Our extensive knowledge of Roman London is the result of over four decades of large-scale excavation. In the UK, the establishment and growth of professional archaeology since the 1970s, coupled with the funding provided by property developers since 1990 (Fulford & Holbrook 2015), has transformed our understanding of both urban and rural sites—and nowhere more so than London. A combination of intensive building development in the City of London and the world-leading technical quality of many of the excavations means that Londinium is now probably both the most extensively and best-excavated major town of the Roman world. Knowledge generated by these excavations, however, has not always been made available through publications as it should have been. Although there is an important archive in which the records of past projects are curated, how and where to publish results has been a long-running problem, especially for the excavations of the 1970s and 1980s where post-excavation work was often not properly funded or supported. One major project to publish a synthesis of work on such sites in Southwark, south of the Thames, did result in a series of important volumes (Sidell et al. 2002; Cowan 2003; Hammer 2003; Yule 2005; Cowan et al. 2009), but a programme designed to provide systematic coverage of such projects in the City of London, to the north of the river (Maloney 1990; Perring & Roskams 1991; Williams 1993; Davis et al. 1994), failed to produce one of the five volumes promised—that concerning the archaeology of the key eastern hill. We also lack any up-to-date synthesis, a problem only partly compensated for by Dominic Perring's (1991) popular overview and Wallace's (2014) in-depth analysis of the evidence for the period down to the Boudiccan revolt in AD 60/61.

For this issue of New Book Chronicle, we don lifejackets and head out on, and under, the high seas to review recent volumes on aspects of maritime and underwater archaeology. Along the way are tales of pirates and the odd Sherman tank, but we set sail with Site formation processes of submerged shipwrecks, edited by Matthew Keith. The Introduction, by Oxley and Keith, outlines the development of site formation theory in maritime archaeology, and flags the foundational work of Keith Muckelroy, as summarised through his flow diagram of the sequence of cultural and environmental processes at work between a wrecking event and archaeological investigation. This model features strongly not only in the following chapters, but in every one of the volumes considered below.

The Middle East generally (Bar-Yosef 1994) and Iran specifically (Vahdati Nasab et al. 2013) have become a focus for the study of human migration between South-west Asia and Central and Eastern Asia during the Pleistocene (Asgari Khaneghah et al. 2005; Biglari & Shidrang 2006; Heydari Guran 2012). In Iran, studies of the Palaeolithic have concentrated on the Zagros and Alborz areas, but recent work in the sub-montane areas, desert margins and lowland plains have also revealed interesting results regarding the activities of hunter-gatherer societies (Biglari et al. 2000; Dashtizadeh 2009; Vahdati Nasab et al. 2009, 2010, 2013; Darabi et al. 2012).

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA; c. 9600–8500 cal BC) period in the Levant provides the earliest confirmed evidence for plant cultivation anywhere in the world, marking a significant escalation in the human management of plants towards fully fledged agricultural food production. Until now, the majority of PPNA sites have been documented in the Jordan Valley, the Wadi Araba and farther north along the Upper Euphrates (e.g. Mureybet, Jerf el-Ahmar, Djade). By contrast, few PPNA sites have so far been reported from the semi-arid to arid eastern part of the Levantine interior. Among these is El Aoui Safa (Coqueugniot & Anderson 1996) and sporadic flint scatters elsewhere in the Harra. Recent fieldwork in the Qa’ Shubayqa area in the Harra has produced the first evidence for a more substantial settlement site in this region.

The archaeological site of Al-Ashoosh is a third-millennium BC settlement located in the Rub al-Khali Desert (or Empty Quarter), 70km south of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (Figure 1). This site provides an excellent example of the type of occupation of the inland deserts of the Oman peninsula during the period following the Holocene Climatic Optimum. Between November 2015 and May 2016, the Dubai Municipality and the Sanisera Archaeology Institute conducted excavations at the site of Al-Ashoosh. This site was discovered during two seasons of survey in 2002–2003. This survey work, undertaken by the Dubai Municipality and the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, identified 33 archaeological sites ranging in date from prehistory to the late Islamic period. In 2006–2007, more-detailed archaeological investigations of the area of Al-Ashoosh were conducted, including survey, excavation and geological sampling (Casana et al. 2009; Herrmann 2012; Contreras & Carcacer 2016).

Digital media and learning initiatives for virtual collaborative environments are contributing to the definition of new (sub-)disciplines in archaeological and heritage sciences. New nomenclature and terminology is emerging such as cyber archaeology, cyber archaeometry, virtual worlds and augmented and immersive realities; and all of them are related to museums and cultural heritage—tangible, intangible or natural (Forte 2010; Liritzis et al. 2015).

The burial of animals is attested in Egypt from the pre-Dynastic period through to Roman times. This phenomenon is observed across different animal species and involves varied funerary practices, although mummification is the most significant. Against this background, a series of burials of small animals, under excavation since 2011 at Berenike, suggests a unique example of pet-keeping rather than the religious or magical deposits found in the Nile Valley.

Durham University's Sudan Archive was founded in 1957 by former members of the Sudan Government under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, and by staff from Durham University, including the first director of the Oriental Museum, T.W. Thacker (Cory & Forbes 1983). Since the initial call for donations, the Sudan Archive has now collected 800 boxes of documents and photographs, mainly from former Sudan Government officials. This material now forms an integral part of Durham University Library's special collections (Sudan Archive Catalogue). The archive holds a wide variety of documents, from personal communications and photographs, to official reports mainly pertaining to political and social issues from early twentieth-century Sudan and neighbouring countries. It also includes a wealth of material relevant to the archaeology of both the Sudan and neighbouring countries (e.g. Egypt, Israel, Syria) (Figure 1), yet only a limited amount of the potentially relevant material has been used by archaeologists. The Sudan Archive remains a largely untapped resource for archaeological research. This situation is probably to be explained partly by the description of the archive as a historical and political collection; moreover, a search of the existing catalogue for the term ‘archaeology’ returns only four results, whereas about 700 documents are directly relevant to the subject. An additional problem is that the spellings of both archaeological sites and locations are inconsistent; for example, Meroë also appears as Meroe, Merowe and Bakarwiyyeh. To remedy these issues and to make the material more accessible, a recent project has identified over 1000 individual references to archaeological sites or themes and catalogued them in a database (Figure 2).