A new interdisciplinary volume, Human Identities in the Archaeological Record: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Late Antiquity to the Modern Period, has been published by Bloomsbury Academic (11 June 2026). The volume is co-edited by Annamaria Diana (independent researcher, Ireland), Daniela Marcu-Istrate (Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archaeology, Romania), and Jun.-Prof. Dr. Alice Toso, Professor of Bioarchaeology at the University of Bonn and a member of the BCDSS.
The volume brings together perspectives from archaeology, bioarchaeology, material culture studies, and archaeoscience to examine how identities were formed, expressed, negotiated, and transformed across time. Drawing on case studies from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australia, its seventeen chapters address belonging and exclusion, migration, spirituality, cultural continuity and change, and the resilience of communities whose identities were marginalised or deliberately erased. The volume is organised into five thematic sections: belonging, resilience and spirituality; stories from burial contexts; biocultural transitions; expressions of individuality; and the reclaiming and protection of identities.
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Toso also contributes a chapter titled The Taste of the Land: Isotopic Evidence of Urban and Rural Identities in Medieval Portugal, co-authored with Cláudia Detry, Inês Simão, Joaquina Soares, Ana Margarida Arruda, and Michelle Alexander, which uses stable isotope analysis to examine how dietary practices shaped social and local identities.
The volume argues that identity cannot be reduced to a single category such as biological ancestry, religious affiliation, or material culture, but emerges through the interaction of different dimensions of human experience. Archaeology, the editors emphasise, therefore carries an ethical responsibility in reconstructing and protecting the heritage of communities absent from written history.
Human Identities in the Archaeological Record is available from Bloomsbury Academic. The University of Bonn press release is available here.