The old importance of the eastern coastal region of the Mediterranean for the later Palaeolithic has been recently reinforced by remarkably early TL dates for modern hominids there. This important series of dates for the early Upper Palaeolithic at a Lebanese site adds to the story.

Out of molecular biology – the revolution of past decades in biological science – there now begins to come molecular archaeology, the study of DNA in ancient plants, animals and people to address questions of history as well as biology. Here is set out what molecular archaeology is about, how it works and what it has begun to do.

The present system of English resource management relies on legal protected status given to a pre-designated group of monuments. When it is replaced by an adversarial debate between social values, hosted by the planning system, archaeology will need to arm itself with a definition of ‘archaeological value’. The new management system would favour research rather than monumentality as the principal asset of the heritage.

A long section adjacent to a former obsidian quarry on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) reveals a sequence of agricultural strategies, beginning with the clearing of palm trees in the twelfth century AD, and the making of an open garden growing yams and taro, that continued through the fifteenth century. The later phases between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries include veneer and boulder gardens that reflect the broader strategy employed by the islanders to fight the increasingly arid soil.

Results of recent excavations and radiocarbon dating show that several places in Siberia and the Russian Far East, such as the Lower Amur River basin and the Transbaikal, represent independent centres of pottery invention, and all pre-date 10,000 BP. These two areas should be considered among the earliest centres of pottery origins in East Asia and the Old World. The rest of Siberia is characterized by significantly later appearance of Neolithic cultures, between c. 8000 BP and c. 4600–2600 BP.

Armed with a number of powerful arguments, the authors invite us to face up to the evidence for violence in early Neolithic Europe. Linearbandkeramik (LBK) people first attacked the hunter-gatherers they encountered and then entered a period of increasingly violent warfare against each other, culminating in an intense struggle in the area of central and western Germany. The building of fortifications, physical mutilation and cannibalism, while no doubt enacted with ritual airs, nevertheless had their context and purpose in the slaughter of enemies.

New work from the Caucasus is revolutionising the timing and character of the shift from Neanderthals to early Modern humans in Eurasia. Here the authors reveal a powerful signal of that change from excavations at Mezmaiskaya: the abrupt appearance of a well-formed bone industry and ornaments.

The authors deliver a decisive blow to the idea of unidirectional behavioural and cognitive evolution in this tightly argued account of why the bow and arrow was invented and then possibly laid aside by Middle Stone Age communities in southern Africa. Finding that all are modern humans (Homo sapiens), they paint a picture of diverse strategies for survival and development from 75 000 years ago onwards. It is one in which material inventions can come and go, human societies negotiating their own paths through a rugged mental landscape of opportunity.

Archaeologists today do not as a rule seek to excavate the remains of famous people and historical events, but the results of the project reported in this article provide an important exception. Excavations on the site of the Grey Friars friary in Leicester, demolished at the Reformation and subsequently built over, revealed the remains of the friary church with a grave in a high status position beneath the choir. The authors set out the argument that this grave can be associated with historical records indicating that Richard III was buried in this friary after his death at the Battle of Bosworth. Details of the treatment of the corpse and the injuries that it had sustained support their case that this should be identified as the burial of the last Plantagenet king. This paper presents the archaeological and the basic skeletal evidence: the results of the genetic analysis and full osteoarchaeological analysis will be published elsewhere.

Experimental study with replica bows and projectiles of a variety of types indicates the superiority of archery over the throwing of spears, and makes it possible to indicate a hierarchy of increasing efficiency in the main classes of bows.

The author reviews the role of string in early human communities, using prehistoric and ethnographic evidence. Fibres, rolled into string, offer a technical means of holding things together; but the process of manufacturing string itself inspired special roles and structures - which in turn held together the members of communities.

In this article, the authors reveal the symbolic role of cranes at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Worked bones of the Common Crane (Grus grus) are interpreted as coming from a spread wing used in dances, a ritual practice perhaps connected with the celebration of marriage.

The Kow Swamp collection of Pleistocene human remains from southeast Australia is perhaps the largest skeletal collection ever recovered from a single Pleistocene context. It was ‘returned’ for re-burial last year. John Mulvaney, a senior Australian prehistorian, reports on a situation in which the issues concerning the bones of ancient people are at their most acute.

The dating studies of the ‘modern rock-art scientists’, when critically examined, are found not to show that the Côa valley petroglyphs are of recent age. Their Upper Palaeolithic characteristics, and therefore their likely late Pleistocene age, are consistent with their archaeological context.

The earliest evidence of wheeled vehicles dates to the Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture in Europe and the Late Uruk period in the Near East. Results of excavations and 14C determinations from Poland, Germany, Iraq, Syria and Turkey suggest that the appearance of wheeled vehicles was contemporary in Europe and the Near East.

An analysis of the exchange of lithics in settlement period New Zealand (fourteenth century AD) is used to throw light on the mechanisms of colonisation more generally. The early distribution of New Zealand's Mayor Island obsidian demonstrates efficient exploration and dispersal, and the rapid establishment of long-distance exchange networks similar to that seen in early Melanesian obsidian movements. But in New Zealand the motivation is the cementing of social networks, rather than maintaining connections back to a homeland. In the sixteenth century, the distribution of a new high status material, nephrite, shows a different supply system – suggesting trade.

The archaeological definition of a plague should be possible from skeletal populations, because the age profile of a population afflicted by a catastrophe will be different to that of a community exposed to a more normal mortality. The authors show how this can be done using a Bayesian statistical analysis.