In the above paper by Johan Ling and Zofia Stos-Gale, an object seen in a number of Swedish rock paintings and carvings is understood to be a representation of the so-called oxhide shaped ingot of the eastern Mediterranean Minoan-Mycenaean Bronze Age culture.

Few human remains from the distant past have achieved the public visibility and notoriety of Kennewick Man (the Ancient One). Since his discovery in July 1996 in the state of Washington, he has appeared on one of America's best-known television news programmes, 60 Minutes. He has been on the cover of Time magazine and in the pages of People, Newsweek and The New York Times. He has been the subject of popular press books (Downey 2000; Thomas 2000; Chatters 2001), and for many years running there were almost annual updates on his whereabouts and status in Science (some 30 in the decade following his discovery). That is saying nothing of the scholarly notice and debate he has drawn (e.g. Swedlund & Anderson 1999; Owsley & Jantz 2001; Steele & Powell 2002; Watkins 2004; Burke et al. 2008), including a recently issued tome marking the culmination of almost a decade of study (Owsley & Jantz 2014a).

In the autumn of 2013, a discovery was made in the Doganaccia necropolis close to the ancient Etruscan city of Tarquinia. A sepulchre was uncovered, mercifully and unusually unlooted. Inside were the remains of two individuals and a range of grave goods, allowing the tomb to be typologically dated to the late seventh or early sixth century BC. One of the individuals had been cremated, while the other was laid out in a supine position. Both were placed on funeral benches similar to those known from Etruscan tombs across the region (Steingräber 2009). This excavation was as unusual as it was spectacular—the equally vigorous efforts of nineteenth-century enthusiasts (Leighton 2004: 12) and twentieth-century tomb robbers (van Velzen 1999: 180) have left little of the Etruscan burial record undisturbed. Unsurprisingly, there was a great deal of media excitement over the burial, as its excavator, distinguished Etruscan scholar Alessandro Mandolesi, spoke with the press of his impressions of the remains and their relationship to the artefacts found in the tomb. Little of his exact words remain in the public sphere, but the impression he provided to the press was clear in the flurry of media reports that followed his statement. The ensuing media interest and archaeological developments present a number of serious issues for the practice of archaeology in an age in which digital media can magnify the impact of any major discovery. In addition, the interpretation put forward exposed the continued androcentrism inherent in many sub-disciplines of archaeology, which, 30 years on from Conkey and Spector's (1984) transformative publication, remain locked in deeply problematic interpretative patterns. This interpretation of the Tarquinia burial is emblematic of a far wider phenomenon, both within and beyond Italy, which has serious implications for future archaeological practice. This article unpicks both the media storm and interpretative paradigms that characterised this case study, and queries archaeological responsibility and visibility in an age of 24-hour news.

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.

Higham's paper calls for a consensus on the chronology of the Neolithic through to the Bronze period in mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), articulating a series of questions relating to human mobility, subsistence and socio-cultural organisation within this timeframe. Having worked in Vietnam for 20 years, and being very familiar with the ‘Vietnamese’ Neolithic, I must admit to having paid little attention to the so-called LCM (long chronology); this is because the chronology suggested by its (limited number of) proponents is simply inconsistent with what is known of the development of the Neolithic in Vietnam and the later emergence of bronze technology. In terms of the broader chronology of MSEA, my colleagues and I (e.g. Oxenham et al. 2015) have stressed the observation of a virtual eruption of Neolithic sites across the region c. 4000 BP, overlapping with the terminal phase of the southern Chinese Neolithic, which no doubt fuelled (in terms of genes and technology) the major transformations observed among its more southerly neighbours.

Zooarchaeology, once largely confined to questions of subsistence and production strategies, has recently devoted much more attention to the social roles of animals in the past. Responding (belatedly) to trends in archaeological theory, on the one hand, and the growth of interdisciplinary animal studies, on the other, zooarchaeologists are now using animal remains to address a broader range of questions that are of interest to archaeologists and others (e.g. Gifford-Gonzalez 2007; Oma 2010; Hill 2013). The three books here exemplify this development, all using zooarchaeological data to explore the varied roles of animals in (mainly) complex societies. Each ranges widely and demonstrates the centrality of animals in the human world, and, therefore, their great potential to illuminate the workings of ancient societies. Each also integrates zooarchaeological data with many other sources of information to create a whole much greater than any of the parts. There is a little overlap in authorship, with a chapter by Sykes in Animals and inequality in the ancient world and contributions by Michael MacKinnon in both edited volumes. These common threads aside, they are quite different books, with different goals and audiences.

I visited the new Moesgaard Museum in January 2015 on a grey and rainy day, and five hours later I left empowered with an unexpected feeling of optimism at human potential, reacquainted with what Larkin (1974: 19) called “the million-petalled flower of being here”, and not least, conscious again of the privilege of being an archaeologist, lucky enough to spend my professional life doing something so marvellous. Is the museum really that good? Yes.

The above paper by Ling and Stos-Gale raises interesting questions about the extent and effects of trans-continental trade and travel in the Bronze Age. Of course, there is nothing new in the suggestion that Scandinavia was closely linked to the eastern Mediterranean in this period: Kristian Kristiansen, and before him Jan Bouzek, Klavs Randsborg and Peter Schauer have been saying just that for many years (e.g. Bouzek 1966; Randsborg 1967; Schauer 1985; Kristiansen 1994). What is new is the two-fold suggestion that metal was travelling from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, as shown by metal analysis, and that this is reflected in the rock art by what are presented here as depictions of oxhide ingots.

Hugo Anderson-Whymark, Duncan Garrow and Fraser Sturt are to be congratulated on an important find and a robust evaluation of its significance. As they point out, it was Roger Jacobi who first introduced the notion that Britain had been culturally isolated from the continent following the flooding of the English Channel; this was on the basis of stylistic differences between the microlithic assemblages found in the two areas in the later Mesolithic. Equally, although Villeneuve-Saint-Germain communities were established in Normandy early in the fifth millennium BC, and Chassey/Michelsberg groups in the Pas-de-Calais perhaps six hundred years later, the material evidence of their cross-Channel relations with British and Irish hunter-gatherers is limited. On this basis, the view has developed that indigenous people in Britain would have been unaware of the developing Neolithic in France and Belgium. Consequently, they would have had no familiarity with domesticated plants and animals, polished stone tools, ceramics, large timber buildings and mortuary monuments until such innovations were brought to these islands by migrating agriculturalists at the end of the millennium. If Mesolithic people played any part at all in the Neolithic transition, it would only have been after the arrival of settlers on these shores.

In the above paper, Johan Ling and Zofia Stos-Gale present results from a project comparing isotopes from Bronze Age artefacts with signatures from known Bronze Age mining localities. The results showed that artefacts found in southern Sweden were made from bronze mined in Cyprus. This is in itself interesting, but the discovery of rock art engravings in Sweden that resemble ‘oxhide’ bronze ingots from Cyprus adds a new dimension to the interpretation of Scandinavian rock art, with its strong focus on boat images. The number of possible oxhide ingots represented in Swedish rock art is low, but if the identification of these images is correct, we have evidence, for the first time, of direct connections between Scandinavia and the eastern Mediterranean, connections that have been supposed, but not evidenced, for more than a century (e.g. Hansen 1909). Here, I focus on some implications this article may have for future Scandinavian Bronze Age studies, with special emphasis on rock art.

As Charles Higham so rightly states, chronology is a major key to unlocking the prehistoric past, perhaps even the master key. Most readers nowadays will agree that the chronologies for the inceptions of farming and bronze working in north-east Thailand, as put forward in the 1970s, were in error, for the simple reason that archaeologists at that time were prone to sending small scattered fragments of charcoal to C14 laboratories without really trying to understand exactly how and where the charcoal originated. I am sure I have been guilty of similar lapses, so apportioning blame is not on my mind and would indeed be pointless.

The work of North American archaeologists in Jordan has, for more than a century, been directed by the quest for a particular desired past, namely that of the history of Israel and its neighbours, such as the Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites. The volumes under review here continue this tradition. But, more significantly, they also demonstrate the current efforts by these researchers to bring archaeology out of its provincial past in the heartland of biblical archaeology and towards an engagement with contemporary issues in anthropological archaeology and, less explicitly perhaps, global history. One volume, New insights into the Iron Age archaeology of Edom, reports on the results of a single major research initiative, the Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP); the other, Southern Transjordan Edomite Plateau and the Dead Sea Rift Valley to the west, synthesises a number of smaller survey projects directed by Burton MacDonald over the past three decades.

Whether or not a ‘trance-dance’ akin to that of today's Kalahari San (Bushmen) was performed by southern /Xam San in the nineteenth century has long been the subject of intense debate. Here the authors point to parallels between nineteenth-century records of San life and beliefs and twentieth-century San ethnography from the Kalahari Desert in order to argue that this cultural practice was shared by these two geographically and chronologically distant groups. More significantly, it is suggested that these ethnographic parallels allow a clearer understanding of the religious and ritual practices depicted in the southern San rock art images.

There is little doubt that the small lithic assemblage from the Isles of Scilly is totally different to that from any other Mesolithic site in Britain. As the authors correctly state, the general resemblances to trapeze-dominated assemblages from the continent, in particular to the Late and Final Mesolithic industries from northern France, Belgium and the southern Netherlands, are very obvious. Typologically, the majority of armatures relate to continental rhombic trapezes, called ‘trapèzes à bases décalées’. Upon closer examination, however, several armatures display morphological or technical features that deviate from continental trapezes, making the Scilly assemblage both unique and enigmatic within north-west Europe. In particular, the presence of a dorsally or ventrally retouched base between both truncations on at least 20 of the armatures (p. 962, fig. 5) is remarkable. This is a feature that does not occur on continental trapezes, not even on the evolved rhombic trapezes known as flèches de Dreuil. The latter are particularly numerous in assemblages from the Somme valley (Ducrocq 1991), near the coast where the Channel crossing is narrowest. The combination of a length–width ratio typically <1 and the general use of flakes as blanks prompts us to interpret these implements as transverse arrowheads rather than standard trapezes. Pursuing this interpretation, the basal retouch might have been applied in order to facilitate their hafting, while the irregular small ‘splinters’ on the unretouched opposite end, visible on several of the drawings, might correspond to damage resulting from use.

This review considers three books on the archaeology of territories situated around the Bering Sea—a region often referred to as Beringia, adopting the term created for the Late Pleistocene landscape that extended from north-east Asia, across the Bering Land Bridge, to approximately the Yukon Territory of Canada. This region is critical to the archaeology of the Arctic for two fundamental reasons. First, it is the gateway to the Americas, and was certainly the route by which the territory was colonised at the end of the last glaciation. Second, it is the place where the entire Aleut-Eskimo (Unangan, Yupik, Alutiiq, Inupiat and Inuit) phenomenon began, and every coastal culture from the far north Pacific, to Chukotka, to north Alaska, and to arctic Canada and Greenland, has its foundation in the cultural developments that occurred around the Bering Sea.

Red-figure pottery first achieved prominence in the modern world through antiquarianism and the collection of souvenirs on the Grand Tour. This fundamentally shaped the scholarship of this class of pottery. Vases were valued for their completeness, their iconography—scenes depicting Greek myth and literature being particularly prized—and their aesthetic qualities. Famous private collections were formed, many of which subsequently entered the world's great museums. Less value was placed upon the vessels as archaeological objects. The contexts in which they were found, their associations with other objects and their roles in ancient society were given little consideration. The pursuit of intact vases led to a focus on cemeteries, and many discoveries were, and indeed continue to be, the result of looting. Thus, most museum collections are dominated by vessels without proper provenance. Moreover, collections are skewed towards funerary and, to a lesser extent, sanctuary evidence, and away from material used in domestic contexts. The importance of iconography and aesthetics means that museums tend to display the most varied and beautiful vessels, ignoring much of the output of ancient workshops.

We would like to thank all four authors for their thoughtful responses to our paper and the assemblage it describes. In some cases those comments confirmed things we had thought already, but in others they surprised us, confronting us with ideas that we had never previously considered. Collectively this has made us think hard about future research possibilities.