The Lothagam harpoon site in north-west Kenya's Lake Turkana Basin provides a stratified Holocene sequence capturing changes in African fisher-hunter-gatherer strategies through a series of subtle and dramatic climate shifts (Figure 1). The site rose to archaeological prominence following Robbins's 1965–1966 excavations, which yielded sizeable lithic and ceramic assemblages and one of the largest collections of Early Holocene human remains from Eastern Africa (Robbins 1974; Angel et al. 1980).

The author reports an object of modest appearance but great significance — a small bone beam for weighing precious commodities. Weighing indicates the regulation of quantities for exchange or manufacture and is thus a key agent of social and economic complexity. Well-stratified and dated to the early third millennium BC, this find puts the people of the Levant among the earliest to quantify mass. We are rightly urged to inspect faunal assemblages for similarly subtle modifications of bones.

The archaeological department at the University of Bradford is the only one in Britain to be called a Department of Archaeological Sciences. Its Professor–whose own background was in physics and then chemistry before archaeology–explores the relationship of archaeology to the sciences in a contribution adapted from his talk given at Harvard University on Science and archaeology.

A man and a woman were found in a double burial dating from the 1st century BC and located in a Xiongnu burial site in northern Mongolia. An offering box at the head of the man's coffin contained both remains of domestic animals and a human hyoid bone. The skeleton of the man was complete whereas the woman's hyoid bone was missing. The isolated hyoid bone could belong to the buried woman, which suggests the removal of her tongue and probably her sacrifice.

One of the few things to have remained very little changed in the City of London for nearly one thousand years was the position of most of its streets and lanes. Unfortunately this is no longer true, and in the past few decades large numbers of medieval streets have disappeared from the map for ever to be replaced by characterless dual-carriageways that now slice through the City. Not only do these new routes replace the earlier ones, but at the same time they swallow up and destroy all the surrounding side lanes and many of the old alignments disappear. Equally, property boundaries which may also have survived for at least 800 years now disappear for ever in very large redevelopments, and nowhere is this whole process more clearly seen than in the vast swathe cut for the new southern dualcarriageway that has replaced Thames Street. The whole of the western part of Upper Thames Street, with its adjoining side lanes, has been physically removed, to be replaced by a tunnelled dualcarriageway further to the south. For well over half a mile the central part of Thames Street is now so wide that it has engulfed properties on its north side, while the eastern end from the Custom House to Tower Hill, with its surrounding redevelopments, has had all signs of the medieval topography removed except for All Hallows church with its unique Anglo-Saxon arch (Taylor & Taylor, 1965, 39-400)

Llobera (1996) seeks to utilize the concept of affordance in his GIS study of Wessex linear ditches. Unfortunately, he does not seem fully to appreciate what is implied in the concept of affordance, nor the role that it plays within Gibson's theory of direct perception. I offer this short note as an addendum to Llobera's discussion of affordance and its uses with GIS.

The dead are back. Like a horde of irritating poltergeists the human remains of the ancients have returned to harass us in the form of the reburial issue; perennial source of postcolonial guilt and undergraduate seminar material. Only this time there is an unusual twist: the remains in question are British. The Council of British Druid Orders (CoBDO) has requested the reburial of a specific group of prehistoric human remains from the collection of the Alexander Keiller Museum. In response English Heritage have carried out a consultation, amidst considerable publicity and public debate (Hole 2008).

Studying the pottery produced in the Granada region between the eighth and eleventh centuries AD, the author describes a changing discourse of Roman and Islamic forms. This in turn can be held to reflect the changing social relations between conquerors and conquered.

Small islands offer archaeologists interesting and manageable subjects for survey and excavation. The recent work on Adriatic islands reported here examines occupation during the 3rd millennium BC, showing how sailors exploited islands for trade, control and raw materials.

Boxgrove in Sussex has been in the headlines for its human bone (‘the first Englishman’); more to the research point is its superb in-place deposits of debris from handaxe-knapping. This is a timely moment to look once again at the reports of Worthington G. Smith, who a century ago recognized, amongst the scores of sites with river-rolled handaxes, rare deposits of a more informative character.

Fasting was an important element of early Christian behaviour in Egypt. In spite of a wealth of Late Antique monastic sources describing acts of fasting, the reality must be that food was consumed at regular intervals. To date, discussion of monastic dietary practice has been largely a historical debate. Although we do not discount this approach and will use it ourselves, this paper departs from this academic tradition by incorporating new archaeobotanical evidence from the recent excavations of the 5th–7th-century AD monastery at Kom el-Nana. Middle Egypt into the study of monastic diet. It is our belief that the use of independent forms of evidence (in this case written sources on attitudes to fasting and archaeobotanical evidence) is the best way forward to answering fundamental questions about what monastic diet was like in Late Antique Egypt.

It would seem that the Anglo-Saxon invasion of a great part of eastern Britain in the fifth century radiated fan-wise from the gateway of the Wash and of the Fenland Gulf. If this is true, it is not surprising. The position of the continental base of the Anglo-Saxons made the area a natural entry into the Midland plain; and the invaders, with the Wash behind them, gazed upon no unfamiliar scene. The region into which they came may not have been so different from their former homeland on the flats of northern Germany, the homeland which Bede tells us they had so completely deserted. They penetrated by way of the Fenland rivers, up the Nene, the Welland, the Ouse, and the Witham, and this big spread was supplemented to the north and to the south by the smaller river entrances, the Bure, the Yare, the Waveney, the Humber and so on. The archaeological finds, as plotted by Mr Thurlow Leeds, are located along the courses of navigable streams and their tributaries, and are disposed concentrically around the Fenland. Dr Cyril Fox has moreover indicated affinities, during the earlier Saxon period, between the opposite shores of this marshy gulf. All had changed, however, when the tribes emerged into the light of history. The Fenland basin, characterized at an earlier epoch by a certain cultural unity, had now become a frontier region, separating peoples and exercising a repelling action revealed in the making of the Anglo-Saxon States. Kingdoms, finding their limits here, partitioned the marshy wastes between them, and the barrier of the Fens became a permanent feature in the political geography of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy.