Archaeological textiles are relatively rare finds in Mediterranean Europe, but many fragments survive in a mineralised form. Recent analysis of Iron Age textiles from Italy and Greece indicates that, despite the use of similar textile technologies at this time, Italy shared the textile culture of Central Europe, while Greece largely followed the Near Eastern traditions of textile production. This research greatly expands our current understanding of the regional circulation of textile technological knowledge and the role of textiles in ancient societies.

The city of Jerash in northern Jordan was badly damaged by an earthquake in AD 749. As a result of this, many parts of the city, including the Northwest Quarter, were abandoned and further construction ceased. Archaeological excavations in those parts of the city therefore reveal snapshots in time from the moment at which disaster hit. Of particular interest is the so-called ‘House of the Tesserae’, where archaeologists discovered a trough for the storage of pieces to be used in the construction of mosaics. The find, reported here for the first time, provides a unique insight into the practice of mosaic-laying during the Early Islamic Period.

Excavations at Ceibal in Guatemala have recovered numerous polished celts from contexts dating throughout the Preclassic Maya occupation of the site. The celts are made of different types of greenstone, and most were deposited in caches in public areas close to ceremonial structures. Recent study shows how deposition practices changed over time. Furthermore, microwear analysis suggests that the majority of celts did not have a practical function. It is argued, instead, that the caches of greenstone celts represent public rituals relating to the establishment of early Preclassic elites.

Recent analysis of the wool textiles from the famous Egtved oak coffin burial in Denmark indicated that the wool had been obtained from beyond Denmark. Was this an isolated case or evidence of a large-scale wool trade in the Danish Bronze Age? To investigate the broader pattern of wool provenance, textile manufacturing and trade practices, strontium isotope and organic dye analyses were conducted on textiles from a variety of selected burial contexts. Strontium isotope analysis revealed that at least 75 per cent of the Bronze Age wool samples originated outside present-day Denmark. Results also showed no evidence for the use of organic dyes, thereby supporting the hypothesis that no dyestuffs were used in Nordic Bronze Age textile production. These results challenge extant interpretations of Scandinavian Bronze Age textile provenance, and demonstrate the complexity of exchange networks in wool textiles during this period.

Recent genetic, isotopic and linguistic research has dramatically changed our understanding of how the Corded Ware Culture in Europe was formed. Here the authors explain it in terms of local adaptations and interactions between migrant Yamnaya people from the Pontic-Caspian steppe and indigenous North European Neolithic cultures. The original herding economy of the Yamnaya migrants gradually gave way to new practices of crop cultivation, which led to the adoption of new words for those crops. The result of this hybridisation process was the formation of a new material culture, the Corded Ware Culture, and of a new dialect, Proto-Germanic. Despite a degree of hostility between expanding Corded Ware groups and indigenous Neolithic groups, stable isotope data suggest that exogamy provided a mechanism facilitating their integration. This article should be read in conjunction with that by Heyd (2017, in this issue).

Excavations at the Middle Pleistocene site of La Cotte de St Brelade, on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, have revealed a long sequence of occupation. The continued use of the site by Neanderthals throughout an extended period of changing climate and environment reveals how, despite changes in the types of behaviour recorded at the site, La Cotte emerged as a persistent place in the memory and landscape of its early hominin inhabitants. The site's status as a persistent place for these people suggests a level of social and cognitive development permitting reference to and knowledge of places distant in time and space as long ago as at least MIS 7.

Plant macrofossils from the sites of Khao Sam Kaeo and Phu Khao Thong on the Thai-Malay Peninsula show evidence of cross-cultural interactions, particularly between India to the west and Southeast Asia to the east. Archaeobotanical analysis of various cereals, beans and other crops from these assemblages sheds light on the spread and adoption of these species for local agriculture. There is also early evidence for the trade of key commodities such as cotton. The plant remains illustrate a variety of influences and networks of contact across South and Southeast Asia during the late first millennium BC.

For years it has been assumed that tower kivas were observation points, using their high vantage to relay communications across the landscape, or acting as defensive outposts among the local population. Few of these enigmatic structures have been excavated, and archaeologists have consequently turned to landscape survey methods to understand their role and function. Here, the authors contrast visibility and intervisibility within the surrounding viewshed of two tower kivas, Kin Ya'a and Haystack, providing an alternative perspective to traditional interpretations by suggesting that rather than acting as lookout points, they were instead central places built to be looked upon by the surrounding community.

Recent research on the submerged central and southern North Sea basin has focused on the end of the story: the last few millennia before the final inundation. Much older deposits do survive, however, and are documented by collections of Pleistocene fauna recovered by fishing fleets operating from Dutch and British ports during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Analysis of the British collections allows them to be assigned to specific areas of seabed and to broad stages of the Pleistocene climatic sequence. The results provide evidence of more complex and fragmentary undersea landscapes than can be detected using geophysical approaches alone, and indicate targeted areas for future work.

The Caribbean island of Mona, on a key Atlantic route from Europe to the Americas, was at the heart of sixteenth-century Spanish colonial projects. Communities on the island were exposed to the earliest waves of European impact during a critical period of transformation and the forging of new identities. One of many caves within an extensive subterranean world on the island was marked both by indigenous people and by the first generations of Europeans to arrive in the New World. This account of spiritual encounters provides a rare, personalised insight into intercultural religious dynamics in the early Americas.

Traditional studies of early bronze metallurgy in China have focused on typology, decoration and production methods. The application of new analytical techniques to investigate chemical composition, however, is offering important new insights. The use of one such method (electron probe microanalysis) to study bronze artefacts from the Hanzhong basin in central China shows a level of diversity that implies much greater complexity in the extended landscape networks of the Bronze Age than was previously thought. The ability to appreciate these finds from a new perspective allows progression beyond older, simplistic models, and demonstrates that the Hanzhong region held greater importance within the power structure of Bronze Age Central China than has previously been recognised.

The discovery of an unusual early medieval plough coulter in a well-dated Anglo-Saxon settlement context in Kent suggests that continentally derived technology was in use in this powerful kingdom centuries before heavy ploughs were first depicted in Late Saxon manuscripts. The substantial investment required to manufacture the coulter, the significant damage and wear that it sustained during use and the circumstances of its ultimate ritual deposition are explored. Investigative conservation, high-resolution recording and metallographic analysis illuminate the form, function and use-life of the coulter. An examination of the deposition contexts of plough-irons in early medieval northern Europe sheds important new light on the ritual actions of plough symbolism in an age of religious hybridity and transformation.

When the antiquities trade is discussed in archaeology it is often prefixed with the pejorative adjective ‘illicit’. ‘Archaeology without context’ is a rallying cry for the archaeological profession to mobilise its collective voice in order to petition against the sale of heritage where an object's history is opaque and very probably a result of destructive looting (Chippindale et al.2001; Brodie 2006). The vocal campaign of the last decade to ensure that high-profile sales and museum acquisitions of material without documented collection histories do not encourage or sanction looting (e.g. Renfrew 2000; Brodie et al. 2006) has had some success, although objects without findspots continue to surface on the market (e.g.

The high-quality organic preservation at Alpine lakeshore settlement sites allows us to go beyond simplistic reconstructions of farming in the Neolithic. The rich archaeological datasets from these sites may be further complemented by methods such as nitrogen isotope (δ15N) analysis of charred crop remains. At Hornstaad-Hörnle IA and Sipplingen, on the shore of Lake Constance in south-west Germany, this method has been used to provide a unique insight into strategies of cultivation such as manuring on both a spatial and temporal scale.

The long-distance transport of the bluestones from south Wales to Stonehenge is one of the most remarkable achievements of Neolithic societies in north-west Europe. Where precisely these stones were quarried, when they were extracted and how they were transported has long been a subject of speculation, experiment and controversy. The discovery of a megalithic bluestone quarry at Craig Rhos-y-felin in 2011 marked a turning point in this research. Subsequent excavations have provided details of the quarrying process along with direct dating evidence for the extraction of bluestone monoliths at this location, demonstrating both Neolithic and Early Bronze Age activity.

Once Britain had become separated from the European mainland in the seventh millennium BC, Mesolithic stone tool traditions on opposite sides of the newly formed Channel embarked upon different directions of development. Patterns of cross-Channel contact have been difficult to decipher in this material, prior to the expansion of farming (and possibly farmers) from northern France at the beginning of the fourth millennium BC. Hence the discovery of Late Mesolithic microliths of apparently Belgian affinity at the western extremity of southern Britain—in the Isles of Scilly—comes as something of a surprise. The find is described here in detail, along with alternative scenarios that might explain it. The article is followed by a series of comments, with a closing reply from the authors.