During the mid-first millennium AD, new kingdoms and states emerged across South Asia. At this time, land grants made to Hindu temples are thought to have led to wide-ranging societal transformations. To date, however, neither the land-grant charters nor the changes they are said to have driven have been studied archaeologically. Here, the authors present the results of the first archaeological investigation of the charters and their landscape context. Bringing together the textual record with a survey of 268 religious and residential sites, the results establish historical baselines against which the longue durée developments of South Asian social, political and economic formation can be profitably re-posed.

Except for some excavated coastal sites, the rural hinterland of ancient Chersonesos on the Tarkhankut Peninsula in north-west Crimea has been understood only from pot scatters recorded during landscape survey and fieldwalking. The city's rural territory (chora) thrived from the fourth to second century BC, but little is known of the identity of its inhabitants, especially those in the inland areas. This paper presents the results of the first systematic excavations in this part of the peninsula. The results challenge previous notions that the territory was occupied by nomadic indigenous communities and reveal that the site shared the fate of the entire Chersonesean chora, meeting a violent end in the early part of the third century BC.

Surface collection, exposed sections and the use of irrigation wells and channels enabled the authors to map the settlement pattern of the elusive Dian kingdom before it became a subsidiary of the Han empire. The pattern showed that the Dian were already hierarchical, with settlements of different sizes and a political centre in which ritual bronzes featured. The empire redrew the landscape, with settlement migrating away from the wetlands into the hills where it could oversee the routes of communication into Southeast Asia.

CORONA satellite imagery, preserving an account of the earth's surface from 40 years ago, is a most important archaeological survey tool and we have often sung its praises. Here the authors use new procedures to extend the competence and revelations of CORONA even further. Stereo pairs derived from images taken from fore and aft of the satellite give three dimensional images of landscapes and even individual sites. Techniques of modelling and rectification restore the sites to their original shape without recourse to survey on the ground – in many cases no longer possible since the sites have been buried, inundated or erased. The ingenuity shown here indicates that results from CORONA are only going to get better.