To what extent is there spatial and temporal patterning in the spread of our genus around the planet, and what environmental and behavioural factors specify this patterning? The prevailing model of Pleistocene dispersals of Homo holds that this process was essentially terrestrial, with oceans and seas inhibiting and directing the movement of hominins out of Africa (e.g. Mellars 2006; Dennell & Petraglia 2012; Gamble 2013), although some scholars propose short-range maritime hops at both the Strait of Gibraltar and Bab-el-Mandeb (Lambeck et al.2011; Rolland 2013). The relatively recent discovery of stone tools with apparently Lower and Middle Palaeolithic characteristics on islands in the eastern Mediterranean and in Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) has, however, been used by some scholars to challenge this terrestrial model.

The Shapwick Project has pioneered and tested a variety of new methods in field survey. Here heavy metal soil analysis is tested in the search for aceramic sites.

The intensification of agriculture as farming communities grew in size did not always produce a successful and sustainable economic base. At Ras an-Numayra on the Dead Sea Plain, a small farming community of the late fourth millennium BC developed a specialised plant economy dependent on cereals, grapes and flax. Irrigation in this arid environment led to increased soil salinity while recurrent cultivation of flax may have introduced the fungal pathogen responsible for flax wilt. Faced with declining yields, the farmers may have further intensified their irrigation and cultivation schedules, only to exacerbate the underlying problems. Thus specialised crop production increased both agricultural risk and vulnerability to catastrophe, and Ras an-Numayra, unlike other sites in the region, was abandoned after a relatively short occupation.

Northern Belize lies in the northeastern quadrant of the central rainforest zone of the area formerly occupied by Classic Maya civilization, adjacent to the ecological frontier with the northern zone, the arid karstic plain of northern Yucatan. It is bounded on the east by the Caribbean, and is traversed by two of the major rivers of the Maya lowlands, the Rio Hondo and Rio Nuevo, the upper tributaries of which drain the Maya heartland of south Campeche and northeastern Peten.

The historically documented burial samples of the Babenberg and Habsburg dynasties allow a detailed analysis of the circumstances that led to dismemberment, evisceration, disturbance, exhumation and reburial over a millennium. The results may provide deeper and more broadly applicable insights into relevant cultural formation processes of élite burials.

Enhanced by recent survey, the authors define new kinds of rock art along the Lennard and Fitzroy rivers in Western Australia—black pigment and scratch-work images featuring anthropomorphic figures with elaborate head-dresses. These are shown to belong to the Contact period and represent the response of Indigenous artists to European land-taking by recalling and restating traditional themes from earlier times.

In his two articles on querns (1) Dr Cecil Curwen has given us a really epoch-making contribution to prehistory and history. Not only has he provided the prehistorian with a new instrument for the establishment of chronology, but he has drawn the attention of excavators to a revolutionary but curiously neglected advance in technology. For the rotary mill is the first major application of rotary motion since the invention of the potter's wheel and the lathe in the remote Oriental Copper Age; it led on directly to the invention of geared machinery and the water-wheel and so to the first employment of inanimate motive power apart from the harnessing of the winds to the sail. Though this invention took place in the full light of history, the sole evidence for its origin, apart from a single reference in a writer so late as Pliny (2), is purely archaeological. Unfortunately it is still rather thin; excavators of classical and barbarian sites have generally been too preoccupied with statuary and art-objects on the one hand, with types accepted as chronologically significant on the other, to provide the historian of science with the data he craves. Truhelka for instance, generally so scrupulous in the full publication of all his finds, does not illustrate nor even describe a single quern from Dolja Dolina in Bosnia where he found plenty (3).

A new look at the old collections from Jebel Moya, the site in the southern Sudan excavated by the Wellcome expedition early in the century, sets Jebel Moya in the light of modern understanding of the Nile and Sahara sequences.

Work in 1992 has significantly added to understanding of this important Maya site in the Middle Formative or Preclassic period (1000–450 BC). The known settled area now extends to 1.62 sq. km. One of the 14 burials was associated with rich grave-goods, suggesting that it was of a leading member of the Cuello community in the 5th century BC.

Are sites in lowland Europe destroyed when they are ploughed many times? In north Denmark, many Neolithic and Early Bronze Age sites are now reduced to just lithic scatters, but distinctive ‘site signatures’ persist. A lithic economic prehistory from the ploughsoil is possible and instructive.

The ‘faience’ beads of the British Bronze Age have since the last century been appreciated as the product of a somewhat sophisticated technology. Although the possibility of local manufacture was seriously considered by earlier antiquaries, especially for the Scottish beads, in more recent years-since the writings of Childe and Piggott-a Mycenaean or Egyptian origin has been widely assumed for them.

Toolmakers in Queensland Australia used ingenious knapping techniques to produce an implement with a large bulb of percussion and a gouge-shaped cutting edge: the “gull-wing tula adze”. The author concludes that the tool results from a unique compromise between an inefficient knapping technique and a peculiar – but in this case desirable – phenomenon of fracture mechanics

Investigations in a catacomb revealed an early mass grave, in which the bodies were bound tightly with plaster and textile in a type of mummification. Over 100 individuals, mostly young adults, including women, were stacked in rows apparently following a communal fatal incident, perhaps an epidemic. The presence of traces of gold, silver and probably amber with many of the bodies, and their burial in an imperial property suggests a group of some status being interred in the early years of the catacomb, at the end of the second century AD or beginning of the third.