The development of small-scale kingdoms in the post-Roman world of northwestern Europe is a key stage in the subsequent emergence of medieval states. Recent excavations at Rhynie in north-eastern Scotland have thrown important light on the emergence of one such kingdom, that of the Picts. Enclosures, sculptured ‘symbol stones’ and long-distance luxury imports identify Rhynie as a place of growing importance during the fifth to sixth centuries AD. Parallels can be drawn with similar processes in southern Scandinavia, where leadership combined roles of ritual and political authority. The excavations at Rhynie and the synthesis of dated Pictish enclosures illustrate the contribution that archaeology can make to the understanding of state formation processes in early medieval Europe.

Different models of stone-working technology in the Upper Palaeolithic are tested by examining an assemblage from Haua Fteah, on the Libyan coast of north Africa. Evidence that some scrapers have been reworked into burins, while some burins were modified to form scrapers, show how this typically Upper Palaeolithic industry contains morphological transformations between types. This evidence is consistent with a technological continuity from the Middle Palaeolithic.

D.E. Nelson, radiocarbon scientist in the group which reported early dates for rock-art at two Australian sites in ANTIQUITY 64 (1990), reports a further study which leads him to withdraw the published date for one, at Laurie Creek (Northern Territory). As he notes, is co-authors in the 1990 paper are not all in agreement with his present view. The other site dated in 1990, Judds Cavern (Tasmania), is not addressed in this further report.

Past research in the Acacus mountains has been mostly concerned with studies of rock art (Mori 1965) and site-oriented investigations, particularly rock-shelters in the central and northern Acacus (Uan Muhuggiag: Mori 1965; Barich 1987; Ti-n-Torha North: Barich 1974; 1987; Wadi Athal: Barich & Mori 1970). This important research disclosed the astonishing archaeological richness of the area. Particular emphasis was given to data suggesting the existence of early forms of pastoral economy in the region (Mori 1961; 1965; Barich 1987). This led to the hypothesis, differently and repeatedly formulated, of a Saharan focus for the emergence of food-producing activity, based on cattle herding, independent from the Nile Valley and the Near East (Mori 1961; Barich 1987). This is not the place to discuss in detail this interesting, but now largely discarded, hypothesis; what is important to underline, however, is the limited database used in its formulation. The results of only three excavations, all located in the mountain ranges, provided the basis of the evidence presented without any attempt to place these sites in a broader regional framework.

The author studies prehistoric sea travel along the coast between West Mexico and Ecuador using a computer simulation incorporating the performance characteristics of sailing rafts. The model predicts that while northward voyages may have taken as little as two months, southward voyages would have entailed at least five months and may have required a strategy that took the rafts offshore for as long as a month.

Several recent articles in Antiqui (Barker et al. 201 la; Hung et al. 2011; Spriggs 2011), discuss the validity of, and revise, portrayals of an Austronesian farming-language dispersal across Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) during the mid-Holocene (approximately 4000-3000 years ago) . In conventional portrayals of the Austronesian dispersal hypothesis (e.g. Bellwood 1984/85, 1997, 2002, 2005; Diamond 2001; Diamond & Bellwood 2003) , and its Neolithic variant (e.g. Spriggs 2003, 2007), farmer-voyagers migrated out of Taiwan approximately 4500-4000 cal BP to colonise ISEA from 4000 cal BP (Bellwood 2002) and the Mariana Islands and Palau by c. 3500-3400 cal BP (Hung et al. 201 1). The descendants of these voyagers subsequently established the Lapita Cultural Complex in the Bismarck Archipelago by c. 3470-3250 cal BP (Kirch 1997; Spriggs 1997) and became the foundational cultures across most of the Pacific from c. 3250-3100 cal BP (Kirch 2000; Addison & Matisoo-Smith 2010; dates for Lapita in Denham et al. 2012). A major problem with this historical metanarrative is the absence of substantial archaeological evidence for the contemporaneous spread of farming from Taiwan (Bulbeck 2008; Donohue & Denham 2010; Denham 2011 ).

The subsistence basis for Japanese civilization has always been intensive rice cultivation. What was grown there before the introduction of paddy technology? A glimpse of the plant cultigens in the later Jomon begins to tell.

It may seem surprising that, after three-quarters of a century of excavation in Egypt, anyone should still feel it necessary to write an article claiming that ancient Egypt has, after all, left behind stratified town sites of the sort that have been the main source of work for the archaeoIogist in other countries ; and that, furthermore, the life which they represent can be rationally comprehended.

The late Mesolithic sites of Téviec and Hoëdic, located on what are now small islands off the Breton coast, provide evidence for elaborate burial practices, and may be precursors of the megalithic tradition of Brittany and western Europe in general. This paper briefly summarizes what is known of the sites and examines patterning in the distribution of grave inclusions. Differences as well as similarities between the sites are found. When examined carefully and critically, older excavation reports can yield much new information.

Through intensive archaeological investigation of temples in Hawai'i, the authors reveal a sequence of religious strategies for creating and maintaining authority that has application to prehistoric sequences everywhere. Expressed in the orientation and layout of the temples and their place in the landscape, these strategies develop in four stages over the course of a few hundred years, from the fifteenth to nineteenth century AD, from local shrines associated with agriculture to the development of a centralising priesthood serving the larger political economy.

It is over a decade since Palaeolithic parietal art was first spotted in Europe on exposed open-air surfaces—cave art without the caves. Now the major site in Portugal is threatened by the lake behind a river-dam under construction. Here is a report on what cave art outside the caves amounts to, and of the confrontations over the Côa site that were in the headlines early this year.

Is the meaning of prehistoric art beyond recovery — especially the meaning of early art in deep caves, a remote and strange location which itself suggests some out-of-the-ordinary purpose? David Lewis-Williams has been extending his explorations of meaning in later southern African rock-art to the famous enigma of the European Palaeolithic, here in the particulars of a single distinctive motif.

New research on shell middens in the Algarve region of southern Portugal shows continuity of marine exploitation from the Mesolithic into the early Neolithic periods, where the Neolithic period is defined by the appearance of pottery in c 5500BC. The authors propose that either shellfish remained important to Neolithic people in Portugal or that Mesolithic and Neolithic subsistence strategies co-existed in this area for a relatively long time.

Panel faces in teh Côa valley, Portugal, were available for engraving during the Upper Palaeolithic, according to 36Cl exposure ages of 16,000 to 136,000 years.

Comparing the source of a commodity with the social levels of the people amongst whom it is found can reveal important aspects of social structure. This case study of a Maya community, using archaeological and ethnographic data, shows that pine and pine charcoal was procured at a distance and distributed unevenly in settlements. The researchers deduce that this commodity was not freely available in the market place, but was subject to political control.

Precision radiocarbon dating continues to bring historical order into key moments of social and economic change, such as the use of metals. Here the author dates human bone in graves with metal artefacts and shows that copper, antimony and silver were being fashioned into daggers and beads in west central Italy by the early to mid fourth millennium cal BC; but the new-fangled objects had not reached contemporary cemeteries on the other side of the Apennines. We can perhaps look forward to a time when the arrival of metallurgy in Europe is neither diffusionary nor piecemeal, but the result of real historical events and social contacts, mapped for us by radiocarbon.

In the Near East, the inherent dualism of clay as both symbol and instrument was a feature of its use from the inception of farming villages to the formation of cities, and the extensive record of its ‘changing face’ allows us to trace the continuous history of development between them.

In 873 the Viking Great Army took winter quarters at the Anglo-Saxon monastery of Repton in the heart of Mercia. Excavations 1974–88 found their D-shaped earthwork on the river bank, incorporated in the stone church. Burials of Viking type were made at the east end of the church, and an existing building was cut down and converted into the chamber of a burial mound containing at least 249 individuals. Here is a first account of the evidence for the Vikings at Repton in and after the campaigning season of 873-4.