The site of Sungir (alternatively Sounghir) lies east of the town of Vladimir, about 200 km northeast of Moscow. It is a large mid Upper Palaeolithic ('Eastern Gravettian' sensu lato) cultural accumulation on the left bank of the Kliazma river, of which some 1500 sq. m was excavated in several seasons between 1957 and 1964 (Bader 1965; 1967; 1978; 1998).The single burial (Grave 1/Sungir 1) was excavated in 1964. It is that ofan adult male in extended, supine position, with his head oriented to the northeast and hands placed over his pubis (Figure 1). The second grave was discovered in 1969 and contained two adolescents — one male (Sungir 2) and one (probably) female (Sungir 3) — both extended, supine and lying head to head (Figure 2). All three burials were covered in red ochre and Sungir 1 was possibly associated with fires in a manner intriguingly similar to the DVXVI male burialat Dolní Větonice, Moravia (Svoboda et al. 1996).

The Holocene mud-flats of Formby Point, at the mouth of the Mersey estuary in northwest England, have long provided information about their palaeoenvironment. Now they yield a more direct evidence — in the form of preserved footprints — of the people and animals that frequented the foreshore.

Less than ten years have passed since the first discovery in Saudi Arabia of prehistoric pottery superficially identical with that known from the earliest farming settlements in Sumer 6-700 km to the north. Some 40 sites have now been identified in the Eastern Province. More recently comparable pottery has been found at sites in nearby Qatar and Bahrain. These discoveries have provoked much speculation about the nature of the contact between Sumer and Arabia at this early period (on calibrated radiocarbon determinations by the late sixth millennium BC), and indeed on the origins of the people who created the important and distinctive prehistoric culture characterized by this pottery and known to archaeologists as ‘Ubaid.

Clearly the pattern of space in buildings can be expected to relate to the way that buildings are used to structure and reproduce social relations. As an archaeologist, wishing to infer social structure by its reflection in the building pattern, one may hope the relation may be reasonably direct. Here the formal geometrical method of access analysis is used to elucidate the pattern in a distinctive kind of prehistoric settlement form, and thence to elucidate the social structure which both produced it and was structured by it.

To what extent was gender an important factor in plant domestication? How much of the domestication process can be considered as cultural rather than biological? Christine Hastorf considers these and many associated questions in this topical essay about plants and people.

Field terraces are notoriously difficult to date – but historically of high significance. Here the author uses a Bayesian model applied to radiocarbon dates to date the tiered rice fields of the northern Philippines. They turn out to have been built in the sixteenth century probably by peoples retreating inland and upland from the Spanish.

Renewed in-depth multi-disciplinary investigation of a large coastal mound settlement in Peru has extended the occupation back more than 7000 years to a first human exploitation ~13720 BP. Research by the authors has chronicled the prehistoric sequence from the activities of the first maritime foragers to the construction of the black mound and the introduction of horticulture and monumentality. The community of Huaca Prieta emerges as innovative, complex and ritualised, as yet with no antecedents.

Ground radar investigates shallow archaeological features in burial mounds of the Kofun Period (300-700 AD) in Japan. A variety of analytical methods – time slices, synthetic radargrams simulated from model structures, and 3-D depth constructions – are used to interpret the profiles, to reveal the location, depth and shapes of buried features.

It is a startling experience to look down a microscope at a stone tool — a real Palaeolithic artefact, not a modern thing or a replicated copy — and see on its flint surface grubby brown-red stains that look the colour of old blood. Is a consensus emerging from the archaeological scientists as to just what traces of, especially, biological materials do survive on ancient stone surfaces, where they can be reliably characterized and identified?

How and when was northern Europe reoccupied at the end of the last Ice Age? Radiocarbon dates from the earliest post-glacial contexts provide one answer: they offer a sequence in which the regions of Europe, from the Upper Rhine to Britain, saw the return of humans. The authors use Bayesian methods to model a chronology and thus arrive at a sequence with clear assessments of uncertainty.

The role and place of children is frequently overlooked in archaeology. Here Robert Park presents an intriguing analysis of the toys of childhood found in Inuit societies in Canada and Greenland, and assesses how such objects inform on the role of children in Arctic societies.

Intensified dryland agriculture was a component of the late prehistoric Hawaiian subsistence base. Which environmental factors permitted, encouraged, restricted, blocked the spreading of intensive agriculture into new areas of fields? A GIS study of the great field system at Kohala on the leeward side of Hawai'i Island explores the controlling variables.

Even after decades of spearthrower studies, researchers have relatively little reliable data on spearthrower performance, and yet prehistoric lifeways are often reconstructed through consideration of the capabilities of such weapon systems. Experimental study and considered dependence on ethnographic knowledge clarify the realities of the spearthrower in use.

One of the larger — and more expensive — present programmes of study in archaeological science explores the provenance of prehistoric bronzes from the Mediterranean. What are the bases of research? What will the findings tell us about the real place of metal as it moved in the ancient world?