The initial spread of food production in eastern Africa is associated with livestock herding during the Pastoral Neolithic. Recent excavation at Luxmanda, Tanzania, a site dating to c. 3000 BP, revealed circular installations of lower grinding stones and numerous handstones. This discovery, unprecedented for this era, challenges previous ideas about pastoralist mobility and subsistence.

The Small Cycladic Islands Project is a diachronic archaeological survey of several small, currently uninhabited islands located in the Cyclades, Greece. In 2019 and 2020, surface investigations focused on the multi-method, comparative documentation of 21 islets surrounding Paros and Antiparos, revealing oscillating patterns of use and non-use from prehistory to the present.

Investigations at Bushat in northern Albania during 2017–2019 have brought to light a massive fortification wall dating to the fourth century BC and enclosing approximately 20ha of hilly terrain. The wall is connected to the development of Illyrian settlements and the Hellenisation of the area.

The EVOSHEEP project combines archaeozoology, geometric morphometrics and genetics to study archaeological sheep assemblages dating from the sixth to the first millennia BC in eastern Africa, the Levant, the Anatolian South Caucasus, the Iranian Plateau and Mesopotamia. The project aims to understand changes in the physical appearance and phenotypic characteristics of sheep and how these related to the appearance of new breeds and the demand for secondary products to supply the textile industry.

The residential architecture of Alexandria has traditionally been extrapolated based on comparison with the plans and decoration of monumental hypogea from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. New evidence from an archaeological research programme launched at Kom el-Dikka offers novel insights into the style of domestic architecture and the urban topography of the city.

At the time of European contact, Torres Strait, New Guinea and northern Australia were home to highly restricted fraternities focused on warfare, headhunting and mortuary rituals. Masked dancers, representing spirits of the dead, initiated the next generation into secrets reputedly brought by a pantheon of wandering heroes, such as Waiat. A new project explores the deep history of Islander traditions, excavating initiation places associated with Waiat. In so doing, it demonstrates the advantages of collaborative history-building using archaeology and traditional knowledge.

A large-scale geophysical survey conducted recently in Alaska has confirmed the location of a fort associated with a pivotal battle between Tlingit people and Russian colonising forces. The find is preceded by a century of attempts to locate the fort, which the authors have now identified from its unusual shape.

Motifs featuring trios of figures have been discovered at a newly documented rock art site in the Swaga Swaga Game Reserve in Tanzania. These images find parallels in paintings from rockshelters at the nearby Kolo site, and raise the possibility that they represent anthropomorphic figures with stylised buffalo heads.

Dated to the transitional period from the Bronze Age to Early Iron Age (fourteenth to eighth centuries BC), a unique site discovered at Tartas-1 in Western Siberia has yielded the remains of frame-and-post structures, metallurgic furnaces, votive bronze objects, pottery fragments, and animal and human bones. The authors argue that this site represents the first known cultic complex in Western Siberia.

This paper presents the results of a non-photorealistic rendering technique applied to three different types of reliefs from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Meryneith at Saqqara.

The discovery of a multi-chambered long cairn in central Brittany dating to the Middle Neolithic period challenges previous conceptions of the coastal focus of Neolithic society in this region.

This project develops theoretical as well as methodological tools for the study of ancient wood, focusing on wood-use in North-eastern Europe within the period AD 1100–1600. The authors approach wood within the framework of object biographies and link the study of wooden artefacts with broader archaeological understandings of formation processes and environmental reconstruction.

The ‘Maritime Endangered Archaeology’ (MarEA) project is conducting remote, large-scale identification and assessment of vulnerable maritime heritage to assist in its management in the face of challenges such as climate change and rapid urbanisation.

A multi-disciplinary research project in the Aras Valley, Armenia, focuses on the remains of the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age settlement of Metsamor. The results challenge prior understandings of the settlement's past and the role it played in the region, especially during the first centuries of the first millennium BC.

A sickle boat petroglyph in Wadi Asafir, North-west Arabia, can potentially stretch the geographic scope of the connection between Egypt and Western Arabia in the fourth millennium BC.

Excavations in marginal areas of the loess uplands in southern Poland have revealed that the northern periphery of the Sandomierz Upland was intensely colonised in the sixth and fifth millennia BC by Linearbandkeramik and Malice Culture Danubian communities. This research suggests that analogous settlement clusters may exist in other marginal regions of the Central European loess belt, previously thought to be uninhabited.

The first formal bone tool in the Central Altai of Russia was found in an Early Upper Palaeolithic assemblage at the Kara-Bom open-air site. Here the authors report the results of AMS dating, use-wear analysis, 3D-modelling and zooarchaeological and collagen fingerprinting analysis, which reveal important new insights into the osseous technology of the Kara-Bomian tradition.

The discovery of an Early Upper Palaeolithic rockshelter, Nahal Rahaf 2, in the southern Judean Desert revives the debate about whether the Levantine Aurignacian extended into the arid regions of the Southern Levant.

A Late Bronze Age hoard from Karmin, Poland, contained 16 socketed axes, half of which were made of copper. The copper axes represent the same local type as the bronze objects and bear the same traces of manufacturing and use. The authors argue that the move to copper was a response to unexpected difficulties in the tin supply.

Ceramics discovered at Yan'an, Shaanxi, are glazed using a polychrome technique previously unknown in the Han Dynasty. Chemical analysis shows similar technological methods to those used during the Warring States period. This paper demonstrates two possible influences for the polychrome decoration that ultimately suggest Eurasian cultural hybridity and exchange.