Studies of human behavioural responses to climate change have begun to address traditional archaeological questions in new ways. Hitherto, most of these studies have focused on western Eurasia, but the question of human response to rapid climatic changes in northern Japan during the Upper Palaeolithic period opens up new perspectives. Combining artefact studies and palaeoenvironmental evidence, Japan provides a case study for how quickly modern humans adapted to new environmental challenges, and how that adaptation can be charted through the lithic technologies employed in different geoclimatic circumstances.

Attempts to understand the origins of domestication and sedentary settlement in the Near East have traditionally focused on the Fertile Crescent. Beyond this region, however, in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains of north-eastern Iran, evidence has emerged that charts the Neolithic transition over a period of 1500 years. Investigations at the twin mounds of Tappeh Sang-e Chakhmaq have revealed pre-pottery and pottery Neolithic occupation in a sequence long enough to document the evolving exploitation of plants and animals leading to the development of a permanent, agro-pastoral community during the eighth to sixth millennia BC. The continuous occupation of this settlement during this crucial transition allows significant changes in lifestyle to be mapped, and provides a new framework for the earliest Neolithic occupation of Iran.

An unexpected new source of tin was recently located at Hisarcık, in the foothills of the Mount Erciyes volcano in the Kayseri Plain, close to the Bronze Age town of Kültepe, ancient Kanesh and home to a colony of Assyrian traders. Volcanoes in Turkey have always been associated with obsidian sources but were not known to be a major source of heavy metals, much less tin. X-ray fluorescence analyses of the Hisarcık ores revealed the presence of minerals suitable for the production of complex copper alloys, and sufficient tin and arsenic content to produce tin-bronze. These findings revise our understanding of bronze production in Anatolia in the third millennium BC and demand a re-evaluation of Assyrian trade routes and the position of the Early Bronze Age societies of Anatolia within that network.

Rock art, especially in China, has often been associated with the non-literate, non-Chinese periphery. It is often thought of very broadly as a universal phenomenon rooted in religion and sharing a widely recognised iconography. This paper challenges both of these assumptions. Its focus is the rock art of the Zuo River in the Guangxi Province of China and in particular its landscape location and visibility. Broadening the parameters of what we categorise as rock art, such art is shown to have multi-layered meanings that spoke to different groups in different ways. The content, location and visibility of images along this arterial waterway reveal how rock art played a significant role in life and death in Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Guangxi.

The discovery in Llanmaes, South Wales, of a large midden dating from the Early Iron Age provided an opportunity to deepen our understanding of feasting in late prehistoric Britain. But the dominance of right fore-limbs of pigs in the faunal assemblage has raised questions about the social processes represented by this activity. The evidence suggests a move away from conspicuous consumption by an Early Iron Age elite towards a more community-focused event designed to galvanise social relations at a time when the breakdown of bronze exchange networks was challenging the social order.

Although animal cults are a widely recognised feature of religion in ancient Egypt, little is known about the nature of the catacombs and mummies associated with the temples dedicated to animal gods. Here the authors present a biography of the Catacombs of Anubis at North Saqqara in Egypt, from their peak activity in the Late Period to their exploitation in modern times for raw materials. This research highlights the hitherto unappreciated scale of burial practices associated with animal cults, and the industries they supported and were supported by. The evidence suggests that the animal cults played a significant economic role, both in ancient Egypt and in subsequent eras.

The pre-Contact foraging communities of the north-west coast of North America have long been recognised as exhibiting many of the features we associate with agricultural societies, including sedentism and social inequality. Evidence from the pre-Contact plank house communities of Meier and Cathlapotle throws new light on the spatial organisation of these societies. Detailed analysis of stone tools allows the spatial division of labour to be determined within these large, multi-family households. This reveals that while some tasks were associated with particular social ranks, a hierarchical community can be identified in each plank house. Overall, the differences lie in the degree of engagement rather than the kind of activity, helping to characterise labour organisation among these unique, sedentary foragers. The results also provide insight into the potential of stone tool analysis for social reconstruction.

During the final stages of the Second World War, a trench was dug in woodland near a small Polish village, probably by prisoners of war. There are no eye witness accounts and very few artefacts survive. The only way the story of these prisoners can be told is through the material memory held by the woodland. This paper aims to broaden the concept of material culture by considering the archaeological record that is retained in the bark of living trees. The focus is on the beech trees of Chycina that may hold the only record of the construction of a small section of the Festungsfront Oder-Warthe-Bogen in western Poland in 1944.

For many years, archaeologists and archaeometallurgists have suggested that recycled copper might have constituted a significant component of the metal in circulation in Britain during the first millennium AD. They have generally failed, however, to suggest a way of observing and quantifying this phenomenon. Here the authors propose a new methodology to rectify this. A large new database of chemical analyses of British copper alloys dating from the late Iron Age to the early medieval period demonstrates the potential of their approach; it shows that significant and measureable changes occur in metal circulation at the beginning of the first century AD and in the early Saxon period.

Pre-Columbian transoceanic contacts have long been controversial. The controversy stems from the fact that those supporting arguments for such crossings have often not evaluated the evidence as critically as was necessary. On the other hand, those dismissing these arguments have frequently ignored the inevitability of such events over long periods of time. One aspect of these debates that is seldom evaluated is the likelihood of vessels, with or without survivors, or floating artefacts, crossing oceans. As an example, a recent debate (Hristov & Genovés 1999, 2011; Shaaf & Wagner 1999; Smith 2011) centred on the head of a Roman figurine purportedly discovered in a pre-Columbian context at the site of Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca in Mexico. Neither argument for or against the veracity of the pre-Columbian context of the artefact discusses how likely drift events are across the mid-Atlantic.