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.

Combining non- and minimally invasive archaeological survey, geomorphological methods and linguistic studies enables a better understanding of the dynamic use of the Daugava waterway from the Bronze to the Viking ages. Results indicate a common origin period of many fortified settlements and also identify research questions about cultural fluctuations in the Baltic-Slavic–Scandinavian contact area.

Small, disc-shaped shell beads are recorded as mortuary offerings in many Neolithic and Bronze Age burials in Southeast Asia. Yet the provenance of these artefacts is often obscure, as production processes involve the removal of diagnostic morphological features, negating taxonomic classification. Here, the authors report on the combined isotopic and morphological analysis of a subset of shell beads from the site of Ban Non Wat in north-east Thailand. In addition to identifying freshwater sources for nearly all the beads, the results suggest the presence of multiple shell production centres—each with access to distinct aqueous environments—and widespread exchange in the Bronze Age.

The game of fifty-eight holes is one of the longest recognized games of antiquity, but also one of the least understood. New evidence from the Caspian littoral points to an early adoption of the game by Middle Bronze Age seasonally pastoral cattle herders in the late third millennium and early second millennium bc. Six boards bearing this game's distinct pattern were found at sites on the Abşeron Peninsula and Gobustan Reserve in Azerbaijan. Their presence there not only indicates that the region was connected to societies to the south, but also demonstrates the game's popularity across cultures and socioeconomic groups. Its supposed first appearance in Egypt is questioned in favour of a south-western Asian origin.

Humans have utilised caves for funerary activities for millennia and their unique preservational conditions provide a wealth of evidence for treatments of the dead. This paper examines the evidence for funerary practices in the caves of Scotland and northern England from the Bronze Age to the Roman Iron Age (c. 2200 bc–ad 400) in the context of later prehistoric funerary ritual. Results suggest significant levels of perimortem trauma on human skeletal remains from caves relative to those from non-cave sites. We also observe a recurrent pattern of deposition involving inhumation of neonates in contrast to excarnation of older individuals.

Jicha is a Bronze Age settlement located next to the upper Mekong River in the Hengduan Mountains of Yunnan, south-west China. Recent excavations have revealed details of successive occupation and copper-base industrial activity. The site's position and chronology provide evidence of north–south demographic movement and technological transmission along the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau corridor.

A battle-axe made of picrite from the Cwm Mawr rock source, near Hyssington, Powys, UK, was discovered during the archaeological excavation of two Early Bronze Age barrows at Church Lawton, near Alsager in Cheshire, UK, in 1982–3. It had been subjected to intense heat and then placed in a pit, next to the cremated remains of an adult, possibly a female. The heating has radically altered the appearance of the axe. Originally very smooth and dark grey-green, it now has a more granular and dusty feel, together with a mottled orange-reddish appearance. The Church Lawton battle-axe is particularly notable as it is among a small number of such artefacts in Britain to have been recovered from a barrow excavation conducted according to modern standards, as well as being directly associated with an interment dated by radiocarbon: 1893–1740 cal bc (3490 ± 29 bp). It is also the first implement from the Cwm Mawr rock source to be dated in this way. An initial examination of the battle-axe was conducted in the 1980s. A more exacting analysis of the object has now been undertaken, focusing on its petrology in relation to the rock source, its manufacture and use, and its heating. The new examination included the use of stereoscopic and metallographic microscopes. This paper details the new work and provides an enhanced understanding of the implement’s history and significance, emphasising the likely connections between the Early Bronze Age community at Church Lawton and others in the wider region.

Countering the passive representation of rivers in many previous accounts of later prehistory – as static vessels for spectacular deposits, highways for transport and communication, and backdrops for settlement and farming – this paper asks if and how rivers actively shaped prehistoric lives. Rivers have long been hailed as conduits for prehistoric materials and ideas. However, positive archaeological correlates of the processes involved are notoriously difficult to identify and have rarely been scrutinised in detail. Using the example of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age pottery in the east of England (1150–350 bc), we examine in detail how prehistoric pottery-making traditions cohered around river valleys over an extended time period and were thus, to a certain extent, generated by rivers. Drawing on wider evidence for the flow of people and things in this region we build a broader multi-dimensional account of how people, objects, and practices moved in a period of diverse lifeways in which the makeup of human mobility is not well understood. In doing so, we hope to tether abstract arguments about the active role of rivers and other non-human elements in shaping past lives and to approach the often missing ‘middle ground’ – small-scale movements at local and regional scales – in existing archaeological discussions about mobility.

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.

This study presents the first extensive radiocarbon dating programme of Bronze Age material from northern Germany, and it combines radiocarbon dates, relative typo-chronological date ranges, and stratigraphic data within a Bayesian chronological framework. We estimate the cemetery complex at Mang de Bargen (Bornhöved, distr. Segeberg, Schleswig-Holstein) to be in use for more than two millennia, which is exceptionally long in northern Germany and in a wider European context. The site provides a unique insight into the dynamic nature of burial monuments and associated burial practices, from the Late Neolithic and into the Pre-Roman Iron Age (c. 2500–50 bc). The barrow building tradition lasted around a millennium (c. 2350 –1300 bc), with several barrows in concurrent use. The barrows were persistently re-used as burial ground, both within ‘living memory’ of the primary graves, but also long after. The burial intensity varied over the cemetery’s use-life, with distinct peaks in the Late Neolithic, when the first barrows were erected; in the Older Bronze Age when more barrows were erected; in the Younger Bronze Age, when secondary cremation graves were added to existing barrows; and finally in the Pre-Roman Iron Age, with the addition of an urnfield. The funerary rituals vary considerably over the period: from inhumation to cremation, and from primary and secondary graves in barrows to flat graves. Cremation was introduced in the 14th century bc but inhumation and cremation were used in parallel for around a century before the former ritual was abandoned c. 1300 bc. The study provides absolute chronological distributions of the grave types present at Mang de Bargen and shows them to be comparable to other sites at a regional and over-regional scale, successfully demonstrating how new types were quickly adopted across large parts of north-western Europe.

In this article, the authors present the salient archaeological results of a diachronic, interdisciplinary research project on rural settlement and land use in a region of low mountains in southern Germany. Despite clear locational disadvantages, in particular great distances to drinking water sources, archaeological excavations and an extensive dating programme document an unexpectedly long continuity of prehistoric settlement in the area.

The settlement of Ban Non Wat charts the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in north-eastern Thailand. Examination of grave inclusions and mortuary treatment at this important site allows insights into social change during this key period. Increasing complexity and the inclusion of exotic items in the mortuary treatment of some individuals early in the Bronze Age is suggested to show the rise of a lineage of aggrandisers who controlled access to these symbolic articles. But, the author argues, their elevated status was ephemeral, forfeited as local bronze casting became established.

The deposition of intentionally damaged metal artefacts within burials and hoards is a phenomenon attested in areas as disparate as Ireland and the Caucasus during the Bronze and Iron Ages. While ritual significance is often attributed to such damage in burial contexts, the intentions behind the inclusion of damaged objects in hoards remain enigmatic. This article synthesises evidence for the intentional destruction of metal artefacts from 70 sites in the territory of modern Georgia and analyses patterns of deliberate damage over time and space. The study of these damaged artefacts enhances our understanding of ritual practice at a local level and locates the south Caucasus within the wider networks of this phenomenon.

Myanmar is located within an important geographic corridor of prehistoric demographic and technological exchange, yet relatively few archaeological sites have been securely dated. Here, the authors present a new radiocarbon chronology for Halin, a UNESCO-listed complex in the north-central Sagaing Division of Myanmar, which contributes to the generation of nuanced regional chronologies and to improving the temporal resolution of Southeast Asia more generally. Discussion of 94 radiocarbon determinates, together with site stratigraphy and pottery traditions, provides a chronological sequence from the early third millennium BC to the early second millennium AD. Corroboration of the beginning of this sequence would place Halin as the oldest currently dated Neolithic site in Mainland Southeast Asia and would provide support for the two-layer model of Neolithic migration.

Grain-cooking traditions in Neolithic China have been characterised as a ‘wet’ cuisine based on the boiling and steaming of sticky varieties of cereal. One of these, broomcorn millet, was one of the earliest Chinese crops to move westward into Central Asia and beyond, into regions where grains were typically prepared by grinding and baking. Here, the authors present the genotypes and reconstructed phenotypes of 13 desiccated broomcorn millet samples from Xinjiang (1700 BC–AD 700). The absence in this area of sticky-starch millet and vessels for boiling and steaming suggests that, as they moved west, East Asian cereal crops were decoupled from traditional cooking practices and were incorporated into local cuisines.

There are now 101 radiocarbon dates from the long Paleolithic and post-Paleolithic culture-stratigraphic sequence in El Mirón Cave, Cantabrian Spain. Here we report on two dates on bone from two different humans whose remains were found in disturbed surface sediments in the cave vestibule rear and that confirm the existence of burials in addition to previously reported residential occupations in the vestibule front pertaining to the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age periods (ca. 5500–3500 cal BP). In another attempt to resolve problems of stratigraphic incoherence of dates from the early Magdalenian periods in the vestibule rear, six new assays on faunal remains from Levels 119, 117, 114, 108, and 106 were run at Queen’s University in Belfast. There continue to be date inversions in the Lower Magdalenian range of levels that may be explained by a combination of intensive anthropic and rodent activity, major rock fall, slope wash and gravity-caused object movements, as well as possible problems in following some thin levels during excavations over a large area and across many years of work in the cave vestibule interior, particularly in the absence of any layers that are culturally sterile or even poor. Nonetheless, the coherent age of the Initial Magdalenian is fully confirmed by a new date from Level 21 in the vestibule front at ca. 22,000–20,500 cal BP), as is the general age range of the Lower Magdalenian (ca. 20,500–18,000 cal BP).

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.

Connections between northern Iberia and western France around the Bay of Biscay during the Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age, and Middle Bronze Age are addressed in this article through a multivariate cluster analysis of a dataset of 1273 metal finds, comprising 4554 metal artefacts grouped into five multiregional clusters with distinctive distributions, chronologies, content, and contexts. Changes in distribution and chronology show that metalwork from faraway regions was deposited in similar ways, reflecting changing patterns of interregional connectivity. Changes in context and content suggest social transformations. The clustering method known as Latent Class Analysis is presented here in the hope that it will be applicable to other datasets elsewhere in the world.

During the third millennium BC, new types of anthropogenic landscape emerged across northern Europe: heathlands and pasture. These open landscapes afforded mobile pastoralism and the arena for a new funerary practice: barrow building. Here, the authors define this entanglement of people, animals and landscapes as a literal and figurative ‘ancestral commons’. Focusing on western Jutland, they combine palaeoecological and archaeological evidence to characterise the form and temporal depth of the co-emergent links between pastoralism, barrows and mobility. Conceptualising the ancestral commons as a deep-time entanglement, characterised by rhythms of physical and metaphorical movement, reveals a landscape that afforded shared understanding of the ancestral past and a foundation for the subsequent Nordic Bronze Age.