Shell rings are circular and semi-circular deposits of shell (mostly oyster, Crassostrea virginica), faunal bone, artefacts and soil constructed along the Florida, Georgia and South Carolina coasts of the southeastern United States.

Rings in Georgia and South Carolina date to c. 4200–3200 BP and range in size from 1 to 3 m tall and 22 to 83 m across. These little-studied sites have been suggested to be the remains of gaming arenas, astronomical observatories, torture chambers, houses of state, and fish traps. Most archaeologists view the sites as the subsistence remains of egalitarian hunter/fisher encampments. The rings’ generally symmetrical, circular shapes are seen as reflective of the equal status among their societal members wherein no individual or family held a unique or favoured position over another. The general absence of exotic or prestige artefacts, elaborate burials and ceremonial mounds has reinforced the concept that these Late Archaic shell rings reflect rudimentary hunter/fisher cultures. Ironically, shell rings have also been cited as the earliest evidence for the rise of hierarchical social development in North America (Russo 1991; Russo & Saunders 1999). Shell rings have yielded evidence of the earliest permanent year-round occupations, the earliest development of pottery and the earliest examples of large-scale monumental architecture. Consequentially the function of shell rings remains an open question.

The well-known Mesolithic cemeteries of Northern Europe have long been viewed as evidence of developing social complexity in those regions in the centuries immediately before the Neolithic transition. These sites also had important symbolic connotations. This study uses new and more detailed analysis of the burial practices in one of these cemeteries to argue that much more is involved than social differentiation. Repeated burial in the densely packed site of Zvejnieki entailed large-scale disturbance of earlier graves, and would have involved recurrent encounters with the remains of the ancestral dead. The intentional use of older settlement material in the grave fills may also have signified a symbolic link with the past. The specific identity of the dead is highlighted by the evidence for clay face masks and tight body wrappings in some cases.

Neolithic northern Greece has both tell sites and extended ‘flat’ sites, with an implication that people lived differently and may have managed their animals differently on each type of site. The author investigates these differences using characteristic plant assemblages deriving from animal dung. She finds that samples from tells are rich in processed crops and wild seeds, indicating grazing on and off the fields near home. But those from the flat sites were rich in chaff and contain no wild seeds, indicating the absence of animals out grazing on the hills when the wild plants are in seed. These were seemingly two alternative categories of Neolithic farmer, the one organising grazing differently from the other.

The authors' research project in the Pyrenees mountains has located and excavated Roman kilns for producing pitch from pine resin. Their investigations reveal a whole sustainable industry, integrated into the local environmental cycle, supplying pitch to the Roman network and charcoal as a spin-off to the local iron extractors. The paper makes a strong case for applying combined archaeological and palaeoenvironmental investigations in upland areas, showing mountain industries to have been not so much marginal and pastoral as key players in the economy of the Roman period and beyond it into the seventh century AD.

A first notice of the mushy element in the subsistence base of the Maya realms.

Are the imposing, decorated copper-alloy shields of Bronze Age Europe symbolic objects or functioning weapons? The author undertakes new analysis and experiments to conclude that whether bronze, leather or wood, all shields had a range of purpose in which the ceremonial and homicidal could rarely be completely isolated.

Pottery was found in situ in the Mesolithic layers of the site Lepenski Vir in the Iron Gates gorges of the Danube. This discovery raises issues about Meso-Neolithic contact in the second half of the 7th millennium cal BC. Here discussion of the evidence from Lepenski Vir and Padina explores the Neolithic groups which made contact, opening the debate on the process of neolithization in the Balkans and southeast Europe in general.

The Niah Caves in Sarawak, Borneo, have captured evidence for people and economies of 8000 and 4000 years ago. Although not continuous on this site, these open two windows on to life at the cultural turning point, broadly equivalent to the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic. They have much in common, inferring that the occupants, perhaps belonging to an older maritime dispersal, had a choosy appetite for the Neolithic package.

Archaeological evidence and historic records are often at variance on the subject of animal husbandry. This paper discusses the problems of integrating the evidence for medieval and later Britain, and offers new discussion on the interpretation of the zooarchaeological data.

Archaeology is notoriously vulnerable to the ideological pressures of authoritarian regimes. This paper charts the political influences that shaped archaeology in Spain for some 40 years. Following the Civil War Spanish archaeologists were isolated from mainstream theoretical evolution, a situation that was exacerbated by the exile of some leading figures. The centralizing authoritarianism of the Franco régime stifled regional autonomy in administration and research, and key archaeological appointments went to committed supporters of the régime.

The first (1949) season of archaeological reconnaissance on the Foggia Plain in South Italy has confirmed, in the most striking manner, the existence of one of the densest concentrations of ancient sites to be identified in Europe in an area of comparable size. For readers of ANTIQUITY, their nature had already been foreshadowed in these pages.

These discoveries were first made from British air photographs taken in June 1945, which revealed the plans of settlements, farms, roads and field-systems existing below the surface of the ground or clearly visible to the air camera. They were distributed across 3000 years of Italian history, from the Neolithic to the Middle Ages, and illustrate from the archaeological record three principal stages in the rise of a European peasantry. This is a theme that affords ideal ground for the conjunction of Archaeology and Ethnology ; and it is appropriate that the Expedition should be based on the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford, which was founded on this very principle.

Now, thanks to the Apulia Committee, set up under the auspices of the Society of Antiquaries and representing the University of Oxford and learned societies, it has been possible to proceed to the second and fundamental stage:—namely, to carry out the first systematic programme of archaeological investigation based on air photographic data ever conducted in Italy. This also included the first British excavations there for a number of years, with the permission and helpful co-operation of the Italian authorities, and the support of the British School at Rome.

The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), the Smithsonian Institution’s new facility on the National Mall in Washington DC, challenges the very notion of what constitutes a museum. Probably the most theoretically informed museum in North America, this is no shrine to the past: it is a museum that claims both past and present to shape a decolonised future for Indigenous populations.

The meat and milk of horses are highly valued food products, past and present. Horses were an especially valuable food resource in grassland habitats, which may explain their increased exploitation in the central Eurasian forest steppe during the late Eneolithic. It may also explain the emphasis on horses in final Upper Palaeolithic art.

The Sujala site in northern Finnish Lapland is a reindeer hunters' camp from the early post-glacial period, discovered by the authors in 2002. The site was originally linked with the Preboreal occupation of the north Norwegian coast, but further excavations and analyses indicate that it actually represents a totally new phenomenon: evidence for an eastern influx into Lapland around the Preboreal–Boreal transition. This discovery has far-reaching implications for the colonisation of north Scandinavia, but also for the subsequent development of Early Mesolithic settlement in northern Finland and Norway.

The ‘radar rivers’ of the southern Eastern Sahara are systems of aggraded valleys containing inset drainage channels, now entirely obscured by wind-blown sand in the dry and hostile open desert. These features, first recognized on radar images, are remnants of the very different and moister landscapes of the Pleistocene and early Holocene. Proof of their attraction for early human settlement are the Acheulean artefacts that are found buried in alluvium that completely fills these old valleys and at the surface, along with Neolithic sites. The distribution of these sites follows, with good reason, the order of the radar channels.