Defining territories and settlement hierarchies is a primary goal of archaeological survey, involving the mapping of different-sized settlements on the ground. However it may not always work, owing to the particular land use or political strategies anciently employed. With the aid of cuneiform documents from Tell Leilan, Syria, the author shows how the settlements found by archaeological survey in northern Mesopotamia actually relate to a number of intersecting authorities, with a hold on major tracts of pasture as well as on arable land and cities. These insights from the Near East have important implications for the interpretation of surveyed settlement patterns everywhere.

In world archaeology, there has always been a problem regarding the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition. Late twentieth-century research has attempted to address this issue through the recognition of Initial Upper Palaeolithic (IUP) lithic industries. These assemblages were first characterised through evidence from the sites of Boker Tachtit and Ksar Akil (the Levant), and they are now identified in many regions of Eurasia, including Central Asia, the Near East, the Altai Mountains, Transbaikalia, Mongolia and northern China. A characteristic IUP assemblage has also been recently found in Kazakhstan (Ushbulak-1) (Shunkov et al. 2016). Large blades and elongated pointed flakes dominate these assemblages, and there is a prevalence of Upper Palaeolithic tool types in tool sets.

The present age, as far as archaeology is concerned, may well be termed that of excavations, and Mesopotamia is more than any other country the centre of such activity. It is work on the most ancient sites that has come most before the public eye ; but later ruins too have received some attention, both before and since the war. Samarra stands and must long stand as the classical example of an excavation of the later eriod, but the recent work at Ctesiphon is no going investigation by the Baghdad school and the Michigan University expedition and the ancient city of Kish has produced a Sasanian palace. Our work at Hira, some 50 miles to the south of ancient Babylon, now adds another name to this list, and though we made but preliminary soundings they served to show that the town of Hira was definitely an important and interesting place, the further examination of which will be without doubt well repaid. The work which we did was undertaken on behalf of Oxford University and was carried out under the joint direction of Mr Gerald Reitlinger and of the author of this paper. Most sincere thanks are due to Mr Reitlinger, who bore the entire cost of the expedition, and to Professor Langdon of Oxford, who greatly simplified our work by allowing us to become a branch of the Oxford-Field Museum expedition to Kish.

Almost half a century has elapsed since the first area excavation of a prehistoric site in north-east Thailand at Non Nok Tha (Bayard & Solheim 2010) (Figure 1). A long and still unresolved debate has ensued, centred on the chronology of the establishment of rice farming and bronze casting, that has dovetailed with further controversies on the pace and nature of social change. Results obtained during the past 20 years of fieldwork focused on the upper Mun Valley of north-east Thailand, together with a new series of AMS radiocarbon determinations from key sites, have thrown into sharp relief contrasting interpretations of two issues: one centres on the timing and origin of the Neolithic settlement; the other on the date and impact of copper-base metallurgy. A consensus through debate would bring us to a tipping point that would see Southeast Asian prehistory turn to more interesting issues of cultural change.

It is excellent to be able to present this latest achievement in the onward march of remote mapping, the art and science of exploring archaeological sites without digging them. Using a particularly graphic case study in Hungary, the author shows that deposits characterised by geophysical and chemical means can reveal their plans and the emphasis of their activity in some detail. This is not only a rapid and economic means of landscape investigation, but offers striking research results over a broad canvas, indicative of the numerous small dispersed settlements that so often escape the attention of the great excavation campaigns.

The use of a wide range of narcotic drugs in antiquity has been widely documented, although archaeologists have sometimes been too credulous of apparently scientific data, and have failed to appreciate the post-excavation histories of artefacts, including mummies. This paper examines the discovery of tobacco in the mummy of Rameses II, provides an alternative model for its origin, as a 19th-century insecticide used in conservation, and throws doubt upon the evidence for both cannabis and cocaine in ancient Egypt.

DNA analysis of a tooth found with imported pottery in Bali offers a strong possibility of the presence of a trader of Indian extraction in the late first millennium BC.

In June ANTIQUITY published a novel contribution by Mike Parker Pearson and his Madagascan colleague Ramilisonina, which addressed the question of the significance of stone at Stonehenge(ANTIQUITY 72: 308–76). They argued that stone symbolized death and the dead, and provided examples from ethnographic studies to support this notion. The paper has stimulated two replies–from John Barrett & Kathryn Fewster, and from Alasdair Whittle. We are pleased to publish these here, as part of the continuing debate on analogy in archaeology, and on Stonehenge.

The bombing of the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy in 1998 provides the focus for an analysis of the political targeting of heritage in Sri Lanka.

Six years ago, Darvill and colleagues reported (ANTIQUITY 61: 393–408) on the Monuments Protection Programme, a new English initiative to build, from a century of haphazard acts of site protection, a set of balanced judgements and priorities by which to recognize ancient places that are more precious, genuinely of a national importance. The Programme, they tell ANTIQUITY, has now completed the first-stage review of information in local sites and monuments records and is proceeding with the identification of nationally important monuments in every English county. This further paper reports on how the Monuments Protection Programme is addressing landscapes, as distinct from ‘spot sites’ with clear limits, where the matters of defining a ‘relict cultural landscape’ and judging relative value are harder.

The authors review the significance of bracers by undertaking a detailed examination of their morphology, fragmentation, manufacture and wear. The results have a number of implications regarding their use and value and this is supported by the use of petrographic and geochemical analyses which suggest discrete patterns of raw material acquisition. A description of the technical methodology and appropriate data tables are available at http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/woodward.

Researchers in several continents have found that agriculture began not in major river valleys but up in the hills, where early farmers tended crops on alluvial fans and improved irrigation by building earth barriers across them. Here the authors reveal a similar process in the hills of Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where early farming villages overlook the plains of the Punjab and Sindh, heartland of the later Indus civilisation. Today this is a troubled border zone, with difficult access on the ground, but our researchers make exemplary use of satellite survey to map the villages in their specific local environments.

The Formative in the northern Andes

The northern Andean regions, encompassing northernmost Peru, all of Ecuador and the southern provinces of Colombia, remain archaeologically very poorly known. Although the past 30 years have witnessed an increasing number of archaeological projects in coastal zones, especially the Santa Elena Peninsula, work in the highlands outside of the greater Quito commute zone has lagged sadly behind. Southern Ecuador, in particular, has had little investigation since earlier this century when first Max Uhle, then Donald Collier, John Murra and, finally, Wendell Bennett, demonstrated the existence of ‘Formative’ cultures in Ecuador through their investigations at sites along the Tomebamba and Paute rivers of Azuay province and at Cerro Narrío, just to the north in the Cañar Valley (Uhle 1922; Collier & Murra 1943; Bennett 1946; FIGURE 1).