The credit for the discovery of the great antiquity of Jericho belongs to Professor John Garstang, who excavated there between 1930 and 1936. In those days our picture of man's emergence from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic savagery through Neolithic barbarism to the civilization of the metal ages was a neat and tidv one. The nomadic hunters of the first stage discovered agricultuer and stock-breedkg and were thus assured of enough subsistence to become settled villagers, self-sufficient and unprogressive, but at least no longer savages. After long years of this unprogressiveness the eventual discovery of the uses of metal led to trade, specialization, the need for surplus food to feed the traders and specialists, the growth in importance of favoured areas such as the great river valleys and the development of the villages there into towns through the accumulation of surpluses and the consequent need for organized rule to control them. The theory was reasonable, and what was then known about the early village settlements in Western Asia and the rise of towns and states in the river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia seemed to fit the facts. A chronology of early villages in the later fifth millennium and the growth of towns in the later fourth, leading to states in the third, seemed to cover what was known.

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.

A worked stone from a secure Mousterian context has a bone splinter driven through it and appears to modern eyes like an attempt to represent a face. The authors argue that a face was indeed intended, and that the Roche-Cotard “proto-figurine” can be counted among the earliest art objects. At this place and date it should refer to a Neanderthal people.

Lapita pottery, the herald of the settlement of the wider island Pacific, turns out to have been painted with lime and clay, to give a red and white finish over the decorated surface. The find of a pot in Vanuatu, its sherds in different states of deterioration showed why painted Lapita has previously gone unrecognised. The author suggests that it was widespread from 1000 BC and reminds us that pottery was painted in China 7000 years ago.

The city of al-Raqqa in north central Syria rivalled early Baghdad in scale, and was briefly during the ‘Abbasid caliphate the imperial capital of an empire stretching from North Africa to Central Asia. Now largely levelled the multifaceted Islamic cityscape is revealed by aerial and satellite imagery. It is at this site that the evidence of innovative Islamic industries has been revealed by excavations undertaken by the Raqqa Ancient Industry project since 1994. Here they discuss the production models for glass and ceramics in their socio-economic contexts.

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 ‘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.

New finds of astonishing splendour have come to light at Snettisham (Norfolk, England), a place which already holds a special, if enigmatic, place in Iron Age studies. Discoveries there first put British gold torques on the map; the magnificent great torque not only gave its name to an art-style but held a coin that helped to date it, and the very wealth of the place has provoked endless speculation.

As many an excavator — and many an older person — knows, it is in the nature of human teeth to fall out, before death if they can, after and into the ground if they may not. So any consideration of tooth loss as we see it in prehistoric remains — if it is to be the cultural evidence for the deliberate removal of teeth — needs properly to identify a sufficiently distinctive pattern.

Ancient art cut into rock is difficult to research and manage off-site without precise three-dimensional records. Experiments with photographic modelling by the authors led to a relatively accessible and economical way of making them.

The lack of botanical remains from farming sites in Africa remains a serious archaeological problem. This paper discusses how the indirect evidence of pottery may help to evaluate grain farming in African archaeology.

Historiographic revelations

Back from his famous visit to Boucher de Perthes in the spring of 1859, John Evans hastened to invite some antiquarians friends in London to examine his finds. The flint implements he had collected with Joseph Prestwich in the undisturbed gravel beds of the Somme valley were indeed. or so ho believed, altogether new in appearance and totally unlike anything known in this country [Evans 1869: 93-4):

A classic exposition of the difficulties of dating a major monument and why it matters. Silbury Hill, one of the world's largest prehistoric earth mounds, is too valuable to take apart, so we are reliant on samples taken from tunnels and chance exposures. Presenting a new edition of thirty radiocarbon dates, the authors offer models of short- or long-term construction, and their implications for the ritual landscape of Silbury and Stonehenge. The sequence in which monuments, and bits of monuments, were built gives us the kind and history of societies doing the building. So nothing matters more than the dates…

All technical and scientific illustration is at once symbol and communication, a pictorial language addressing the author's audience side by side with his written text. It transmits information according to an agreed code of conventions which translates actuality into forms and outlines in one or more colours, usually black on white, in a manner which will convey to the observer the features of the original which the illustrator wishes to present. As Winston Churchill wrote of painting, ‘the canvas receives a message despatched a few seconds before from the natural object. But it has also come through a post office en route. It has been transmitted in code . . . it reaches the canvas a cryptogram’. Archaeological draughtsmanship involves the construction of technical cryptograms, and as in all ciphers these must be made according to rules carefully observed by both transmitter and recipient.

Refitting flakes to cores is a well-developed way to investigate how stone tools were made. Here the author takes on the formidable task of refitting the stone blocks of menhirs, orthostats and megalithic tombs to their quarries. The results are impressive: the order of erection in a row of menhirs, the method of construction in a passage grave and the monumental chronology of a region are just three of the rewards of this promising new method.

Eritrea fought a war of liberation for three decades between the early 1960s and 1991. While professional research stagnated because of the war, amateur archaeologists provided the sole source of information for ancient material culture in the country during this era. With the coming of independence in 1993, awareness of the potential value of Eritrea’s heritage resources began to grow, leading to an initiative in 1997 to teach archaeology and heritage management at the University of Asmara.

Out of the combined training and research programmes conducted by the University of Asmara have come several major discoveries that change the way that the rise of urbanism is seen in the Horn of Africa. We highlight research showing that between 800 BC and 400 BC the greater Asmara area of Eritrea supported the earliest settled agropastoralist communities known in the highlands of the Horn. These communities pre-date and are contemporaneous with Pre-Aksumite settlements in the highlands of southern Eritrea and northern Ethiopia.

In previous papers the writer has suggested that, according to such evidence as is available, the rotary quern must have been derived from the large and heavy donkey-mill of Greece and Rome (1), and Childe has further suggested that this development may have been brought about through the adaptation of the rotary principle to small portable mills suitable for the use of armies in the field (2). Thus legionaries, upon demobilization, would carry the idea, if not the articles themselves, back to their peasant homes.

Extensive radiocarbon data are examined, including results from short-lived samples contemporary with use-contexts. An absolute date range for the main Late Cypriot IIC period on Cyprus, from c. 1340–1315 BC to c. 1200 BC, is proposed.