Few chipped stone artefacts from prehistory were as technically complex as the flint daggers of Late Neolithic Denmark. Here Michael Stafford present a study that examines, through experimental archaeology, many aspects of dagger production.

The centuries between A.D. 400 and 800, which make the transition between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, are sparsely documented and have often been called by the English the ‘Dark Ages’, the dark centuries of Western European history. This paucity of written historical sources is greatly to be regretted, for these were decisive centuries for the formation of European society and in them occurred events whose results are to be seen even to the present day. The Roman Empire with its ancient civilisation collapsed; the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean went over to Islam; the Slavs settled in the Balkans, North-Central Europe, and the territory around the Danube as far as Austria; and these Danube-lands came under the domination of the Mongolian Avars.

The author shows how houses in the northern Baltic were constructed using two realities: the reality of timber and the equally potent reality of spirits supporting and controlling the fate of structures. Excavations in seventeenth-century Tornio (now in modern-day Finland) showed that houses were furnished with special offerings when founded and refurbished, while evidence from living folklore suggested that the houses themselves were originally given spiritual personalities and were treated as members of the family. As more modern thinking took hold, this spirituality was transferred to the more mobile and skittish household sprites.

Stone artefacts are made central in Australian prehistory by their dominance in the material we have from the field. Their contribution to this prehistory comes in the form of an unchanging tradition that spans the transition and changes only in the mid Holocene. This makes the Australian record almost unique in the world; but it is a uniqueness that may owe more to archaeological methods than cultural conservatism.

‘Parched’ Apulia still describes the dominant characteristic of this region of southern Italy as aptly as when Horace wrote. The climate is one of sharp contrasts, especially apparent on the treeless plain round Foggia (the district known as the Capitanata). There, some midwinter snow and a few intermittent days of heavy rain between January and March are offset by almost continuous, and often pitiless, days of sunshine from April to the end of September, with the thermometer reaching 105° in the shade and scorching winds from the North in late summer absorbing what little moisture remains. The average annual rainfall at Foggia is only 18-19 inches, or no more than in parts of lowland Tunisia; but the fertile soil is today intensively cultivated by dry farming, with immense open arable fields. Harvesting begins at the end of May and, as there is often little depth of cultivated soil above the absorbent subsoils, by early in July the dusty ground is baked as hard as iron.

Further fieldwork at Sembiran, on Bali in the Indonesian archipelago, tells more about the eastern end of the exchange network running across southern Asia about 2000 years ago.

The authors explore the practice of extracting the thighbone from burials in Mesoamerica, making use of a newly excavated Classic period Zapotec burial at the Mitla Fortress, where the femur had been carefully removed and the interment resealed. They conclude that the femur acted as an ancestral emblem and could be used by families of relatively low social rank. This function contrasts with the Aztec, where the large bones could also be used as war trophies. Archaeological readers studying ancestor worship and the cult of relics in other continents will find much of value here.

This paper reviews the architectural and human skeletal remains from Umm an-Nar period tombs (c. 2500–2000 BC), found across the Oman Peninsula. Possible meanings for the regional dispersal of the tombs across the region are considered. Tomb Unar 2 may provide possible interpretations of 3rd-millennium BC burial practices.

Radiocarbon dating and stratigraphy here offer a new chronological structure for the Iron Age in the Levant. The credit for the construction of massive public monuments in the northern part of Israel is here wrested from David and Solomon and attributed to the later Omride dynasty. The early Israelite monarchs actually ruled over a small kingdom in the highlands around Jerusalem rather than a great empire.

Geochemical analyses of obsidian offer unexpected insights on the size and organization of the Hohokam regional system in the North American Southwest. Networks of obsidian circulation enlarged greatly during the Classic period as community centres with monumental architecture acquired non-local obsidian from a vast territory. This pattern confirms that prior models drastically underestimated the geographic scale of the Classic period regional system.

This paper presents a brief overview of Amazonian archaeology in Brazil in the last two decades, a fitting span since 1997 marked the 20th anniversary of the PRONAPABA — Programa Nacional de Pesquisas Arqueológicas nu Bacia Amazônica — created by Clifford Evans, Betty Meggers and Mário Simões with the co-operation of several Brazilian archaeologists.

In contemporary archaeology of the Brazilian Amazon, rapidly increased knowledge about the early pre-ceramic and ceramic occupation has not been matched by an understanding of the socio-political dynamics of native Amazonian societies during the last two millennia, notably immediately before the 15th century AD.

The author attributes the claimed migrations of the Irish into Argyll to a set of élite origin myths, finding no support in archaeological evidence. He goes on to ask how the Iron Age populations of Argyll established and changed their personal and group identity.