Was the British Neolithic a take-it-or-leave-it “package” which included building monuments and giving up fish? Julian Thomas thinks there was some room for creative packaging on the home front.

What was the population of imperial Rome? City blocks in Pompeii and Ostia are sufficiently well explored that a fair estimate of population density can now be arrived at. That peoples the city of ancient Rome with roughly 450,000 inhabitants, within the known population and density range of pre-industrial and modern urban centres.

Discovering what was cooked in a pot by identifying lipids trapped in the potsherds has been a highly successful method developed in recent years. Here the authors identify a compound which shows the pots had been used to process maize – probably the most important foodstuff in later prehistoric North America. The uptake of maize is confirmed as coincident with the Mississippian fluorescence.

Dating and examination of plaster floor sequences by micromorphology at a tell site in Greece shows when they were made and how they were composed. While numerous informal floor surfaces using recycled rubbish were put in place, as and when, by the occupants, formal floors rich in plaster seem to have been re-laid at regular intervals in reflection of a communal decision – even if the actual floors followed a recipe determined by each household. The authors rightly champion the potential of the technique as a possible indicator of social change at the household and settlement level.

Long doubted, the existence of Pleistocene rock art in North Africa is here proven through the dating of petroglyph panels displaying aurochs and other animals at Qurta in the Upper Egyptian Nile Valley. The method used was optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) applied to deposits of wind-blown sediment covering the images. This gave a minimum age of ~15 000 calendar years making the rock engravings at Qurta the oldest so far found in North Africa.

Discovery of a well-stratified fish hook from a cave sequence on East Timor shows a fishing technology developed at least 5000 years before the Austronesian expansion through Island South East Asia and into the Pacific. The fish hook is fashioned from shell and has been radiocarbon dated to 9741 ± 60 b.p.

Erlitou is one of the most important settlements in early China, a prime site for the investigation of early cities and states. Traditionally, it has been described, dated and explained in terms of dynastic succession – the dynasties of the Xia and the Shang being the ethnically-distinct actors and prime movers that made history here. In a brilliant analysis, the authors decouple the semi-legendary textual histories from the up-to-date archaeological sequence at Erlitou itself. This article strikes a blow for archaeological reasoning that will be felt far beyond the Yellow River.

The recent radar mapping discovery of widely distributed patterns of intensive agriculture in the southern Maya lowlands provides new perspectives on classic Maya civilization. Swamps seem to have been drained, modified, and intensively cultivated in a large number of zones. The largest sites of Maya civilization are located on the edges of swamps. By combining radar data with topographic information, it is possible to suggest the reasons for the choice of urban locations. With the addition of patterns elicited from rank-ordering of Maya cities, it is also possible to suggest more accurate means of defining Classic period Maya polities.

In an editorial in 1897, the British Medical Journal (ii: 1112) reported on increase in the ‘disgusting habit’of chewing gum, prepared from rubber or plant resin flavoured with aniseed or peppermint. However, the use of masticants is a much more widespread and long-term behaviour with possible health implications for humans. Here, samples of Mesolithic date from Scandinavia are identified and discussed.

A recent review of all ivory from excavations in Chalcolithic and Beaker period Iberia shows a marked coastal distribution – which strongly suggests that the material is being brought in by sea. Using microscopy and spectroscopy, the authors were able to distinguish ivories from extinct Pleistocene elephants, Asian elephants and, mostly, from African elephants of the savannah type. This all speaks of a lively ocean trade in the first half of the third millennium BC, between the Iberian Peninsula and the north-west of Africa and perhaps deeper still into the continent.

The Xiongnu people have long been considered an archetypical nomadic group, characterised archaeologically mainly from their tombs – which have reinforced the stereotype. Thanks to a sophisticated survey project, the authors are able to reveal the Xiongnu's economic complexity. Although primarily pastorialists they practiced cultivation and their ceramics reveal a settlement hierarchy which chimes with the broader social and settlement system of the region.

By extracting lipids from potsherds and determining the δ13C of the most abundant fatty acids, degraded fats from ruminant animals, such as cattle, and non-ruminant animals, such as pigs, can be distinguished. The authors use this phenomenon to investigate Late Neolithic pig exploitation and find that the pig ‘signature’ was more frequently found among residues from Grooved Ware than other prehistoric pottery types.

The walls and hut circles which are known to the Bedouins as “the works of the old men” lie about 120 miles to the east of the Dead Sea, in a southern extension of the Jebel Druze range through which the Cairo-Baghdad air mail passes, in the neighbourhood of landing grounds F, G, and H.

The Jebel Druze is a desolate range of mountains rising to from 2000 to 3000 feet above sea level. It consists of steep-sided flat-topped mountains of black basalt, the wadis and flat country between being covered with sand thickly besprinkled with huge black basalt boulders. Here and there the winter rains have formed lakes of sand which during the winter are morasses and during the summer hard flat glaring expanses of white sand, many as much as three miles long.

The author sets out to explain why Maya cities are so dispersed, with a ceremonial core surrounded by spacious neighbourhoods. Using the case study of Xuch, and the judicious application of phosphate analysis, he shows that these were clusters of farmsteads, growing food. Tackling the apparent confrontation of town and country in the same settlement he urges us to reconsider ‘urbanism’ as being too narrow a term in archaeology. Solutions that combine food production and ritual can be seen as increasingly diverse. The paper provides valuable reflections for archaeologists studying settlement evolution the world over.

The authors describe three splendid and newly discovered objects from the Upper Palaeolithic in northern Spain: an engraved scapula, a possible spearthrower and a decorated stone pendant. As well as adding to the corpus of iconic artefacts from the period, these new finds have the special virtue of being meticulously excavated and recorded in context.

In Classical times, the Indian continent was central to a trading network that ran west to the Mediterranean world revolving round Rome: despite its name, the Mediterranean was not the centre of the known world. Another world opened eastwards from India, and there are many obscure references to its eastern fringes, Now a series of finds from Bali, in the Indonesian archipelago, gives the elusive direct connection of Indian traders to that farther East.

The authors have explored the workplace and house of copper workers of the early Iron Age (twelfth to tenth century BC) in Jordan's Wadi Faynan copper ore district, showing that it belongs in time between the collapse of the great Bronze Age states and the arrival of Egyptians in the area under Sheshonq I. They attribute this production to local tribes – perhaps those engaged in building the biblical kingdom of Edom.