American Journal of Archaeology

In the April 2022 issue, an error appeared in “Negotiating Infant Personhood in Death: Interpreting Atypical Burials in the Late Roman Infant and Child Cemetery at Poggio Gramignano (Italy)” (AJA 126.3:219–41). Hemozoin isolation analysis positively demonstrated the presence of P. falciparum in one of the individuals buried at the site (IB36), not two individuals (IB36 and IB39) as incorrectly stated. The digital edition has been corrected.

The world of vinicultural archaeology has expanded exponentially over the past two decades, adding novel discoveries, methodologies, theories, and new archaeological evidence. Despite this, focused regional or site-specific approaches and syntheses dominate scholarship. This article provides an alternate, macroperspective via a comprehensive update and overview of the archaeological evidence for the entire Italian peninsula. When considered as a whole, the sheer quantity of evidence is simply a starting point for future research directions. New data from pre-Roman Italy might suggest localized indigenous winemaking experimentation, contrasting with traditionally dominant east–west colonial diffusionist models. Detailed cataloguing and interpretation of Roman wineries demonstrate that two dominant press types were present simultaneously. Along with these syntheses, previously unpublished evidence is analyzed for the first time, including conspicuous, lavish, and theatrical wine production at the Villa dei Quintili just outside Rome.

In this article we discuss the archaeological landscapes of the Erbil plain during the Hellenistic period (late fourth century BCE–mid second century BCE) based on the data collected during the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) between 2012 and 2019. We use a landscape archaeology approach to trace patterns of habitation, migration, land exploitation, and water management from the Iron Age to the early first millennium CE. Over the course of the first millennium BCE, the Erbil plain was transformed from an urbanized core region to a rural area of the vast Seleucid world through a moment of depopulation in the post-Assyrian period. These transformation processes continued after the end of the Hellenistic period, but with a different pattern. Urbanization resumed, peaking during the Parthian (Arsacid) era, when the region was part of the kingdom of Adiabene. Ultimately, our analysis shows how the planned landscape of Assyria was transformed in the centuries that followed the collapse of the empire and how the proximity of political power was the critical variable in the settlement patterns of this part of northern Mesopotamia under the empires of the first millennium BCE.

In 2006, a Roman oil lamp was scientifically excavated at Jamestown, Virginia, the earliest permanent English settlement in the Americas. This study explores why a 17th-century traveler would bring this ancient lighting vessel to the settlement and how its unusual double depositional history allows us to trace its changing meaning over time. It further demonstrates that the Jamestown lamp is the type of object that appealed to British and European nobility as a curiosity based on the inclusion of Roman lamps in still life paintings, collections, catalogues, and inventories.