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.

Recent study of Vlaho in Pelagonia confirms that it is the earliest known Neolithic settlement in North Macedonia. Multidisciplinary research of the architecture and material reveals a complex enclosure site dating to the seventh millennium BC, with dozens of ditches, daub buildings, white painted pottery and domesticated plants and animals.

The authors introduce an ongoing project that explores a solution for the long-term preservation of proxies in archaeological and geological sediment cores to protect unique palaeoenvironmental data. To prevent alterations of organic properties and/or fungal growth, the sediment cores are vacuum freeze-dried, allowing long-term storage at 55 per cent relative humidity (RH).

During the fourth millennium BC, public institutions developed at several large settlements across greater Mesopotamia. These are widely acknowledged as the first cities and states, yet surprisingly little is known about their emergence, functioning and demise. Here, the authors present new evidence of public institutions at the site of Shakhi Kora in the lower Sirwan/upper Diyala river valley of north-east Iraq. A sequence of four Late Chalcolithic institutional households precedes population dispersal and the apparent regional rejection of centralised social forms of organisation that were not then revisited for almost 1500 years.

China was a centre for early plant domestication, millets in the north and rice in the south, with both crops then spreading widely. The Laoguantai Culture (c. 8000–7000 BP) of the middle Yellow River region encompasses a crucial stage in the transition from hunting and gathering to farming, yet its subsistence basis is poorly understood. The authors present archaeobotanical data from the site of Beiliu indicating that farmers exploited a variety of wild and cultivated plants. The predominance of broomcorn millet accords with other Neolithic cultures in northern China but the presence of rice—some of the earliest directly dated examples—opens questions about the integration of rice cultivation into local subsistence strategies.

Next Generation Lab turns large and hitherto unstudied urban assemblages of archaeological leather and bone into a laboratory learning experience for high school students. The students, in turn, provide species identifications and thus increase knowledge on medieval and Renaissance livestock exploitation and material selection by craftsmen.

The port-city of Adulis in modern Eritrea was a key node on the Red Sea linking the Kingdom of Aksum to the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. Recent excavations at Adulis have reinvestigated two early Christian churches. New radiocarbon analysis dates both structures to the sixth and early seventh centuries AD, with multiple phases of architectural development reflecting changing use and liturgy. The author uses evidence for both continuity and change in architectural materials, construction styles and sacred practices to assess religious transition at Adulis, and across the Aksumite Kingdom more broadly. Moving beyond an archaeology of conversion, the article reinforces recent work on cosmopolitanism in the Horn of Africa.

Artefact biographies are a valuable means of conceptualising the relationships between people, places and objects in the past. It is rare, however, that the detailed contextual information required by such approaches can be extracted from the archaeological assemblages typically found in the often dense and confusing palimpsests of complex urban sites. Eighteenth- to twentieth-century ceramic wares associated with Oxbridge colleges provide one way of exploring this issue. Detailed historical records of property owners and tenants can be combined with ceramics linked to individual colleges by corporate markings such as coats of arms or badges. This enables fine-grained reconstructions which show, in many cases, that ordinary vessels had far from ordinary histories of use and discard.

In the Andean highlands, hilltop fortifications known as pukaras are common. Dating predominantly to the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1450), pukaras are important to archaeological characterisations of a political landscape shaped by conflict but the distribution of these key sites is not well understood. Here, the authors employ systematic satellite imagery survey to provide a contiguous picture of pukara distribution on an inter-regional scale covering 151 103km2 in the south-central highlands of Peru. They highlight the effectiveness of such survey at identifying pukaras and capturing regional variability in size and residential occupation, and the results demonstrate that satellite surveys of high-visibility sites can tackle research questions at larger scales of analysis than have previously been possible.

The ‘Qin & Han Iron Smelting Site Investigation Project’ aims to illuminate the early use and production of iron during the Qin and Han Dynasties in south and south-west China. Here, the authors report on attempts to discover the origins of iron objects from the Lingnan region.

‘Smellscapes’ have become an increasingly popular concept in recent years. Here, the authors argue for a new direction in sensorial archaeology by focusing on the ‘smell of things’ or the potential information held in the odours of archaeological objects. They offer a case study using early modern earthenware ceramics from Portugal—renowned for the distinctive smell and taste imparted to their contents—to explore the possibility of developing standardised analytical techniques and vocabularies that would allow archaeologists to describe the odours associated with artefacts.