A fragment of equid tibia found with a Mousterian assemblage in a rockshelter in the Crimean peninsula is carefully examined. The authors show that it has been knapped like flint to produce a tool probably at a time when stone resources were becoming exhausted. This tool is thus the product of a Neanderthal response to a local need as well as proof that the technological properties of bone were known.

The authors identify natural bitumen on stone implements dating to 70 000 BP. It is proposed that this represents residue from hafting, taking the practice back a further 30 000 years from the date previously noted and published in Nature. The bitumen was tracked to a source 40km away, using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and carbon isotopes.

The new art objects from Zaraysk show an extraordinary repertoire of incised carving on mammoth ivory plaques and carving in the round, including representations of women and large mammals, and geometric decoration on bone utensils. The authors show that while belonging to the broad family of Upper Palaeolithic artists, the Zaraysk carvers produced forms particular to their region, some with magical associations.

The present study examines the stone weapons available in Late Palaeolithic Korea, showing how the change in lithics signals a change in hunting strategy. In advance of the Late Glacial Maximum, a tanged spear tip flourished, reflecting the hunting of large mammals associated with the colder climate. In the more variable climate that followed, the prevalence of microliths suggests lightweight composite hunting weapons mostly used in pursuit of small game and diverse food resources. These weapons eventually included bow and arrows in the final Pleistocene.

The Sujala site in northern Finnish Lapland is a reindeer hunters' camp from the early post-glacial period, discovered by the authors in 2002. The site was originally linked with the Preboreal occupation of the north Norwegian coast, but further excavations and analyses indicate that it actually represents a totally new phenomenon: evidence for an eastern influx into Lapland around the Preboreal–Boreal transition. This discovery has far-reaching implications for the colonisation of north Scandinavia, but also for the subsequent development of Early Mesolithic settlement in northern Finland and Norway.

A small group of exotic obsidian blades supplied from over 600km distant reached a particular area of the East Mound at Çatalhöyük in the Early Ceramic Neolithic (7000-6300 cal BC). The authors explore a variety of explanations and contexts, including changes in technology, agricultural expansion, gift exchange, bride-wealth and incomers from the east.

The rondels – circular earthworks of late Neolithic Europe – have a repeated form highly suggestive of deliberate design and symbolism. The concentric ditches are cut by two, three or most often four causeways at right angles. Here the authors investigate the orientation of the causeways in 51 rondels belonging to the Lengyel culture and conclude that they correlate well with the sunrise. The idea of a solar cult receives some corroboration from patterns on contemporary pottery.

The famous headdress of Pu-abum at Ur is an object of great beauty. But the authors show that the gold leaves of the headdresses and diadems of her court circle can tell an even richer story. Identifying among them the leaves of the sissoo tree, they show that its symbolic usage celebrated a wide range of properties, from medicine to furniture. These were properties appreciated not only in Mesopotamia but in eastern Iran and the Indus Valley, home to the sissoo tree as well as to neighbouring civilisations.

Emotional news for lovers of a dry white wine. The blissful Hippocrene was composed from wild grapes from the sixth millennium BC in the lands of its natural habitat. But, as the author shows, the cultivation, domestication and selective breeding of the grape following in the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age was aimed primarily at the enjoyment of its sweetness.

What happened at the sites of prehistoric burial mounds after they were erected? In the southern highlands of Brazil and Argentina the pre-Hispanic mounds of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries AD are surrounded by large circular enclosures with avenues leading to their centre. The authors discovered that the banks of the surrounding enclosure were built up over several generations of time, accompanied by a succession of ovens. Ethnohistoric observations of more recent peoples in the same region suggested an explanation: the cremation of a chief was followed by periodic feasts at his mound, where meat was steamed and maize beer prepared at the edge of the gathering.

At Antiquity's invitation the author offers this account of recent research and current objectives at the famous ancient Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan. After a century of investigation, archaeologists are beginning to see something of the composition and preoccupations of one of America's first urban societies, and how it began, flourished and ended.

‘Any study of Great Zimbabwe has to rely a great deal on re-examining and re-assessing the work of early investigators, the men who removed all the most important finds from the ruins and stripped them of so much of their deposits’ (Garlake 1973: 14). The authors have here done us a great service in reviewing the surviving archaeological evidence from this world famous site. They challenge the structuralist interpretation – in which different parts of the site were allocated to kings, priests, wives or to circumcision rituals – and use the architectural, stratigraphic and artefactual evidence accumulated over the years to present a new sequence. The early enclosures on the hill, the Great Enclosure and the valley enclosures now appear as the work of successive rulers, each founding a new residence and power centre in accord with Shona practice.

On Tongatapu the central place of the rising kingdom of Tonga developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD. Marked out as a monumental area with a rock-cut water-carrying ditch, it soon developed as the site of a sequence of megalithic tombs, in parallel with the documented expansion of the maritime chiefdom. The results of investigations into these structures were achieved with minimum intervention and disturbance on the ground, since the place remains sacred and in use.

The authors raise spatial analysis to a new level of sophistication – and insight – in proposing a mathematical model of ‘imperfect optimisation’ to describe maritime networks. This model encodes, metaphorically, the notion of gravitational attraction between objects in space. The space studied here is the southern Aegean in the Middle Bronze Age, and the objects are the 34 main sites we know about. The ‘gravitation’ in this case is a balance of social forces, expressed by networks with settlements of particular sizes and links of particular strengths. The model can be tweaked by giving different relative importance to the cultivation of local resources or to trade, and to show what happens when a member of the network suddenly disappears.

The aurochs was a type of wild cattle not extinct in Europe until the mid-second millennium BC – so they must have co-existed for centuries with the domestic cattle which were to supplant it. Here the authors use stable isotope analysis to show what form that co-existence took: the domestic cattle grazing on the pasture, and the aurochs lurking in the forests and wet places.

Methods for mapping and determining the condition of archaeological resources while they are still underground have been in development for nearly half a century. The authors here offer an example from the frontiers of the art: the application of a package of remote sensing procedures not only designed to locate sites but to model the valley deposits which contain and cover them. The variation in success of different methods in different deposits offers a guide to the design of evaluation projects on sand and gravel terrain everywhere.

The authors assess the potential contribution of lidar surveys to national inventories of archaeological resources (‘Historic Environment Records’), and compare the relative costs and sensitivity of lidar and aerial photography.

The mysterious rock-cut cart ruts of Malta are here examined by geomorphologists. They find that the ruts could be caused by two-wheeled carts with a gauge of 1.40m carrying moderate loads. In wet weather the carts would gradually cut into the limestone and reach their ground clearance of 0.675m, causing the carriers to try another route – so there are plenty of them.

What did the British know about Islam before the modern period? The author reviews evidence which shows that there was contact with, and appreciation of, Muslim culture from almost the time of the Hegira in the seventh century. This appreciation varied and was reflected in different choices of material culture: coinage, ceramics and architecture, in successive periods from the eighth century to the nineteenth.