.

Ebert, J. I. (1992). Distributional Archaeology. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Foley, R. A. (1981). Off site archaeology and human adaptation in eastern Africa: An analysis of regional artefact density in the Amboseli, Southern Kenya. British Archaeological Reports International Series 97. Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 3. Oxford England.

Kidder, A. V. (1924). An Introduction to the Study of Southwestern Archaeology, With a Preliminary Account of the Excavations at Pecos. Papers of the Southwestern Expedition, Phillips Academy, no. 1. New Haven, Connecticut.

Kidder, A. V. (1931). The Pottery of Pecos, vol. 1. Papers of the Southwestern Expedition, Phillips Academy. New Haven, Connecticut.

Nelson, N. (1916). Chronology of the Tano Ruins, New Mexico. American Anthropologist 18(2):159-180.