Unmodified and modified animal remains and animal representations significantly contribute to the content of Mesolithic and, in some cases, Early Neolithic hunter-gatherer burial assemblages in Northern Europe. Though these finds have received noteworthy attention, predominant archaeological narratives focus on their economic, aesthetic, or symbolic values in relation to humans. This contribution explores ways of looking at these assemblages beyond seeing them primarily as signifiers of human identities and human symbolic and/or economic choices. Drawing on insights from Russian ethnographic literature about near-recent East Siberian hunting and gathering communities, this paper explores paths for understanding unmodified and modified animal remains and animal representations from Mesolithic and Neolithic hunter-gatherer graves as animate objects and investigates ways of recognising their personhood. The paper outlines what could be considered as the material consequences of communicative actions and performative acts in relation to artefacts and animal remains that might have been perceived as having the qualities of a person, such as their placement and arrangement within the burial and treatment prior to deposition.

This paper builds on the recent aDNA results from Hazleton North chambered tomb to explore how people might have repeatedly negotiated kinship, descent, and affinity in Early Neolithic southern Britain. Hazleton North was constructed around 3700 cal bc, was in use for less than a century, and – unlike many other Cotswold-Severn tombs – was never modified to alter the arrangement of chambers. The aDNA analysis from 35 individuals whose remains were deposited at the site revealed that 27 were biologically related and represented five sequential generations. Here we explore changing practices across those generations. We argue that Hazleton North was constructed to demonstrate the vitality of a lineage at a specific moment in time while choices about who to entomb indicate an inclusive expansion of the lineage in the first two generations which is not evident during the remaining generations. We argue that by the third generation lineage members increasingly chose to dispose of the remains of their dead elsewhere. Hazleton North was built in a landscape rich in earlier tombs, many of which were modified to produce long cairns with multiple chambers: some of those formed opposed pairs similar to the chambered areas at Hazleton North. We argue this was part of a growing trend in ‘kinship work’ which accentuated lineal descent and sub-lineage distinctions in the centuries around 3700 cal bc. However, deposition at Hazleton North was short-lived. This can be set in the local context of not only the construction and use of further chambered tombs but also increasing investment in larger corporate projects like causewayed enclosures. These enclosures formed new arenas where negotiations of descent and community were played out with increased intensity and in different ways to activities at chambered tombs. Overall, we argue that kinship, affiliation, and belonging were repeatedly renegotiated among the monument building communities of Early Neolithic southern Britain.

The island of Sardinia is well known for its Late Neolithic and Copper Age underground rock-cut tombs that were used over generations for collective burials. Many tombs were decorated to resemble house interiors and cemeteries are often referred to as villages of the dead. Research so far has focused on excavating stratigraphic contexts within some of these monuments, or on typological classifications of tomb plans and wall decorations, but the landscape context of the cemeteries and their relationship to settlements have been overlooked. The article presents the results of two seasons of survey in Ossi (north-west Sardinia), focusing on two major cemeteries (Mesu ‘e Montes and S’Adde ‘e Asile). Combining fieldwalking, mapping and 3D recording techniques, the survey provides a comprehensive documentation of the cemeteries (from the underground architecture of individual tombs to their landscape setting) and yields evidence of prehistoric settlements in their vicinity. The article discusses the topographic and visual relationships between the tombs and the residential areas and how they may reflect social interactions between the living and the dead in late prehistoric Sardinia.

The story of humanity during the period that elapsed between Palæolithic and Neolithic times has proved an intriguing problem to prehistorians for a long time. The Azilian culture (discovered by Piette in the cave of Mas d'Azil) resting as it does on the older Palæolithic industries and covered in turn by layers of Neolithic and Eneolithic age, seemed to bridge the gulf. But the Azilian culture has only a limited distribution and is truly Palæolithic, as is shown by the absence of the remains of domestic animals and pottery. Again, the Tardenoisean culture, with its pigmy industries and typically pigmy burin seemed to supply a bridge, and here we find a culture of wide extent. As before, however, we are still dealing with a Palæolithic culture, and its age in Western Europe (as has been shown at the diggings of Valle) is contemporaneous with the latter part of the Azilian. After the Azilio-Tardenoisian culture came the early Neolithic of which little can be told except in certain localised areas. Now another chapter of the story of these times, mainly referring to Asturias on the North coast of Spain (but including the area further East as far as Biarritz and also embracing sites in North Catalonia) has been added through the perspicacity of the Count de la Vega del Sella, who has unearthed a new and most interesting post-Azilio-Tardenoisean but pre-real Neolithic culture.

Expanded excavations at the rockshelter of Jebel Humeima (J412) in south-west Jordan provide the basis for re-evaluation of its Upper Palaeolithic lithic assemblage. Initially identified as Levantine Aurignacian, the sample is more closely aligned with the Early Ahmarian. The framework currently used for the Levantine Upper Palaeolithic, combined with spatial clustering of specific blank and tool types, is directly responsible for initial misidentification. This spatial clustering is thought to represent two distinct activity loci: early-stage core reduction and later-stage blade and tool production. This kind of technological and typological variability may also help account for some of the ambiguity within the current Upper Palaeolithic framework of the southern Levant.

The invention and acceptance in Europe of an ingenious metal clothes-fastener in the late second and early first millennia BC has long been known. Interest in it and its several thousand variant forms has been concentrated mainly on their importance as type fossils for chronological systems and, more recently, on how they were used, but there has been little study of how or why the ideas spread (Alexander 1973b). Here an attempt will be made to show where the inventions took place and which communities first accepted them.

In his great study of practical ways and means of daily life in prehistoric Europe, our former Hon. Editor, and President, wrote of the archaeology of horse driving and riding as being ‘slight and difficult to interpret’ (Clark, 1952, 301), and these words have remained very true twenty years on. The study of horse drawn vehicles, and of items of bridling and harness, has, nevertheless, received a good deal of attention, and the leading references have been usefully brought together by Piggott (1968, 313–18), and by Littauer (1969, 300). Much more difficult is the matter of the ridden horse in temperate Europe not only for the scarcity of direct skeletal material, and the usually deplorable circumstances of its excavation, but on account of confusion in the application of terminology, zoological and veterinary, no less than in the existence of many traditional assumptions about the identity and characteristics of the earliest horse domesticators, not to speak of the animal itself. From an archaeological point of view, it has been too easy to forget the animal for the trappings, and to appear to assume that any horse could be decked out regardless of shape or size to perform specialized tasks.

In this short contribution, most gladly dedicated to Grahame Clark, an attempt is made to bring together material for an interim statement, and to consider what guide lines in interpretation can be followed in the light of information on horsemanship in adjacent regions of the Ancient World that are considerably better documented.

During the 1960s and 1970s, aerial reconnaissance on the northern side of the confluence of the Rivers Trent, Tame, and Mease in Staffordshire revealed a cluster of features indicative of prehistoric ceremonial activity. Some of the features within the cluster are morphologically unique, but a lack of previous investigation meant that their dating, phasing, and function were unknown. This paper details the results of a multi-disciplinary approach to addressing these questions about the complex and to place it into its contemporary landscape context. The results indicate that the complex represents numerous phases of symbolic and ceremonial activity extending from the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age. Furthermore, it has shown how these structures fit within a wider landscape of ceremonial activity extending back to the earlier Neolithic and continuing into the Bronze Age.

Strap-unions of the types discussed in this study were made during the later part of the pre-Roman Iron Age and during the earliest part of the Roman occupation of Britain. Their distribution (fig. 1) and details of their chronology and cultural associations and also the evidence for their precise use are considered in the concluding sections of this paper.

The weapons from Populonia and Vetulonia have been the subject of an admirable study by Signora Tallochini and I am most grateful for her help when I was working in the Archæological Museum at Florence, where I was afforded every facility for studying the bronzes from these sites.

Tomb 7 at Piano delle Granate, Populonia, an inhumation ‘fossa’ grave contained the bronze dagger (fig. 1, no. 1), a fibula with slightly thickened round bow, a bronze ring, fragments of bronze nails and bronze hooks, and fragmentary remains of the bows and pins of fibulas. There was no pottery. The description and contents of the tomb are published in Notizie degli Scavi, 1917, p.76 and also in A. Minto, Populonia: la Necropoli arcaica, Florence, 1922, p. 64. This tomb was one of a group of ‘fossa graves’ excavated in 1915 and situated close to the seashore on the flat area known as Piano delle Granate. When I visited Populonia in 1953 it was still possible to locate the tholos tombs and the fossa graves, which, with many cremation burials, were found all over this area, in spite of the thickness of the ‘macchia’ often entirely covering the tombs. An examination of the relative position of the chamber tombs and fossa graves certainly confirmed Minto's conclusion based on a study of the contents of the three different kinds of burials, that the cremation, fossa and some of the earliest type of chamber tombs must all have been used contemporaneously. This group of tombs when excavated also yielded the series of stilted fibulas and the fibula ‘a serpegiante’ (fig. 2).

Air photography in the drought of 1984 and in the dry summer of 1989 has produced cropmark evidence in Dyfed for a number of defended enclosures whose morphology suggests a new site type that may be commonplace throughout the region.

The county of Dyfed has good surviving earthworks of defended enclosures and small hillforts, and hitherto most discussion on settlement patterns has been confined to upstanding sites. Air surveys since 1978, especially in dry summers, have begun to produce evidence for an inadequacy in our understanding of prehistoric and native Romano-British settlement patterns with the discovery of many new defended enclosures surviving only as cropmarks. Building on the work of Professor St Joseph, numerous straight-sided defended cropmark enclosures have been revealed, although the probably mistaken assumption that some of these are of Roman date has tended to exclude them from consideration of prehistoric settlement patterns. The straight-sided cropmark noted by the author in 1984 underlying the surviving earthworks of the later prehistoric Woodbarn Rath (SN 01681703) has corroborative excavation evidence (Vyner 1986) that this cropmark at least is of earlier prehistoric date.

This paper is concerned with the nature of the relationship that existed between Central Europe and the Aegean area in the early 1st millennium B.C. Interest in Aegean-continental connections has been strong for a considerable time, but has been intensified, particularly from the continental standpoint, in the past fifteen years. Although some of these studies have been concerned with the contacts between 2nd millennium (Late Bronze Age) Greece and the north, others have examined in detail the evidence for the links between the Urnfield culture and Greece during the 10th, 9th and 8th centuries. For Greece, this is an utterly different period from the preceding one; the evidence for foreign contacts suddenly becomes scarce and that for military disasters is virtually non-existent. Yet some scholars have reached very similar conclusions, involving the transmission of objects and of the people who carried them from Central Europe into Greece, for this period as for the preceding Late Bronze Age. Such arguments have a recent exponent in Professor W. Kimmig, whose paper Seevölkerbewegung und Urnenfelderkultur ranges over the whole period from about 1200 to 700. His list of objects and practices in this period, which he considers to have been donated by the Danube-Balkan peoples to the Mediterranean world, is comprehensive indeed: it would include bronze shields and body armour, the equipment of Goliath, the knobbed ware of Troy VII B, the practice of cremation in the Iron Age, the ritual spoliation of weapons in graves, iron swords, spears, knives, bits, lugged axes, spits, fire-dogs, bronze personal objects generally, clay idols, the maeander pattern and the swans of Apollo.