Stratified stone tools found with elephant and hippopotamus teeth at Evron Quarry can be dated to before 780 000 years ago. The assemblage includes handaxes, but less expectedly, small stone tools in the form of flakes with notches and points. Not thought to be points for spears or arrows, these small tools are suggested to be usable for butchery. They represent an adaption of local materials that make poor handaxes—so showing an ingenious improvisation on the part of Homo erectus.

The first calibration curve, published by Suess in 1967 (Suess 1967), was a wiggly thing arrived at by a process Suess called ‘cosmic schwung’. Later curves used more formal statistical methods, including Clark's published in ANTIQUITY (Clark 1975), which came to be one of the most used. It would be good to have the new standard curves available in ANTIQUITY, but they are far too bulky. We recommend the now-indispensable calibration issue of Radiocarbon (Stuiver & Kra 1986), which takes 230 large-format pages to set them out as tables, graphs and a computer program.

Gordon Pearson is the British end of the Anglo-American axis, with Minze Stuiver at the University of Washington, largely responsible for the new calibration. He summarizes what the calibration does and how best to work with it.

This paper is a guide to working with the Radiocarbon calibration issue in particular, as well as calibration curves in general. It therefore follows the conventions for calibrated and uncalibrated dates that are presented there, rather than ANTIQUITY's normal convention.

The authors describe an ingenious Aztec form of irrigated field system and assess its costs and benefits. Swamps were reclaimed by digging channels by hand and the excavated soil used to construct embanked fields (chinampas). The banks were anchored by planted trees and the trees, the crops and the water channels created a sheltered space which itself raised the temperature and increased productivity. The construction of the whole system took 25 million person-days spread over 40 years. In their study of the energetics of construction, the authors show that this project, forced on the local community, was within their capacity and comparable to the labour expended on the production of cloth.

The focal point of many of the world's cities is a natural stronghold, or fortress, which may also be a religious sanctuary. The Acropolis, the great rock which stands above the ancient and modern city of Athens, is one such place. Why is it once again a place of pilgrimage? And how is its present form the result of its later history?

Large Mesolithic and Neolithic cemeteries that span the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition are scarce in Europe. As such, understanding the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition is rarely easy when using the direct evidence from carbon-dating of human remains. A new dating programme for the Ukrainian cemeteries of the Dnieper Rapids region throws up considerable discrepancies between typological seriation as a means to assign burials to the Mesolithic or to the Neolithic and the carbon evidence.

Not long ago the theoretical literature in archaeology dealt mainly with excavation techniques and the primary analysis of archaeological data. In recent years, the successful realization of many of these empirical objectives, plus a rapidly increasing corpus of data, have motivated a younger generation of archaeologists to investigate more carefully the problems that are involved in the explanation of these data and the study of prehistory in general. This concern has produced a spate of publications which, although they often disagree radically about particular issues, are attempting (a) to investigate the theoretical structure of prehistoric archaeology, (b) to formulate a more rigorous canon for the interpretation of archaeological data, and (c) to pioneer new methods of analysis (Binford, S. R. and L. R., 1968; Chang, 1967 and 1968; Clarke, 1968; Trigger, 1968).

The written sources are overwhelming for that great historical event, the conquest of the world by Europeans between the 15th and the 19th centuries. Historical archaeology, especially in north America, now provides an important source of evidence of a different character. But what was it like to receive Europeans on your shore, what was it like to be dispossesed? Here is a report specifically concerned with relations between native and newcomer at the Cape, one of those African regions which first felt the European impact.

It has long been recognised that the Neolithic spread across Europe via two separate routes, one along the Mediterranean coasts, the other following the axis of the major rivers. But did these two streams have a common point of origin in south-west Asia, at least with regard to the principal plant and animals species that were involved? This study of barley DNA shows that the domesticated barley grown in Neolithic Europe falls into three separate types (groups A, B and C), each of which may have had a separate centre of origin in south-west Asia. Barley was relatively rarely cultivated by the early Linearbandkeramik farmers of Central and Northern Europe, but became more common during the fifth and fourth millennia BC. The analysis reported here indicates that a genetic variety of barley more suitable for northern growing conditions was introduced from south-west Asia at this period. It also suggests that the barley grown in south-eastern Europe at the very beginning of the Neolithic may have arrived there by different routes from two separate centres of domestication in south-west Asia. The multiple domestications that this pattern reveals imply that domestication may have been more a co-evolutionary process between plants and people than an intentional human action.

Not the least of the unusual revelations that have come from the wonderfully preserved ninth-century Norwegian ship burials at Oseberg and Gokstad, is the fact that both had been later broken into—by interlopers who defaced the ship, damaged the grave goods and pulled out and dispersed the bones of the deceased. These ‘mound-breakers’ helpfully left spades and stretchers in place, and through the application of some highly ingenious dendrochronology our authors have been able to date the break-ins with some precision. Mound-breaking, it seems, took place during the domination of Norway by Harald Bluetooth in the tenth century as part of an extensive campaign which included subduing local monuments as well as converting Scandinavians to Christianity. The old mounds retained such power in the landscape that it was worth desecrating them and disinterring their occupants a century after their burial.

This is the first description of the prehistory of the coastal Congo, won by the author and his colleagues against considerable odds: war, exploitation by big business and, above all, by the entrenched assumption that this part of the world had no history to save. Here is a first glimpse of that history: 3300 years of prehistoric settlement, movement and change chronicled by radiocarbon dating and a new ceramic typology.

It is now 20 years since the discovery of the Grotte Chauvet with its impressive cave art, but controversy continues over the antiquity of the images. Radiocarbon assays have been used to argue that the ‘black series’ charcoal drawings date to the Aurignacian period, more than 20 000 years earlier than traditional stylistic models would suggest. This paper questions the validity of the radiometric dating and cautions against reliance solely on the date of the charcoal. Instead, the authors propose an alternative chronology for the art of Chauvet based on stylistic comparanda, palaeontological remains and stratigraphic evidence.

Archaeological interest in the study of the acoustics of important historic buildings is currently gaining in importance, and there are several areas where research is conducted. Among these I include music archaeology, archaeology of sound, archaeomusicology and archaeoacoustics (Watson & Keating 1999; Scarre & Lawson 2006; Knight 2010: 1). Research on acoustic space can, in principle, be divided into two types of project: the measurement of acoustic parameters and the storage of acoustics as audio heritage.