Seeing the Ancients
Witnesses, Judges: A Revolution Untold
Orit Malka
Law and History Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Witness testimony in a judicial setting is commonly viewed as a form of evidence -- a means to inform a judicial body of relevant facts in a given case. In this perspective, witnesses are merely instrumental to the process of adjudication. While this viewpoint provides a useful account of how we think of witness testimony in courts today, it is ill-suited to the way witnesses and their role were perceived in the ancient world. Drawing on a cross-cultural analysis of ancient and late antique texts, the article recovers a different perception of the role of witnesses that once prevailed in the societies that gave rise to Western civilization. According to this alternate view, witnesses were not seen as passive providers of information but rather as active agents with the power to adjudicate -- a role that we would now associate with judges. The article offers a new conceptualization of this historical transformation, outlining two paradigms that can help us critically examine the implied assumptions about the role of witnesses in adjudication: “the instrumental paradigm,” which is dominant in contemporary thought, and “the authoritative paradigm,” emerging from ancient texts, wherein witnesses held a far more authoritative role than the contemporary understanding suggest. The study argues that the instrumental paradigm reflects a radical transformation in the meanings of testimony and witness as legal concepts -- a shift that marks an unexamined revolution in the history of legal thought.
New regional-scale Classic Maya population density estimates and settlement distribution models through airborne lidar scanning
Francisco Estrada-Belli et al.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, October 2025
Abstract:
Vast tracts of tropical forest of the Yucatan Peninsula have remained largely uninhabited for the last 1000 years representing a rare opportunity to document the settled landscape of entire regions of an ancient civilization, the Classic Maya (300–900 CE), undisturbed by subsequent settlement. At the same time, limited access to this landscape has hindered regional scale surveys outside well-known major centers until recently. Today, airborne lidar mapping provides extensive and fine-grained data to document ancient Maya settlement on a previously unattainable scale. Using updated analytical methods, here we aggregate a diverse set of public and privately commissioned lidar mapping, including reprocessed environmental lidar data from Southern Campeche and Southern Quintana Roo, Mexico with enhanced structure visibility, to update population estimates to between 9.5 and 16 million people in a large central area of the Classic Maya Lowlands. Beyond population density, we highlight a uniform model for the spatial organization of settlement and agriculture structuring political and economic interactions in urban and rural zones alike within a 95,000 km2 area of the Central Maya Lowlands. The observed distribution of public plazas, residential zones and agricultural fields suggest that ancient Maya urbanism was more widespread, more populous and more efficiently structured for periodic interaction among elite and non-elites than previously thought.
An early ruler etched in stone? A rock art panel from the west bank of Aswan (Egypt)
Dorian Vanhulle
Antiquity, forthcoming
Abstract:
In terms of the grand narrative of Upper Egypt’s expansion into, and unification with, Lower Egypt in the second half of the fourth millennium BC, substantial debate surrounds the processes of state formation. Referring to a recently discovered engraving near Aswan, the author argues that rock art has much to contribute to these discussions. Typological and comparative analyses of the engraving, which is interpreted as a processional boat bearing a seated human figure, are used to suggest that it was created at the dawn of the First Dynasty, thus adding to the limited corpus of political authority expressed in Protodynastic rock art.
Seafaring megaliths: A geoarchaeological approach to the Matarrubilla giant stone basin at Valencina (Spain)
Luis Cáceres Puro et al.
Journal of Archaeological Science, August 2025
Abstract:
A broad multidisciplinary approach is deployed to study an exceptional megalithic feature: the stone basin that presides over the chamber of the Matarrubilla tholos, part of the Valencina Copper Age mega-site (Sevilla, Spain). The study, including geoarchaeological characterisation and sourcing of the stone, traceological analysis of its surfaces based on photogrammetry and morphometrics, digital image analysis as well as OSL dating, leads to a number of substantial findings of great relevance to understand the significance of this stone basin, the only of its kind documented to this date in the Iberian Peninsula, with parallels only in Ireland and Malta. Among the most relevant conclusions, it is worth noting the fact that the gypsiferous cataclasite block the basin was made of was brought from the other side of the marine bay that five thousand years ago extended across the south-east of Valencina, this is the first evidence of waterborne transport of a megalithic stone in the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, the basin appears to have been put where it stands today sometime in the first half of the 4th millennium BC, long before any tholoi were built at Valencina, which suggest a prior history of still poorly documented monumentality at this mega-site.
Challenging the boom-and-bust models? The fourth millennium BC copper mine of Curak in south-west Serbia
Peter Thomas et al.
Antiquity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Despite an early surge in copper-ore mining during the sixth and fifth millennia BC (the ‘boom’), evidence for metal production in the Balkans dwindles in the fourth millennium (the ‘bust’). Here, the authors present new evidence for copper mining at Curak in south-west Serbia, c. 3800 cal BC, during this apparent downturn. By integrating field surveys, excavations and provenance analyses, they explore activity at the site, challenging the visibility bias in the archaeological record of this region for this key period. Rather than a societal collapse, the authors argue, fewer artefacts may instead reflect a widening Balkan sphere of influence.