Trustworthy dates on charcoal from the classic European painted caves have given a sharper view of images and their making in the later Palaeolithic. The new Grotte Chauvet has its own original themes, revealing a striking and an unexpected Aurignacian art with — again — dates from charcoal in which one can have confidence.

The authors consider the impact that trees would have had on the visibility of the landscape from and around Neolithic monuments. It is suggested that woodland may have been an integral part of the way monuments were experienced.

Understanding how differential wealth develops between households in villages is one key to understanding how socioeconomic inequalities develop; a key theoretical issue for archaeologists. An ethnoarchaeological perspective in Southeast Asia gains major insights into how socioeconomic inequalities emerged and were maintained, with numerous implications for other cereal and stock based prehistoric cultures, such as those of Neolithic Europe.

Does climate affect behaviour and social process? In this case study, powerful scientific, anthropological and archaeological arguments are deployed to show that it can. The capricious climate of the latest centuries of the Marquesas Islands was instrumental in transforming a chieftain society into less hereditary and more flexible polities by the time of European contact.

There is no expansion of human settlement to match the colonization of the Pacific islands, from Island Southeast Asia right across to Hawaii, Easter Island and down to New Zealand. The expansion is given an extra interest by the new finding that it began as early as the Pleistocene. The settlement of the remote Pacific began after 3500 BP and computer modelling and analysis of inter-island transits explains not just how settlement was possible-but how it must have followed from the controlled navigation of directed voyages and strategies for survival.

An articulated hen's skeleton, set under the doorway of a building at the celebrated desiccated site of Qasr Ibrim in Egyptian Nubia, is cause to look again at the flight of chickens into Africa.

Archaeologists are increasingly publishing articles proclaiming the relevance of our field for contemporary global challenges, yet our research has little impact on other disciplines or on policy-making. Here, the author discusses three reasons for this impasse in relevance: archaeologists do not understand how relevance is constructed between fields; too little of our work follows a rigorous scientific epistemology; and we are confused about the target audiences for our messages concerning our discipline's relevance. The author suggests two strategies for moving forward: transdisciplinary collaborative research and the production of quantitative scientific results that will be useful to scientists in disciplines more closely involved in today's global challenges.

Methods for mapping and determining the condition of archaeological resources while they are still underground have been in development for nearly half a century. The authors here offer an example from the frontiers of the art: the application of a package of remote sensing procedures not only designed to locate sites but to model the valley deposits which contain and cover them. The variation in success of different methods in different deposits offers a guide to the design of evaluation projects on sand and gravel terrain everywhere.

The present study examines the stone weapons available in Late Palaeolithic Korea, showing how the change in lithics signals a change in hunting strategy. In advance of the Late Glacial Maximum, a tanged spear tip flourished, reflecting the hunting of large mammals associated with the colder climate. In the more variable climate that followed, the prevalence of microliths suggests lightweight composite hunting weapons mostly used in pursuit of small game and diverse food resources. These weapons eventually included bow and arrows in the final Pleistocene.

The cremation urn is a tiny archaeological site of its own, with finds, features, stratification and structure. The old prescription was to take the pot apart, or slice it, and micro-excavate with inevitable damage and loss. Here is a new methodology – the application of a CT scan as used in medicine. The authors evaluate the results on 35 Etruscan cremations, finding that CT not only provides an excellent guide for micro-excavation, but allows the degree of fragmentation to be appreciated inside the pot and maps those metal objects that have corroded to a crust and do not survive excavation. They emphasise the value of the method in making a ‘first resort’ primary record especially in commercial archaeology.

Introduction

The black spacer plate necklaces and bracelets of the Early Bronze Age (Figure 1) are among the most technically accomplished prestige items of this period in Britain and Ireland. There has been much debate over the years as to whether these artefacts and other prehistoric black jewellery and dress accessories are the product of specialist jetworkers based around Whitby in North Yorkshire — Britain’s only significant source of jet. As early as 1916, for example, Callander was arguing that the Scottish finds had been made using locally available materials — cannel coal, shale and lignite — rather than Whitby jet. There has also been much confusion over the identification of these various materials. Flirthermore, the conservation of newly discovered jet and jet-like artefacts can be problematical, and the correct identification of raw material is important in determining the best method of treatment.

Mortimer Wheeler famously tied together the worlds of ancient Rome and ancient India by finding Roman ceramics stratified into levels at Arikamedu, in south India. Late Roman pottery from far down the East African coast now permits the same kind of matching link from the Mediterranean to a distant shore, this one in the Swahili world.

Intensive research on China's Western Loess Plateau has located 63 Palaeolithic deposits, which together allow the authors to present a general model of hominin occupation from 80 000 to 18 000 years ago. Tools, subsistence and settlement correlate nicely with the climate: the warm wet MIS3 seeing expansion and more organised acquisition of quartz, and the Late Glacial Maximum that followed, a reduction in human presence but possibly an increase in ingenuity.

The authors use metrical, demographic and body part analyses of animal bone assemblages in Anatolia to demonstrate how cattle were incorporated into early Neolithic subsistence economies. Sheep and goats were domesticated in the eighth millennium BC, while aurochs, wild cattle, were long hunted. The earliest domesticated cattle are not noted until the mid-seventh millennium BC, and derive from imported stock domesticated elsewhere. In Anatolia, meanwhile, the aurochs remains large and wild and retains its charisma as a hunted quarry and a stud animal.

The author explores responses to political violence through the materiality of three aspects of the Civil War in Spain: military lines in the battle for Madrid, a concentration camp in Extremadura and a remote settlement of forced labourers and their families. He shows how archaeology's revelations reflect, qualify and enrich the story of human survival under the pall cast by a dictatorship. Sharing the inquiry with the public of today also revealed some of the disquieting mechanisms by which history is composed and how archaeology can be used to deconstruct it.

Caves and rockshelters are a key component of the archaeological record but are often regarded as natural places conveniently exploited by human communities. Archaeomorphological study shows however that they are not inert spaces but have frequently been modified by human action, sometimes in ways that imply a strong symbolic significance. In this paper the concept of ‘aménagement’, the re-shaping of a material space or of elements within it, is applied to Chauvet Cave in France and Nawarla Gabarnmang rockshelter in Australia. Deep within Chauvet Cave, fallen blocks were moved into position to augment the natural structure known as The Cactus, while at Nawarla Gabarnmang, blocks were removed from the ceiling and supporting pillars removed and discarded down the talus slope. These are hence not ‘natural’ places, but modified and socially constructed.