Clusters of Neolithic cursus monuments are attested in several parts of Britain but have so far not been recorded in Ireland, where only isolated or pairs of monuments are known. A recent lidar survey of the Baltinglass landscape of County Wicklow, Ireland, has now identified a cluster of up to five cursus monuments. Here, the author explores this group of monuments and their significance within the wider setting of Neolithic Ireland and Britain. Their unique morphology, location and orientation offer insights into the ritual and ceremonial aspects of the farming communities that inhabited the Baltinglass landscape and hint at the variability in the form and possible functions of these monuments for early farming communities.

Across more than seven centuries (c. 1350–600 BC), the Assyrian Empire established political dominance and cultural influence over many settlements in the Ancient Near East. Assyrian policies of resource extraction, including taxation and tribute, have been extensively analysed in textual and art historical sources. This article assesses the impact of these policies on patterns of wealth within mortuary material—one of the most conservative forms of culture, deeply rooted in group identity. The author argues that a trend of decreasing quality and quantity of grave goods over time supports models emphasising the heavy economic burden of Assyrian administration on its subjects.

During the Late Neolithic, a series of short-lived, monumental-scale farmhouses were constructed across southern Scandinavia. The size of these structures is often taken as a tangible manifestation of the elite status of the inhabitants. Here, the author explores the architecture and associated material culture of the six largest known examples, drawing attention to general parallels with smaller farmhouses in the region. The comparison highlights similarities in spatial organisation and function indicating that, despite their size, these monumental houses served the same roles as dwellings and centres of agricultural production. Attention to function rather than size emphasises the importance of food production and control of surpluses in the emergence of social elites at the end of the Neolithic.

The late third-millennium BC Longshan period was a crucial time for state formation in central China. During these centuries, long-distance networks expanded and shared material culture and then cultural practices spread across wider areas precipitating social and ideological developments that presaged the rise of states and cities on the Central Plain. In this research, the authors use multiple (strontium, oxygen and carbon) isotope analyses from the dental enamel of 67 individuals buried at the Xiajin cemetery, Shanxi Province. The results indicate significant long-distance migration among females during the Longshan period, which the authors interpret as evidence of exogamous marriage for political alliance-building—a phenomenon found more widely across Eurasia at the start of the Bronze Age.

Tophets are Phoenician and Punic sanctuaries where cremated infants and children were buried. Many studies focus on the potentially sacrificial nature of these sites, but this article takes a different approach. Combining osteological analysis with a consideration of the archaeological and wider cultural context, the authors explore the short life-courses and mortuary treatments of 12 individuals in the tophet at the Neo-Punic site of Zita, Tunisia. While osteological evidence suggests life at Zita was hard, and systemic health problems may have contributed to the deaths of these individuals, their mortuary rites were attended to with care and without concrete indication of sacrifice.

High-elevation environments present harsh challenges for the pursuit of agropastoral subsistence strategies and relatively little is known about the mechanisms early communities employed to adapt to such locations successfully. This article presents the sequential carbon and oxygen analysis of archaeological caprine teeth from Bangga (c. 3000–2200 BP), which is approximately 3750masl on the Tibetan Plateau. Made visible through this method, intra-tooth variation in isotopic composition allows insights into herding strategies that possibly included the provisioning of livestock with groundwater and agricultural fodder and summer grazing in saline or marsh environments. Such intensive provisioning differs markedly from lower-elevation agropastoralism.

Historically, urban centres are seen as consumers that draw in labour and resources from their rural hinterlands. Zooarchaeological studies of key urban sites in Southwest Asia demonstrate the movement of livestock, but the region-wide application of these findings has not been tested and the logistics of urban provisioning remain poorly understood. Here, the authors analyse zooarchaeological data from 245 sites in the Levant and Mesopotamia to examine patterns of livestock production and consumption over a 5000-year period. They find that although preferences varied over time and space, urban sites consistently relied on rural satellites to overcome local limitations to support their large and diverse populations.

Relatively few examples of Palaeohispanic writing have been recovered from the Vasconic territories of present-day Navarre, leading to the assumption that the Vascones were a pre-literate society. Here, the authors report on an inscription on a bronze hand recovered at the Iron Age site of Irulegi (Aranguren Valley, Navarre) in northern Spain. Its detailed linguistic analysis suggests that the script represents a graphic subsystem of Palaeohispanic that shares its roots with the modern Basque language and constitutes the first example of Vasconic epigraphy. The text inscribed on this artefact, which was found at the entrance of a domestic building, is interpreted as apotropaic, a token entreating good fortune.

Horses began to feature prominently in funerary contexts in southern Siberia in the mid-second millennium BC, yet little is known about the use of these animals prior to the emergence of vibrant horse-riding groups in the first millennium BC. Here, the authors present the results of excavations at the late-ninth-century BC tomb of Tunnug 1 in Tuva, where the deposition of the remains of at least 18 horses and one human is reminiscent of sacrificial spectral riders described in fifth-century Scythian funerary rituals by Herodotus. The discovery of items of tack further reveals connections to the earliest horse cultures of Mongolia.

The nature and timing of the transition to farming north of the Linearbandkeramik zone in Europe is the subject of much debate, but our understanding of this fundamental shift in lifeways is hampered by the low resolution of available data. This article presents new multi-proxy evidence from Swifterbant (4240–4050 BC), in the Dutch wetlands, for morphologically domestic cattle with two different dietary regimes. The authors argue that the results indicate early animal management, alongside arable farming and the continuance of foraging practices, prompting the reconsideration away from broad statements about the Neolithic north of the Linearbandkeramik zone towards more local trajectories.

A dearth of published archaeobotanical data from the Late Bronze Age of western Anatolia limits our understanding of agricultural production in this key area. Recent excavations at Çine-Tepecik provide insights into farming and the political economy in the kingdom of Mira within the lands of Arzawa. Archaeobotanical assemblages indicate that farming was structured to meet both domestic and institutional consumption; the former utilising a wide range of crop species while the latter focused on cereals. Plant remains provide further evidence for a ‘hybrid’ suite of farming practices across western Anatolia and contribute to debate around the spread of broomcorn millet cultivation.

Explanations for the emergence and abandonment of the Chalcolithic Trypillia mega-sites have long been debated. Here, the authors use Gini coefficients based on the sizes of approximately 7000 houses at 38 Trypillia sites to assess inequality between households as a factor in the rise and/or demise of these settlements. The results indicate temporarily reduced social inequality at mega-sites. It was only after several generations that increased social differentiation re-emerged and this may explain the subsequent abandonment of the mega-sites. The results indicate that increases in social complexity need not be associated with greater social stratification and that large aggregations of population can, for a time at least, find mechanisms to reduce inequality.

During the second half of the first millennium BC, hundreds of hillforts dotted the central Italian Apennines. Often interpreted as ‘proto-towns’, the authors present results of investigations at Monte Santa Croce-Cognolo that challenge this idea. Previous studies identified a small area (<1ha) of occupation and suggested that habitation extended across the whole 18ha site. Combining geophysical and pedestrian survey with remotely sensed data, and local ethnographic accounts, the authors detect little evidence for permanent habitation and instead argue for activities connected with animal husbandry. The results challenge urban-centric interpretations by demonstrating the coexistence of monumental but uninhabited hillforts and urban sites—usually seen across the Mediterranean and Europe.

Wine was deeply embedded in all aspects of Roman life and its role in society, culture and the economy has been much studied. Ancient Roman texts and archaeological research provide valuable insights into viticulture and the manufacture, trade and consumption of wine but little is known of the sensory nature of this prized commodity. Here, the authors offer a novel oenological approach to the study of Roman dolia through their comparison with modern Georgian qvevri and associated wine-production techniques. Far from being mundane storage vessels, dolia were precisely engineered containers whose composition, size and shape all contributed to the successful production of diverse wines with specific organoleptic characteristics.

One century after its initial excavation, this article presents the first absolute chronology for the settlement of Karanis in Egypt. Radiocarbon dates from crops retrieved from settlement structures suggest that the site was inhabited beyond the middle of the fifth century AD, the time at which it was previously believed to have been abandoned. These dates add to the complex picture of population fluctuations and the remodelling and reuse of structures at Karanis. Two dates reach into the middle of the seventh century, placing the abandonment of the site in a period of political and environmental transition that changed the physical and social landscape of the Fayum region and beyond.

Examination of plant microfossils (phytoliths and starch granules) preserved in dental calculus allows for the direct identification of some components of prehistoric diets. In this article, the authors present the results of microfossil analysis of dental calculus from wild and domestic animals at the Late Neolithic site of Kangjia in the Central Plains, an area critical in the emergence of early Chinese states. Consumption of cooked plant foods by domestic pigs and dogs, and of domestic crops by wild animals, at this site hints, the authors argue, at an interdependent relationship between animal management, agricultural production and ritual practices that contributed to the political transformations of Late Neolithic China.

Post-mortem manipulation of human bodies, including the commingling of multiple individuals, is attested throughout the past. More rarely, the bones of different individuals are assembled to create a single ‘individual’ for burial. Rarer still are composite individuals with skeletal elements separated by hundreds or even thousands of years. Here, the authors report an isolated inhumation within a Gallo-Roman-period cremation cemetery at Pommerœul, Belgium. Assumed to be Roman, radiocarbon determinations show the burial is Late Neolithic—with a Roman-period cranium. Bioarchaeological analyses also reveal the inclusion of multiple Neolithic individuals of various ages and dates. The burial is explained as a composite Neolithic burial that was reworked 2500 years later with the addition of a new cranium and grave goods.

Investigations in the Tollense Valley in north-eastern Germany have provided evidence of a large and violent conflict in the thirteenth century BC. Typological analysis of arrowheads from the valley (10 flint and 54 bronze specimens) and comparison with type distributions in Central Europe, presented here for the first time, emphasise the supra-regional nature of the conflict. While the flint arrowheads are typical for the local Nordic Bronze Age, the bronze arrowheads show a mixture of local and non-local forms, adding to the growing evidence for a clash between local groups and at least one incoming group from southern Central Europe.

As an important component of prehistoric subsistence, an understanding of bone-working is essential for interpreting the evolution of early complex societies, yet worked bones are rarely systematically collected in China. Here, the authors apply multiple analytical methods to worked bones from the Longshan site of Pingliangtai, in central China, showing that Neolithic bone-working in this area, with cervid as the main raw material, was mature but localised, household-based and self-sufficient. The introduction of cattle in the Late Neolithic precipitated a shift in bone-working traditions but it was only later, in the Bronze Age, that cattle bones were utilised in a specialised fashion and dedicated bone-working industries emerged in urban centres.

Broomcorn millet and foxtail millet were first cultivated in Neolithic China then the process spread west across Asia during the Bronze Age. But the distinctive ceramic, and later bronze, vessels utilised in East Asian cuisines for boiling and steaming grains did not move west alongside these crops. Here, the authors use measurements of 3876 charred millet grains to evaluate regional variations and implications for food preparation. In contrast to wheat grains, which became smaller as their cultivation moved east, millet grains became larger as they spread from northern China into Inner Asia and Tibet. This indicates the decoupling of millets from associated cooking techniques as they reached geographical and cultural areas.