At a hill-top site in the Korrannaberg, where there is a water source and a sandy arena embraced by a rocky ridge, the author persuasively evokes a lively prehistoric ritual centre, with rock gongs, reverberating echoes, dancing and trance.

The authors report new understanding of the prehistoric monuments of Hadramawt (Yemen) using archaeological fieldwork, linguistic terminology and ethnography. The stone tombs, platforms and alignments are shown to have experienced particularly interesting life histories. Passing travellers add stones and bury camels, shrines are reconditioned and dismantled to construct goat pens. It is clear that only this kind of multi-disciplinary expertise can hope to define the prehistoric sequence in an arid and rocky mountain landscape in which non-literate pastoral peoples have left few other traces. An online photo essay accompanies the article at http://antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/mccorriston/index.html

In this ground-breaking study the author looks at three consecutive styles of rock art, placing them in the social context in which they were produced. Although necessarily succinct, the argument shows that as hierarchy increased and functioned over longer distances, rock art could perform as the organ of pastoralist authority, or the badge of marginalised hunters or, most often, as the imagery of consensus masking social inequality.

Did the banana, yam and taro arrive in Australia at the hands of Europeans or come across the Torres Strait 2000 years before? Reviewing the evidence from herbaria histories and anthropology, the authors propose a ‘hierarchy of hypotheses’ and consider a still earlier option, that these food plants were potentially grown in Australia at least 8000 years ago, while it was still joined to New Guinea. This hypothesis, first proposed by Jones and Meehan in 1989, locates early horticultural experiments among peoples too often seen as inveterate hunter-gatherers.

In the Neolithic megasite at Çatalhöyük families lived side by side in conjoined dwellings, like a pueblo. It can be assumed that people were always in and out of each others' houses – in this case via the roof. Social mechanisms were needed to make all this run smoothly, and in a tour-de-force of botanical, faunal and spatial analysis the authors show how it worked. Families stored their own produce of grain, fruit, nuts and condiments in special bins deep inside the house, but displayed the heads and horns of aurochs near the entrance. While the latter had a religious overtone they also remembered feasts, episodes of sharing that mitigated the provocations of a full larder.

The authors use metrical, demographic and body part analyses of animal bone assemblages in Anatolia to demonstrate how cattle were incorporated into early Neolithic subsistence economies. Sheep and goats were domesticated in the eighth millennium BC, while aurochs, wild cattle, were long hunted. The earliest domesticated cattle are not noted until the mid-seventh millennium BC, and derive from imported stock domesticated elsewhere. In Anatolia, meanwhile, the aurochs remains large and wild and retains its charisma as a hunted quarry and a stud animal.

New research into the Neolithic of Island Southeast Asia is broadening the old models and making them more diverse, more human – more like history: people and animals can move through the islands in a multitude of ways. The domestic pig is an important tracker of Neolithic people and practice into the Pacific, and the authors address the controversial matter of whether domestic pigs first reached the islands of Southeast Asia from China via Taiwan or from the neighbouring Vietnamese peninsula. The DNA trajectory read from modern pigs favours Vietnam, but the authors have found well stratified domestic pig in the Philippines dated to c. 4000 BP and associated with cultural material of Taiwan. Thus the perils of relying only on DNA – but are these alternative or additional stories?

The authors present a remarkable site with a remarkable interpretation: a structured platform of dugong bones, containing skulls laid in parallel and ribs in sets, together with artefacts of the Neolithic period. They propose that the bones have been symbolically arranged and the mound as a whole had a ritual purpose – an interpretation endorsed by analogy with dugong platforms noted in the Torres Strait in recent times.

High ranking burial mounds in Bronze Age Sudan featured burials in a corridor leading to the central burial – supposedly of a king. Were the ‘corridor people’ prisoners captured during periodic raids on Egypt, or local retainers who followed their king in death? The authors use the skeletal material to argue the second hypothesis – coincidentally that advanced by George Reisner, the original excavator.

With the help of a modern mason, the authors have discovered a series of scarcely visible markings on well-known limestone statues from southern Spain dating back to the fifth century BC. Unrelated to letters or religious symbols, their best point of comparison seems to lie with the kind of signature used by masons to denote a craftsman or workshop. One can certainly forgive any sculptor an expression of pride in the elegant and complex carvings of the Iberian culture.

Guided by modern miners of the region the authors track down pre-Inca mining sites in the Southern Nasca Region of Peru. In the hinterlands away from both modern and ancient roads they find a surprising number of small sites serving the pre-Inca industry, principally in the Nasca period. Drawing analogies from modern practice they are able to distinguish the ancient sites dedicated to exploration, extraction or production.

A single coin discovered in a field at Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, UK, has proved to have an exceptional significance in the world of Roman numismatics. It features a third-century emperor, Domitianus, unknown apart from a find of 1900 from a vineyard in Cléons previously described as ‘doubtful’. The dies used to strike the two coins match, leaving little doubt that Domitianus was a real person, although of somewhat fleeting dominion over the Gallic Empire – for a brief period in AD 271.

The authors disentangle the fascinating tale of the investigations in Kent's Cavern, iconic site for the acceptance of early man. The drawings they have discovered in the archives of the Geological Society are the only ones known from the earliest excavations and they are published here for the first time. As this paper shows, it takes intellectual courage to be an archaeologist. Whatever the enormity of his challenge to contemporary religion, I like to think that MacEnery would have been fairly supported by Antiquity's reviewing system. But perhaps our doctrinal challenges are lesser ones.…

What better way to understand how to make a handaxe or cleaver than getting into an Acheulean quarry and doing it yourself. The authors experimented at Isampur Quarry in India, finding that handaxes were best produced by reducing a slab to shape, while cleavers were best made by striking large flakes. There was a good correspondence with the ancient implements, and the authors deduced that Acheulean hominins were learning and transmitting standardised manufacturing methods to each other.

What are the advantages of equipping a wooden arrow with stone, rather than just using the sharpened wooden tip? Very few it seems. In a series of well-controlled experiments the authors show that stone arrow-heads achieve barely 10 per cent extra penetration over wood. They then raise some pertinent ideas about the other advantages, social and symbolic that may have driven hunters the world over to adopt the stone tip.

Field terraces are notoriously difficult to date – but historically of high significance. Here the author uses a Bayesian model applied to radiocarbon dates to date the tiered rice fields of the northern Philippines. They turn out to have been built in the sixteenth century probably by peoples retreating inland and upland from the Spanish.

The dead are back. Like a horde of irritating poltergeists the human remains of the ancients have returned to harass us in the form of the reburial issue; perennial source of postcolonial guilt and undergraduate seminar material. Only this time there is an unusual twist: the remains in question are British. The Council of British Druid Orders (CoBDO) has requested the reburial of a specific group of prehistoric human remains from the collection of the Alexander Keiller Museum. In response English Heritage have carried out a consultation, amidst considerable publicity and public debate (Hole 2008).

In this debate the authors tackle a problem fundamental to researchers and resource managers in the Mesolithic period: what sort of prehistory do flint scatters represent?

I thank Crombé et al. for their comment on an earlier paper (Vanmontfort 2008) and the editor of this journal for providing me with the opportunity to reply to their critique. They use two intensively surveyed and studied areas in the lower Scheldt region to compare the microlith-based method with a site-based approach. Actually this comparison nicely illustrates the potential of the method. My Figure 3 compares the calculated frequencies of sites and microliths – which is not quite the same as the 'Mesolithic use' of these regions – over the Mesolithic period for the two regions. The results correspond remarkably well. This agreement is perhaps not surprising, since the presence of microliths is also one of the most determining factors in the attribution of sites to each of the Mesolithic phases. However, the results from the two methods might easily have diverged from each other. Contrary to Crombé et al.'s expectation of correspondence, the distribution of a particular artefact type may offer different and complementary information to site-based data (Vanmontfort 2008: 250).