A few years ago Professor Ole Klindt-Jensen, in publishing the results of his excavations of Migration Period sites on the island of Bornholm, described a remarkable find from the Sorte Muld settlement. Here, just outside the entrance to Building II, was a small pit containing the skull of a horse, its severed fore-legs, and a pelvic bone, accompanied by a few bones of sheep, pig and dog, and sherds which dated the pit to the main occupation phase of the site, in the 5th century A.D.(FIG. 2, 1).

Late and Epi-Palaeolithic sequences are well known from field work and publications in southeast Europe and the Levant. Current research in Anatolia promises to shed new light on the vast region that connects these two areas. At Öküzini cave a detailed sequence of Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene assemblages contributes greatly to our understanding.

Even if the foundation, rise and eventual demise of Carthage and its overseas territories in the West Mediterranean occurred in much the same space and time as the glory days of Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greece and Rome, there is no doubt that the Phoenicians and their Punic successors (to use the conventional terms) have rarely been regarded as fully signed-up members of the ancient world. Reduced to walk-on cameos as skilled silversmiths, agricultural experts, shrewd traders or military strategists, Phoenician and Punic representations tend to be rather stereotypical (Prag 2010, with earlier bibliography), which perhaps should not come as a surprise, as nearly all these portraits have been sketched by outsiders; they certainly do not add up to a coherent ethnographic or political description.

The catastrophic 1855 AD Wellington earthquake is used to predict likely environmental impacts of earlier seismic events (earthquake and tsunami) that have been reported for the Cook Strait region in the period following first human settlement 700 years ago. Environmental changes around Palliser Bay in prehistoric Maori times, inferred from archaeological research, parallel those that occurred in 1855 AD. We consider that devastation caused by earthquake activity and subsequent tsunami, rather than climatic deterioration invoked previously, precipitated the rapid abandonment of the Palliser Bay coast by human communities in the 15th century AD.

Minute biological traces, with their prospect of recovering even ancient DNA, are the most attractive of archaeological materials to work with. This supplementary report on field studies of rock-art first published in ANTIQUITY further explores how these studies may in truth be carried out.

The author argues for a significant social and cognitive transition between the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic in Europe. Between about 300 000 and 200 000 years ago, early Neanderthals developed stone working techniques which combined methods that were previously discrete, began to occupy high-relief terrain and to settle systematically the highly seasonal environments of central and eastern Europe – skill-sets here termed the ‘incorporation of difference’. These findings make us rethink the competence of pre-modern hominins and to review, in the author's words, ‘the boundaries we erect to police the uniqueness of humanity’.

What better way to understand how to make a handaxe or cleaver than getting into an Acheulean quarry and doing it yourself. The authors experimented at Isampur Quarry in India, finding that handaxes were best produced by reducing a slab to shape, while cleavers were best made by striking large flakes. There was a good correspondence with the ancient implements, and the authors deduced that Acheulean hominins were learning and transmitting standardised manufacturing methods to each other.

The rock art of Kupgal, south India, represents an archive of images amassed over five millennia. The author works out a first sequence and shows how the Neolithic petroglyph site may have functioned in its landscape – as a ritual locality at which not only images but sound, performance and social relationships were all prominent.

Detailed analysis of the anatomy and taphonomic process of a burial in Jordan shows that the body was originally bound in a sitting position and placed in marshland, where it collapsed into the splayed tableau eventually recovered by excavation. The authors succeed in reconstructing a burial rite from one of the most elusive of mortuary phases: the Early Epipalaeolithic in south-west Asia.

The ancient Sri Lankan city of Anuradhapura is currently the subject of one of the world's largest and most intensive archaeological research projects. Having traced its growth from an Iron Age village to a medieval city, the research team now moves to the task of modelling the surrounding landscape. Three seasons of fieldwork have located numerous sites of which the most prominent in the urban period are monasteries. Here is a clue about how the early urban hinterland was managed which has implications well beyond Sri Lanka.

The temptation to equate environmental change with archaeologically observed events is always with us, and matching a climatic downturn with civilisation collapse is perhaps more attractive then ever. The archaeologically observed collapse of the Tiwanaku civilisation in the twelfth century AD has been specifically related to a prolonged drought which would have affected the people’s ability to produce food. However, a careful scrutiny of the data from ice cores and lake sediments persuades the author that no such drought can be inferred: the evidence for climatic change is of quite a different scale and order to the archaeological changes and cannot be used as an explanation of social events.

Excavations at three open-air sites in the Karama valley of West Sulawesi have revealed similar suites of ceramics and overlapping chronologies. The pottery from the basal layers at Minanga Sipakko and Kamassi resembles that of the Philippines and Taiwan, and suggests the settlement of migrants from those areas, consistent with the theory of Austronesian expansion. The absence of the flaked lithic technology typical of earlier Sulawesi populations indicates that these two sites do not represent the indigenous adoption of Neolithic features. The Karama valley evidence underlines the importance, in the quest for the earliest farmers, of research at open-air sites close to agriculturally suitable land, while indigenous populations may have continued for some time to occupy remote caves and rockshelters.

Hawaiian temple sites of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries have diverse orientations previously thought to be random. Using precise measurements and nineteenth-century native Hawaiian sources, the author shows that the temples cluster into groups whose orientation was deliberate and likely to relate to a particular god.

We are privileged to publish this interim report on the discovery of open settlement sites of the early Palaeolithic in the Paris basin. The early occupation areas were defined beside the river Yonne at Soucy during gravel-quarrying, which were to produce flint bifaces and débitage and the bones of elephant, rhinoceros, horse and a wealth of other mammals. The sites differed from each other, both in their assemblages and in their location with respect to the old river channels. In the author's analysis this demonstrates signs of subsistence strategy and spatial organisation in the buried valley between 365 and 345 000 years ago.

Radiocarbon dating of 32 stratigraphic samples aided by Bayesian analysis has allowed the author to produce a high precision chronology for the construction and development of a continental Neolithic long barrow for the first time. She shows when and how quickly people living on the shore of the Baltic adopted pit graves, megalithic chambers and long barrows. Better than that, she provides a date for the famous cart tracks beneath the final barrow to 3420–3385 cal BC. Although other parts of the package — ploughing and pottery — are late arrivals, her analysis of the global evidence shows that Flintbek remains among the earliest sightings of the wheel in northern Europe.

It is more than forty years now since the first radiocarbon dates began the reconciliation of conventional and absolute chronologies for later prehistory. This pioneering radiocarbon chronology for the Bronze Age sequence in Central Europe brings that process nearer to a close, by filling the last major gap in the radiocarcbon chronology of the European continent.

Comparing the records of fishing communities made in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries to the archaeological evidence of the sixth millennium BP, the authors propose a sophisticated prehistoric network for the coastal people of northern Chile. Residential seashore settlements link both along the coast to temporary production sites for fish, and inland to oasis-based providers of products from the uplands and salt flats. Sharing values and kinsfolk, the coastal communities must have travelled extensively in boats which, like their modern counterparts, made use of floats of inflated sealskin.

A sickle, 21 flint lunates for tipping spears and evidence of the hunted quarry – gazelle bones – lay together by the wall of a Natufian building. The author deduces that these objects were contained in a bag and constituted the versatile working equipment of a hunter-gatherer.