Title Participants "From Hellenistic slipped tableware to Roman Imperial Sagalassos Red Slip Ware: A petrographic and geochemical study" "Dennis Braekmans, Dries Daems, Jeroen Poblome, Patrick Degryse" "Reshuffling city life: spatial and functional dynamics of urban activity in Tokyo during COVID-19" "Maarten Loopmans" "Te bad of niet te bad" "Jeroen Poblome, Bas Beaujean, Frans Doperé, Stef Boogers, Sam Cleymans, Peter Talloen" "The Power of Emergence: The Effects of Bottom-Up Decision-Making in Resource Exploitation Strategies on Community Sustainability in Iron Age to Hellenistic Anatolia" "Dries Daems, Stef Boogers" "All human societies need energy and resources in order to sustain themselves. Individual decisions on how to meet these needs necessarily impact on the possibilities of other nearby actors to meet their own. The range of exploitation possibilities thus becomes limited by the proximity to others in tandem with the (re)generative capacity of the local landscape. In this paper, we present results from SAGAscape, an agent-based model of resource exploitation and subsistence in the area of Sagalassos (southwest Turkey) from Middle Iron Age to Early Hellenistic times (900–200 BC). The model simulates the harvesting of food, wood and clay by individually- optimizing households, seeking to fulfil the collective needs of their communities. Our results show how the behavior of these households leads to distinct spatial pat- terns in land use and how sustainability depends simulta- neously on a settlement’s environment as it does on its neighbors. The use of known, periodized sites generates new hypotheses with regards to observed settlement pat- terns as well as the nature of property regimes in these periods. Through the continued development of SAGAscape, we intend to bring the significant potential of agent-based modelling for archaeology to further fruition." "Simulating Roman Economies. Theories, Methods, and Computational Models" "Dries Daems" "Wastewater treatment on chongming eco-island: The Cultural Politics of Hydro-Social Territory-Making" "Maarten Loopmans" "The introduction of rural domestic wastewater treatment (WWT) installations is part of a grand scheme to realise China’s 'ecological civilisation' on Chongming in the Yangtze Delta region. Taking a cultural approach to hydrosocial territoriality, this article examines why this seemingly well-intended welfare intervention is rejected by rural islanders. The introduction of WWT does not only imply an upgrading of rural services, but is also seen as a top-down attempt at reshuffling the hydrosocial territories in which Chongming villages are embedded. Villagers perceive the WWT project as a forerunner of the greater threat of urbanisation and displacement of rural livelihoods, and also express a cultural reaction rooted in alternative rural understandings of landownership and engrained traditions related to water, waste, and soils. Village resistance forces local village cadres to intervene as cultural mediators between the villagers and the state. This moves the village cadres, against their own will, into a prominent position in the hydrosocial network. The article reveals how hydrosocial territories emerge from confrontations between top-down governance reshuffling and bottom-up manoeuvring." "Milieuongelijkheid en milieurechtvaardigheid" "Maarten Loopmans" "In het tweede decennium van de 21e eeuw krijgen milieubewegingen in België steeds meer aandacht voor sociale ongelijkheden. ‘Milieurechtvaardigheid’ en ‘milieuongelijkheid’ zijn termen die steeds vaker opduiken in politieke conflicten. Daarom is het goed om even stil te staan bij hun betekenis en achtergrond. Milieurechtvaardigheid kent, als eis van sociale bewegingen, een rijke geschiedenis, eerst in Noord-Amerika en vervolgens elders in de wereld. In de Verenigde Staten werken milieuactivisten, wetenschappers en juristen sinds decennia samen, en hebben ze een waaier aan perspectieven op de sociale dimensies van milieuproblemen ontwikkeld. In wat volgt bespreken we de belangrijkste invalshoeken van deze bewegingen, en hun gevolgen voor activisme en onderzoek. Daaruit kunnen we leren dat sociale bewegingen naast morele principes, ook pragmatische en strategische overwegingen in ogenschouw nemen bij hun acties." "Tell it like it is. Discoveries from a new survey of the Northern Jordanian plateau" "Dries Daems" "This article presents the results of a joint Finnish-Jordanian survey project that focuses on investigating the interrelations of the imperial heartlands and the Levantine region in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. We used historical satellite images to identify potential sites on the northern Jordanian plateau, after which they were systematically investigated by archaeological survey. Of the sites discovered, the fortified site of Tell al-Assara stands out owing to its prominent location, as indicated by a visibility analysis, and its massive enceinte wall made of ashlars. One of the pottery sherds found at the site bears an inscription in Aramaic. Although Tell al-Assara is remarkably well preserved, many of the sites discovered were already badly damaged by looting and urban development. These alarming developments can only be countered by closely involving local communities in fieldwork projects working in the region." "Socio-Material Bricolage: (Co)Shaping of Irrigation Institutions and Infrastructures" "Pieter Van den Broeck, Maarten Loopmans" "Drip irrigation is often considered a technological solution to increase water use efficiency and crop productivity. However, all too often, its social and institutional entanglements are ignored. This paper treats drip irrigation as a socio-material assemblage and discusses the social and institutional changes triggered by the introduction of drip irrigation infrastructure in Ağlasun, a rural town located in the southwest of Turkey. Through an ethnographic study, we investigate how the switch from surface irrigation to drip irrigation entails an interaction of institutional re-arrangements, material infrastructures and strategizing actors to reshuffle the operation and maintenance of irrigation infrastructures, water distribution rules and water pricing. Expanding the concept of institutional bricolage to socio-material bricolage, we offer a nuanced understanding of how material infrastructures and institutions are mutually shaped by individual and collective agency." "Magical practices? A non-normative Roman imperial cremation at Sagalassos" "Johan Claeys, Elena Marinova Wolff, Sam Cleymans, Patrick Degryse, Jeroen Poblome" "Many thousands of burials have been excavated from across the Roman world, documenting a variety of funerary practices and rites. Individual burials, however, sometimes stand out for their atypical characteristics. The authors report the discovery of a cremation burial from ancient Sagalassos that differs from contemporaneous funerary deposits. In this specific context, the cremated human remains were not retrieved but buried in situ, surrounded by a scattering of intentionally bent nails, and carefully sealed beneath a raft of tiles and a layer of lime. For each of these practices, textual and archaeological parallels can be found elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, collectively suggesting that magical beliefs were at work."