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.

To what extent was gender an important factor in plant domestication? How much of the domestication process can be considered as cultural rather than biological? Christine Hastorf considers these and many associated questions in this topical essay about plants and people.

Ground radar investigates shallow archaeological features in burial mounds of the Kofun Period (300-700 AD) in Japan. A variety of analytical methods – time slices, synthetic radargrams simulated from model structures, and 3-D depth constructions – are used to interpret the profiles, to reveal the location, depth and shapes of buried features.

Excavation of a cropmark in northeast Scotland revealed a substantial timber hall of the general form one expects from the early medieval period. Yet it turned out to be Neolithic in date! The structure produced copious quantities of charred cereal grains from contexts intimately associated with its destruction. Accelerator dates confirm the integrity of selected species with the period of use of the building. Hexaploid wheat and cultivated flax were both identified.

Intensified dryland agriculture was a component of the late prehistoric Hawaiian subsistence base. Which environmental factors permitted, encouraged, restricted, blocked the spreading of intensive agriculture into new areas of fields? A GIS study of the great field system at Kohala on the leeward side of Hawai'i Island explores the controlling variables.

In this important new review the author shows that neither trade nor migration can account for the distribution of Bell Beakers and the associated artefacts and burial practices in Europe. The materials were generally local and rooted in local know-how. However recent stable isotope results show small-scale population changes associated with the arrival of Beaker practice. The distribution of Bell Beakers could thus reflect the movement of marriage partners.

One of the larger — and more expensive — present programmes of study in archaeological science explores the provenance of prehistoric bronzes from the Mediterranean. What are the bases of research? What will the findings tell us about the real place of metal as it moved in the ancient world?

Even after decades of spearthrower studies, researchers have relatively little reliable data on spearthrower performance, and yet prehistoric lifeways are often reconstructed through consideration of the capabilities of such weapon systems. Experimental study and considered dependence on ethnographic knowledge clarify the realities of the spearthrower in use.

Indian Ocean maritime networks have become a special focus of research in recent years, with emphasis not only on the economics of trade but also the movement of domesticated plants and animals (see Fuller et al. in Antiquity 2011: 544–58). But did such contacts inevitably lead to radical social change? Excavations at Tumbe reveal a settlement of the late first millennium AD that was heavily engaged in the traffic in exotic materials and may have been producing shell beads for export. This activity seems to have flourished within a domestic context in a village setting, however, and does not seem to have stimulated pronounced social stratification nor to have led inexorably towards urbanisation. These results demonstrate that some communities were able to establish a stable balance between the demands of the domestic economy and long-distance trade that could persist for several centuries. Activities at Tumbe should hence be viewed in their own right, not as precursors to the formation of the Swahili trading towns of the later medieval period.

New field evidence challenges an old-established fundamental of the Lower Palaeolithic sequence in Britain.

The Holocene mud-flats of Formby Point, at the mouth of the Mersey estuary in northwest England, have long provided information about their palaeoenvironment. Now they yield a more direct evidence — in the form of preserved footprints — of the people and animals that frequented the foreshore.

The excavation of 81 skeletons at Cerro Cerrillos provided the occasion for a rigorously scientific deconstruction of human sacrifice, its changing methods and its social meaning among the Muchik peoples of ancient Peru. This paper shows how bioarchaeology and field investigation together can rediscover the root and purpose of this disturbingly prevalent prehistoric practice. Be warned: the authors' clinical and unexpurgated accounts of Andean responses to the spirit world are not for the fainthearted.

Less than ten years have passed since the first discovery in Saudi Arabia of prehistoric pottery superficially identical with that known from the earliest farming settlements in Sumer 6-700 km to the north. Some 40 sites have now been identified in the Eastern Province. More recently comparable pottery has been found at sites in nearby Qatar and Bahrain. These discoveries have provoked much speculation about the nature of the contact between Sumer and Arabia at this early period (on calibrated radiocarbon determinations by the late sixth millennium BC), and indeed on the origins of the people who created the important and distinctive prehistoric culture characterized by this pottery and known to archaeologists as ‘Ubaid.

Dendrochronology now provides a date, exact nearly to the year, for three Viking Age burial mounds of special importance for chronology in Scandinavia and across early medieval northern Europe. Their dating used to depend on the style of the carved wooden artefacts in the grave goods; now the grave-goods are exactly and independently dated by the tree-rings, those same links will provide dating bridges across the Viking world.

Renewed in-depth multi-disciplinary investigation of a large coastal mound settlement in Peru has extended the occupation back more than 7000 years to a first human exploitation ~13720 BP. Research by the authors has chronicled the prehistoric sequence from the activities of the first maritime foragers to the construction of the black mound and the introduction of horticulture and monumentality. The community of Huaca Prieta emerges as innovative, complex and ritualised, as yet with no antecedents.

Among the most complex and specialized hunter-gatherer-fisher societies in the New World, the peoples of the Santa Barbara Channel region of California were considered exceptional by early explorers because of their intense interest in valuables, beads and trade. During the last several centuries before European contact, sedentary populations on the offshore islands and mainland coast participated in an intensive regional exchange network that emerged from important earlier developments in transportation, craft specialization and labour organization. Especially significant in the sociopolitical evolution of this region were changes in the manipulation of domestic labour by a rising elite, expressed through increasing control over the production and distribution of status-rich valuables and critical resources. At historic contact, the Chumash who occupied the mainland coast and the northern Channel Islands (FIGURE 1) were probably organized into several interlinked small chiefdoms.