Fowling has seldom played a part in the food-quest at all comparable with that of hunting or fishing : the situation of St. Kilda, where during the 17th century the 180 inhabitants are held by Martin (1) to have consumed annually some 22,600 Solan Geese (Gannets) and of which the Rev. Macaulay exclaimed in 1758 ‘. . . deprive us of the Fulmar, and St. Kilda is no more (2)’, is an exception which only proves the general rule. Yet, we know that birds helped to vary the diet of most of the communities of prehistoric Europe and that catching them was an activity of economic importance, especially at certain seasons of the year. The only scientific way of estimating the part played by fowling in the economy of any prehistoric group is through an accurate knowledge of the total fauna represented in the food debris, with special regard to the relative proportions of the different species. While this is too seldom available, there is in the aggregate sufficient data to show how far prehistoric man depended on fowling to supply himself with food. As to the methods used, direct evidence of this is all the harder to come by, since these were mainly of a kind to leave little or no tangible trace behind them. Throughout prehistoric times fowling remained at a primitive stage of development, but fortunately the methods used still survived in Europe down to modern times and most are still practised to-day, whether among peasant peoples in the remoter parts of the continent or among poachers nearer home.

Intensive work in the La Mancha region of Spain has revealed a hitherto unknown density of Bronze Age settlement. It is based on large, permanent, fortified settlements associated with intensive agriculture of modern Mediterranean type. Their sudden abandonment in the mid 2nd millennium BC is interpreted as evidence of the establishment of stronger political control by local rulers.

Chemical analysis of the stunning Muisca metalwork shows that the alloys of copper and gold were especially composed for each offering. Traditionally, the Muisca objects have been collected and studied as works of art. Our authors show that when it comes to drawing understanding of people from the objects they have left us, context is all. The results have much to reveal to metallurgists and students of symbolic metalwork everywhere.

The rock-cut churches of Ethiopia have long intrigued visitors and historians – and have frustrated archaeologists seeking their sequence of construction. Do they belong to one grand ceremonial monastic plan, or a long-lived ritual centre, continually refashioned over time? Since the churches are cut into live rock, the conventional signals of archaeological phasing are hard to find. The authors address these problems at the famous site of Lalibela, showing that, embedded in the cuts and openings, the spoil heaps, and even in the now vanished sediments, the stratigraphic sequence is there to be read.

Lessons from history on sustainability, collapse and resilience are the ultimate goal of the Byzantine Bio-Archaeology Research Program of the Negev (BYBAN) (Tepper et al. 2015). Addressing the unprecedented flourishing and collapse of the Byzantine Negev agricultural settlements (fourth–seventh centuries AD), the BYBAN project offers a unique and original approach. It focuses on ancient middens and domestic contexts, which provide an exceptional focus on the materiality of daily life. Archaeobotanical research is central to this project because the copious plant remains retrieved are a reflection of the region's agricultural economy and its environmental sustainability. This approach will enable us to answer important research questions about the Byzantine–Islamic transition in the Negev: what were the major cash and subsistence crops? Which were grown locally, and which, if any, were imported? How, if at all, did the agricultural economy change during the Byzantine–Islamic transition? Were there any major changes in climatic conditions, and, if so, can they be implicated as a cause for agricultural collapse?

Burnt mounds, found across northern Europe, are especially frequent in Ireland. Here a new review of the Irish evidence is presented, and issue is taken with Barfield & Hodder's diagnosis, published in ANTIQUITY last year, that the primary function of the burnt mounds was as bathing places.

In this ground-breaking study the author looks at three consecutive styles of rock art, placing them in the social context in which they were produced. Although necessarily succinct, the argument shows that as hierarchy increased and functioned over longer distances, rock art could perform as the organ of pastoralist authority, or the badge of marginalised hunters or, most often, as the imagery of consensus masking social inequality.

Stable isotopes in skeletons indicate changes in diet, and a sample of humans from Classical Thebes showed an unexpected increase in nitrogen values – usually associated with increased access to protein. But from what and how? After considering the possible sources of meat, milk and manure, the authors highlight the contribution of freshwater fish, and find support in Aristophanes – where the citizens are heard clamouring for the eels of Lake Kopais.

Beside one of the earliest Preclassic pyramids in Guatemala the authors discovered a large basin fashioned in clay and shaped like a quatrefoil. The use of the quatrefoil theme on other carvings reveals its association with water and its symbolic role as the mouth of an underworld. Excavations in an adjacent mound exposed an affluent community, rich in figurines. This juxtaposition of monuments and residence at La Blanca shows a society of 900-600 BC in which ritual and the secular power were well integrated.

Radiocarbon dating of unaccompanied skeletons discovered during the excavation of an Iron Age, Roman and Saxon settlement at Yarnton, Oxfordshire, unexpectedly revealed the presence of a middle Iron Age cemetery (3rd or 4th century cal BC). British Iron Age burials before the 1st century BC are usually found as individuals, often in pits on settlement sites, or are repersented by disarticulated human bone. This paper explores whether cemeteries were a more common part of Iron Age burial practice than hitherto believed, or whether the Yarnton burials were a highly unusual and localized phenomenon? It highlights the merits of obtaining radiocarbon determinations on otherwise undated burials.

Introduction

On August 3, 1908, two young French clergymen with a passion for prehistory, the brothers Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie, discovered in a cave near the village of La Chapelle-aux-Sains (Department of Corréze) an almost intact Neanderthal skeleton. Recognizing both the importance of their find and their own inexperience with such fossils, they handed the skeleton to Marcellin Boule, professor of palaeontology at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris.

Two new finds of Camelina seeds prove the presence of the plant in middle Neolithic and Chalcolithic western France nearly 3000 years before widespread cultivation in France.

The furnished barrow burials of Wessex represent a maturation of the Beaker rite during the Early Bronze Age in Britain. Many of these burials were unearthed centuries ago, when archaeology was at its most eager and insouciant, but – happily for us – there were often a few careful recorders on hand. Thanks to their records, the modern scientists engaged in the Beaker People Project can still follow the trail back to a museum specimen and obtain high precision dates – as in the case of the ‘Wessex 1’ grave from West Overton in Wessex reported here.

The extraction and processing of metal ores, particularly those of copper and tin, are regarded as among the principal motors of Bronze Age society. The skills and risks of mining lie behind the weapons, tools and symbols that drove political and ideological change. But we hear much less about the miners themselves and their position in society. Who were these people? Were they rich and special, or expendable members of a hard-pressed workforce? In this study the spotlight moves from the adits, slags and furnaces to the bones and seeds, providing a sketch of dedicated prehistoric labourers in their habitat. The Mauken miners were largely dependent on imported meat and cereals, and scarcely hunted or foraged the resources of the local forest. They seem to be the servants of a command economy, encouraged to keep their minds on the job.

Examining the beginnings of agriculture in the ‘Fertile Crescent’, this research team has compared the distribution of rainfall with the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups. The extended families signalled by J1 and J2 haplogroups seem to have had different destinies in the era of agro-pastoralist experiment: J2 were the agricultural innovators who followed the rainfall, while J1 remained largely with their flocks. Acknowledging the fuzzy edges of such mapping, the authors nevertheless escort us into new realms of the possible for the early history of peoples.

After the destruction of Ayodhya's Babri mosque in 1992 by supporters of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the statement above seems laden with premonition of the events to come (Rao 1994). More importantly, Carnegy’s comments highlight that the mosque’s destruction was not simply the result of 20th-century politics. The events surrounding and following the outbreak of violence in 1992 have resulted in more ‘spilt ink’ than Carnegy could ever have imagined. This literature can be divided into two main categories; firstly, the initial documentation submitted to the government by a group of VHP aligned historians, which presented the ‘archaeological proof’ that the Babri mosque had occupied the site of a Hindu temple dating to the 10th and 11th century AD (VHP1990; New Delhi Historical Forum 1992). This was believed to have marked the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama (hence the name Rama Janmabhumi — literally ‘birthplace of Rama’), and been demolished at the orders of the Mughal emperor Babur during the 16th century. As a response, a second group of ‘progressive’ Indian historians began a counter-argument, based on the same ‘archaeological proof’ that no such temple had ever existed (Gopal et al. 1992; Mandal 1993). The second category is a growing body of literature which has filled many pages of international publications (Rao 1994; Navlakha 1994). Especially following the World Archaeology Congress (WAC) in Delhi (1994), and subsequently in Brač, Croatia (1998), this has been preoccupied with finding an acceptable route through the battlefield which arises as a result of the problematic, but recurrent, marriage between archaeology, folklore and politics (Kitchen 1998; Hassan 1995).

Within the past two years the chronology of the later prehistoric period in Scotland has been given a new precision by no less than 24 C14 dates obtained from nine different sites, most of which are conventionally assigned to the pre- Roman Iron Age. Previously the identification and dating of the cultures and sites of this period had depended almost entirely on various exotic bronzes and the time that they and other traits were estimated to have reached Scotland from further south in Britain and from the Continent. The last phase of the Late Bronze Age was fairly confidently assigned a start in the mid-6th century BC on the basis of links with the continental Halstatt Iron Age [I] but the bronzes concerned are nearly all stray finds or from hoards and cannot be tied to any contemporary structures or material cultures except at Covesea and, tenuously, at Traprain Law. The same is true of the various examples of decorated Celtic metalwork which have been found in Scotland: these can be given rough dates on stylistic grounds but were stray finds and unconnected with other aspects of the contemporary material cultures. The dating of hillforts and domestic sites of late pre-Roman times has had to rely on the rare examples