Editorial

Welcome to the fourth issue of the European Journal of Archaeology for 2015. Here, we present six general articles and eleven book reviews. Below, I summarize and evaluate their significance to the archaeology of Europe. Jordan Karsten, Sarah Heins, Gwyn Madden, and Mykhailo Sokhatskyi compare the rate of dental caries between Tripolye culture farmers buried in Verteba Cave (c. 3950– 2600 cal BC) in western Ukraine with earlier hunter-fisher-gatherers in the Dnieper Rapids area of central Ukraine. The Tripolye individuals were found to have carious lesions on 9.5 per cent of teeth, while the hunter-fisher-gatherers were free of them. This statistically significant difference can be explained with reference to the increased consumption of highly processed grains of carbohydrate-rich cultivated wheat and barley by the farmers. It is worth adding that the Tripolye rate of dental caries lies at the high end of values published for other European Neolithic/Eneolithic populations, although a recent study of human remains found in Grotte des Pigeons at Taforalt in Morocco with a rate of over fifty per cent (Humphrey et al., 2014) reminds us that high rates of caries are not exclusive to agricultural groups. Building on the work of Leroi-Gourhan at Les Mournouards II hypogeum, Arnaud Blin re-examines the patterning of mortuary deposits found in the Late Neolithic (c. 3350–3000 cal BC) rock-cut hypogea of the Paris Basin, the majority of which are situated around the Saint-Gond swamps in the Marne region. Despite the overall impression of ‘collective’ primary burial practices, distinctions based on the age, sex, and social status of the deceased can be identified. Infants and children aged less than four years are clearly under-represented. Most females were buried along the left wall of the tombs, on the same side as the collective grave goods and female figurines, and were exclusively associated with double-perforated shell ornaments. Contrasts can also be identified between supine corpses accompanied by abundant grave goods and flexed bodies with rarer grave goods. In line with processual archaeological thought, Blin argues that these mortuary patterns reflect a conservative social order maintained by the living, although from a more interpretative perspective there remains plenty to discuss with regard to social relations and dynamics in later fourth millennium northern France. For example, what kinds of people were buried in hypogea (as opposed to other—potentially competing—types of collective burial), and what kinds of people were buried in the main chamber (as opposed to the antechamber)? Why were some tombs closed relatively quickly while others were reused for a long time? And did the clearing out of some hypogea mean that some segments of the dead lost their importance? Laura Perucchetti, Peter Bray, Andrea Dolfini, and Mark Pollard reassess the circulation of early copper and copper-alloy across the Alpine region during the Copper Age (c. 3800–2200 cal BC) and earliest Bronze Age (c. 2200–2000 cal BC) by plotting the geographical distribution of sixteen simple chemical compositional groups (based on the European Journal of Archaeology 18 (4) 2015, 559–561