A characteristic feature of human subsistence as the last glaciation ended was the turn towards new food sources, in a ‘broad spectrum’ transformation. Australia took an unusual course, and the trajectory in its arid zone is especially striking. What were the broad spectrum diets in arid Austalia? Why did they arise so late? Did they arise late?

A prehistorian, like any other historian, should aim not only to describe, but also to explain. . .' Thus Childe's valediction (1958, 6). But we frustrate ourselves unless fiercely selective in explaining traces of small farming (or hunting) communities near subsistence level, with the critical apparatus of contemporary or 19th-century industrial societies; conceptions wholly arising from such societies are likely to be appropriate only to them." Yet we cannot easily avoid these errors, for we are alienated from our material-and not only by time. Schools of archaeology are necessarily urban, draw deeply on traditions of longestablished urban institutions. The conditions of that pre-industrial life which was almost the whole of reality to our ancestors may seem inconceivably remote-and disappointing, distasteful even.

As one digs back through the archaeological record, art and other evidence of symbolic behaviour becomes scarcer, so it is much disputed just when human marking behaviour and human language began. Is the fading away a real fact of prehistory, or a distorting effect of selective survival?

For over a century, the landscape of Angkor Wat and its surrounding area have been the focus of archaeological study. These studies have been constrained substantially, however, by a lack of chronological resolution in the features of the landscape and the difficulty of dating elements of the cultural assemblage. Recently obtained LiDAR data have transformed understanding of the Angkor Wat complex, enabling archaeologists to map terrain usually obscured by dense and protected vegetation. The results have informed targeted ground-based research, demonstrated previously unknown relationships between elements of the site, shown that the complex is much more extensive than previously thought and revealed a massive, unique and unknown structure.

The authors rewrite the character of Early Mesolithic settlement in Europe with their new research at one of its most famous sites. The picture of small mobile pioneering groups colonising new land is thrown into contention: far from being a small hunter-gatherer camp, Star Carr in 9000 cal BC extended for nearly 2ha and involved the construction of an estimated 30m of lakeside waterfront and at least one post-built house. With some justice, they suspect that the ‘small groups’ of Early Mesolithic Europe may have their rationale in the small excavations of archaeologists.

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 most original and useful contributions that I may have made to prehistory are certainly not novel data rescued by brilliant excavation from the soil or by patient research from dusty museum cases, nor yet well founded chronological schemes nor freshly defined cultures, but rather interpretative concepts and methods of explanation. So it is the genesis and development of these to which this autobiographical note is devoted.

Like Gustav Kossinna I came to prehistory from comparative philology; I began the study of European archaeology in the hope of finding the cradle of the Indo-Europeans and of identifying their primitive culture. Reading my Homer and my Veda with the guidance of Schrader and Jevons, Zimmer and Wilamowitz-Moellendorf I was thrilled by the discoveries of Evans in Prehellenic Crete and of Wace and Thompson in Prehistoric Thessaly. Indeed I hoped to find archaeological links between the latter area and some tract north of the Balkans whence similar links might lead also to Iran and India.

During extended biographies, some artefact types may have functioned at times as heirlooms or relics. It is possible to illustrate this process by studying fragmentation, and two case-studies involving British Beaker pottery and amber spacer plate beads are presented. Wider social and chronological implications are also considered.

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is currently producing a digital elevation model of most of the world's surface. Here the authors assess its value in mapping and sequencing the network of water channels that provided the arterial system for Mesopotamia before the petrol engine.

Previous articles in ANTIQUITY have taken different views of the dating pattern for the human settlement of Australia. Is the apparent limit in the region of 35–40,000 years ago visible in the radiocarbon determinations a real date for the human presence? Or is it an artificial result of the dating method? A comparative study of the dating pattern in archaeological as against non-archaeological contexts may inform.

Particular stones found on Epi-Palaeolithic sites in the Levant are thought to be for grinding vegetable matter and to be essential instruments in the development of food processing. Finding an assemblage of these tools in a burial cave, the authors ask a harder question: could they have been used for processing hides with ochre? Use-wear analysis allows a positive verdict, and so the tools take their place in the ritual apparatus associated with burial.

Forgotton beside the well-known and well-studied collections of metalwork from the river Thames is a remarkable collection of human skulls; this new study dates some skulls and finds important order in their pattern of dates.

This article presents a new initiative in combating looting from the air, building on previous work in Iraq and Jordan. Looted sites in the Virú Valley, Peru, are visible as pit clusters on dated versions of Google Earth. Compare these with earlier air photographs and Gordon Willey's famous survey of the 1940s, and we have a dated chronicle of looting events. This makes it possible to demonstrate that modern looting is certainly taking place and linked to an upsurge in the antiquities trade. As well as being a new instrument for managing heritage, the author shows that the looting survey offers an important research dividend: the location of cemeteries not previously systematically documented, with potential for more thorough investigation even of already looted areas.

Age-distributions of perinatal infants from Romano-British sites and a medieval site are different and may reflect different major causes of death. Whilst the medieval infants probably represent natural deaths, the Romano-British infants, from both cemetery and non-cemetery sites, may mainly represent victims of infanticide.

The Mesolithic — as the ‘time in between’ — raises issues of definition, the more so as chronology is refined and the abruptness of environmental change at the end of the glaciation becomes clearer. This clarification of an unusual regional sequence is an instance.

The date of the Late Bronze Age Minoan eruption of the Thera volcano has provoked much debate among archaeologists, not least in a recent issue of Antiquity (‘Bronze Age catastrophe and modern controversy: dating the Santorini eruption’, March 2014). Here, the authors respond to those recent contributions, citing evidence that closes the gap between the conclusions offered by previous typological, stratigraphic and radiometric dating techniques. They reject the need to choose between alternative approaches to the problem and make a case for the synchronisation of eastern Mediterranean and Egyptian chronologies with agreement on a ‘high’ date in the late seventeenth century BC for the Thera eruption.

Interest in explaining scientifically the enormous territorial expansion of the Tupi has been an issue since 1838, now with a consensus: a common centre of origin existed, from which the Tupi fanned out, differentiating through distinct historic and cultural processes whilst keeping several common cultural features. But there is no consensus as to where the centre was located and where passed the routes of expansion.

Scholars have often asserted this hypothesis, but contributed very little scientific proof. Since 1960, archaeological (site location, radiocarbon and thermoluminescent dating) and linguistic data (glottochronology, relationships among languages) have been brought to the scene.

CORONA satellite photography taken in the 1960s continues to reveal buried ancient landscapes and sequences of landscapes – some of them no longer visible. In this new survey of the Mughan Steppe in north-western Iran, the authors map a ‘signature landscape’ belonging to Sasanian irrigators, and discover that the traces of the nomadic peoples that succeeded them also show up on CORONA – in the form of scoops for animal shelters. The remains of these highly significant pastoralists have been virtually obliterated since the CORONA surveys by a new wave of irrigation farming. Such archaeological evaluation of a landscape has grave implications for the heritage of grassland nomads and the appreciation of their impact on history.