For some time now, there has been an increasing tendency amongst archaeologists to think of pottery vessels, not so much as the products of a human mind, which may reflect the many, varied factors which influenced their style of manufacture, but as impersonal objects which serve little more useful purpose than to fill out a complex typological classification. In our preoccupation with compiling these sequences to establish nothing more than the relative and absolute chronologies (vital though they are) of countries where literary records of an historical nature are lacking, we have begun to lose sight of the human element, which is, after all, a more basic constituent of pottery than clay or temper. I little expected, when I embarked on a study of the Cypriote Bronze Age pots found in Egypt, that they would lend themselves so readily to a revelation of the very human reasons which inspired their shapes, created a demand for their contents, and so brought about their exportation to Egypt. It is really to Mr H. W. M. Hodges, to whom I took my technical problems, that I owe the disclosure contained in this paper. Even more it was he who re-orientated my approach to the subject along far more personal lines, which has made the task of assembling and interpreting the data a most rewarding excursion into Levantine life during the Bronze Age.

One of the most interesting facts to emerge from even a cursory study of the Cypriote Base-ring I ware, which occurs in Egypt during the first half of the XVIIIth Dynasty, is the limited number of shapes involved.

Scholarly interest has been growing in an episode of Old World globalisation of food resources significantly predating the ‘Silk Road’. This process was characteristic of crosscontinental translocations of starch-based crops mostly during the third and second millennia BC but which might have been initiated in an earlier period (Jones et al. 2011). Among these translocations we can include a range of crops originally from Southwest Asia, notably bread wheat and barley, and others originally from northern China, such as broomcorn and foxtail millet (Hunt et al. 2008; Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute et al. 2013). Parallel patterns of crop movement between North Africa and South Asia have been observed and discussed in some depth (Boivin & Fuller 2009; Fuller et al. 2011; Boivin et al. 2013). The impetus behind this growth of interest has been the expansion of archaeobotanical research in South and East Asia over the past decade (Fuller 2002; Crawford 2006; Lee et al. 2007; Liu et al. 2008; Zhao 2010). This paper considers the agents responsible for the food globalisation process during the third and second millennia BC. A key aspect of trans-Eurasian starch-crop movement was that it constituted an addition to agricultural systems, rather than movement to regions devoid of existing starch-based agriculture. Other economic plants, such as grapes, dates and peas, also moved considerable distances in the archaeological record, often to areas previously devoid of those plants. However, the novel starchy crops held a particular significance. In both cases, Southwest Asian wheat and barley and East Asian millets went on to become important staple foods in many of their new destinations.

Sexual roles in deep prehistory are among the most intriguing puzzles still to solve. Here the author shows how men and women can be distinguished by scientific measurement in the prints and stencils of the human hand that occur widely in Upper Palaeolithic art. Six hand stencils from four French caves are attributed to four adult females, an adult male, and a sub-adult male. Here we take a step closer to showing that both sexes are engaged in cave art and whatever dreams and rituals it implies.

Why did Palaeolithic people wear shells, and why was the practice so widespread in the world? The authors' own researches in Western Australia show that specific marine shells were targeted, subject to special processes of manufacture into beads and that some had travelled hundreds of kilometres from their source. Whether they were brought in land by the manufacturers, or by specially ornamented people, these beads provided a symbolic language that somehow kept the early peoples of Australia in touch with the sea.

For the most part the Pleistocene, and even the earliest post-glacial, is a blank when it comes to evidence of humans eating plants. No wonder the old men's stories, of chaps who hunt great mammals and eat their meat, still dominate our unthinking visions of hunter-gathering in that period. Some real evidence, slight though it is, from a classic European Upper Palaeolithic site provides a more balanced view.

Archaeological evidence from the Chang Tang Reserve suggests that humans may have first colonized the Tibetan Plateau during the late Pleistocene. Blade, bladelet and microblade technologies are found as surface assemblages in a variety of contexts above 4500 m elevation. The lack of modern analogues for foraging populations in high-elevation environments brings about a reconsideration of the diversity and organization of Pleistocene hunter-gatherer adaptations.

A site dated well back into the Pleistocene in Western Australia yields modified shells, seen as a further evidence of the attributes of modern humans from an early Australian context.

Fine painted pottery is the archaeological trade-mark of the Greek presence overseas. Since other materials of exchange in the Classical world — soft things like grain, oil and slaves — are less archaeologically visible, a fresh look at issues in the archaic Greek economy revolves once more around patterns in the ceramics.

Excavations at the Shang capital of Anyang have uncovered a massive bone-working industry. The animal bones, mainly those of cattle, pig and deer were provided as a spin-off from regular large-scale sacrifice, and made mainly into pins, awls and arrowheads. Although some of the pins were destined for the tombs of prominent women, a penetrating analysis shows that production greatly overran local consumption and the authors are able to raise the likelihood of a wide market for traded objects in addition to the more expected control of production by the elite.

The rise of cemeteries, extreme biological diversification, size decrease, increased violence, disappearance of megafauna, exploitation of different resources, evolution of rivers to an expanded system of microenvironments, changes in occupation. How are these features of Australian Aboriginal societies in the great river-systems of the southeast related? From evidence of geomorphology, skeletal biology and other aspects of the archaeological record, a sharp disjunction between two different and relatively stable states is seen: a transforming transition rather than a gradual change.

An Aboriginal man done to death on the dunes 4000 years ago was recently discovered during excavations beneath a bus shelter in Narrabeen on Sydney's northern beaches. The presence of backed microliths and the evidence for trauma in the bones showed that he had been killed with stone-tipped spears. Now we know how these backed points were used. A punishment ritual is implied by analogies with contact-period observations made in the eighteenth century AD.

The site of Çatalhöyük occupies a key position within the development of larger settlements in south-west Asia, but the apparent absence of outdoor activity areas has challenged conceptions of social interaction within the site. Where did the inhabitants of this substantial settlement meet together if there were no public spaces? The identification of outdoor activity areas is difficult in such a densely patterned settlement, but micromorphology and phytolith analysis, when used together, can provide secure interpretations. The present study applies these methods to a stratigraphic sequence of deposits in the South Area, where a succession of open areas was located adjacent to a series of buildings. The analysis reveals that these open areas were gradually transformed from a place for the dumping or accumulation of midden material in the early phases, to an informal and then a formally laid surface in the later stages. This suggests that although streets or courtyards may have been rare or absent in the early centuries at Çatalhöyük, they were present in the later phases of the occupation.

The site of Sungir (alternatively Sounghir) lies east of the town of Vladimir, about 200 km northeast of Moscow. It is a large mid Upper Palaeolithic ('Eastern Gravettian' sensu lato) cultural accumulation on the left bank of the Kliazma river, of which some 1500 sq. m was excavated in several seasons between 1957 and 1964 (Bader 1965; 1967; 1978; 1998).The single burial (Grave 1/Sungir 1) was excavated in 1964. It is that ofan adult male in extended, supine position, with his head oriented to the northeast and hands placed over his pubis (Figure 1). The second grave was discovered in 1969 and contained two adolescents — one male (Sungir 2) and one (probably) female (Sungir 3) — both extended, supine and lying head to head (Figure 2). All three burials were covered in red ochre and Sungir 1 was possibly associated with fires in a manner intriguingly similar to the DVXVI male burialat Dolní Větonice, Moravia (Svoboda et al. 1996).

Clearly the pattern of space in buildings can be expected to relate to the way that buildings are used to structure and reproduce social relations. As an archaeologist, wishing to infer social structure by its reflection in the building pattern, one may hope the relation may be reasonably direct. Here the formal geometrical method of access analysis is used to elucidate the pattern in a distinctive kind of prehistoric settlement form, and thence to elucidate the social structure which both produced it and was structured by it.