Dunnicaer, Aberdeenshire, a now isolated sea stack, is the findspot of five Pictish symbol stones discovered in the nineteenth century. Excavations from 2015 to 2017 have revealed a Roman Iron Age promontory fort, providing insights into the development of fortified settlement in north-east Scotland, with fortified sites being a key feature of first millennium AD elite practice in this region. The presence of rare and unusual finds indicates contact with the Roman world to the south and changes in the character of settlement as evidenced at Dunnicaer indicate broader transitions in the later Roman Iron Age native society. The archaeological sequence at Dunnicaer sheds new light on the adoption of non-roundhouse styles of architecture in first millennium AD Scotland and provides important evidence for the dating of the Pictish symbol tradition. A consideration of the impacts of coastal erosion on promontories of this nature suggests these are amongst the most threatened archaeological sites.

This report provides an account of the excavations of a cropmark enclosure and other prehistoric remains at Dryburn Bridge, near Innerwick in East Lothian. The excavations were directed over two seasons in 1978 and 1979 by Jon Triscott and David Pollock, and were funded by the Ancient Monuments Branch, Scottish Development Department. Features and artefacts of various periods were discovered during the excavations, including a Mesolithic chipped stone assemblage and pits associated with Impressed Ware pottery. A pair of distinctive burial cists dating to c2300-2000 cal BC was discovered, each containing two inhumations, one articulated and the other disarticulated; a Beaker vessel was found directly above one of the cists. By the mid first millennium cal BC a settlement had been founded on the site. Three successive settlement layouts can be interpreted from the excavated structures. The first two phases represent continuous occupation, dating to before 400 cal BC, and consisted of timber roundhouses, other rectangular structures and a small cemetery of pit graves located within a palisaded enclosure. The final occupation phase, which extended into the Roman Iron Age and may have occurred after a break in occupation, consisted of an unenclosed settlement of ring-ditch houses. Historic Scotland and predecessor bodies funded the post-excavation studies and publication of this report.

Traditionally, the study of Roman cultural imports to Roman Iron Age societies in Scandinavia has been based on analysis of the artefactual record. The starting point has been artefacts held to be high-status objects deriving chiefly from funerary contexts and, to a lesser degree, from settlement sites. Although the existing evidence at Uppåkra, a high-status settlement site in Scania province, Sweden, comes only from residential contexts, we will address the ongoing debate concerning Roman cultural imports with ecofactual evidence, to consider which aspects of Roman culture were introduced, which parts of Roman society were mediators, and the underlying social reasons for the introduction of the archaeobotanical remains into indigenous Iron Age society.

Phenology is the study of the timing of recurring biological events (Lieth, 1974). By looking at seasonal life cycles in plants and animals (Bastian & Bayliss Hawitt, 2022), phenology studies the complex temporal interactions of living beings with each other, and with the temporalities of other surrounding environmental elements (such as, for instance, temperature, light, etc.). Phenology tries to understand how the many and different forms of ecological timing of an organism or populations interact and intersect with the timing of particular components of their environment (Forrest & Miller-Rushing, 2010), making shared life in an ecosystem possible. Phenology spans over a range of analytical approaches at different spatial scales, from macro level (landscape) to meso (ecological communities) and individual level (stands), including statistical methods, interpretation of long-term phenological data, modeling and physiological analysis, with many different forms of data collection (e.g., using remote sensing with satellites and/or phenocams, analysis of time-series photos). An important focus in phenological studies is recording dates of typical conventional phenophases, such as flowering or bud burst in plants, conducted via long-term observations (Bastian & Bayliss Hawitt, 2022).Humans, to plan what to do next, have always used phenological indicators. Phenological times of plant and animals are connected with the local environmental context, and key timings of human activities, such as the best time for harvest, planting, or pruning for instance are always decided taking into consideration such aspects

Groves with ancient olive trees (Olea europaea L.) could be considered remnants of old agroforestry systems. Anything but static, these agro-ecosystems have undergone drastic transformational processes in Mediterranean countries, where abandonment or intensification have been observed far more than continuity, expansion or renaissance, leading to environmental degradation of rural areas. Starting from this assumption and inspired by historical ecology and historical geography, we consider centuries-old olive trees as living archives of human-nature interactions and are thus proxies of past agroforestry. Our aim is to better understand what has driven dynamics of change and persistence, happening today as well as in the past. We first travel backward in time, looking at the ecology of land management systems during the Roman period (ca 200 BC-400 AD) and late Antiquity (ca AD 400-700). The special focus is the island of Sicily, the granary of the Empire, well known as a region where cereal production increased around the latifundia economy. We reconstruct the diversity of land tenure and the ecology of such complex systems, by combining records from Roman agriculturalists and palaeoenvironmental evidence of the past. We then zoom out, to look at today’s management practices in olive groves, thus drawing a parallel between Antiquity and today. Our work provides valuable insights into the correlation between certain organisation models, ecological strategies and adaptation capacity over the long term, clearly showing that human and nature dimensions are interconnected. Such entanglement may be a key element for ensuring these agroecosystems resilience. All elements that may contribute to the re-invention of sustainable forms of their management, for the present and the future.