As radiocarbon dates were announced, the wall paintings and engravings in Chauvet Cave, France, were hailed as fine art far earlier than any recognised before: here was the ‘Dawn of art’ (Figure 1; Chauvet et al. 1996). Soon after discovery, in 1994, the cave was closed to protect the images from chemical and microbial damage. In 2014, it was added to the World Heritage List. Then, in April 2015, replicas of the most striking imagery were opened at a purpose-built site, the Caverne du Pont d'Arc.

Our extensive knowledge of Roman London is the result of over four decades of large-scale excavation. In the UK, the establishment and growth of professional archaeology since the 1970s, coupled with the funding provided by property developers since 1990 (Fulford & Holbrook 2015), has transformed our understanding of both urban and rural sites—and nowhere more so than London. A combination of intensive building development in the City of London and the world-leading technical quality of many of the excavations means that Londinium is now probably both the most extensively and best-excavated major town of the Roman world. Knowledge generated by these excavations, however, has not always been made available through publications as it should have been. Although there is an important archive in which the records of past projects are curated, how and where to publish results has been a long-running problem, especially for the excavations of the 1970s and 1980s where post-excavation work was often not properly funded or supported. One major project to publish a synthesis of work on such sites in Southwark, south of the Thames, did result in a series of important volumes (Sidell et al. 2002; Cowan 2003; Hammer 2003; Yule 2005; Cowan et al. 2009), but a programme designed to provide systematic coverage of such projects in the City of London, to the north of the river (Maloney 1990; Perring & Roskams 1991; Williams 1993; Davis et al. 1994), failed to produce one of the five volumes promised—that concerning the archaeology of the key eastern hill. We also lack any up-to-date synthesis, a problem only partly compensated for by Dominic Perring's (1991) popular overview and Wallace's (2014) in-depth analysis of the evidence for the period down to the Boudiccan revolt in AD 60/61.

The public will not allow us to deal exclusively with things that are facile, amusing, curious, bizarre, passé, things that present no danger, because they concern societies which are either extinct or remote from our own. The public wants studies with conclusions relevant for the present [. . .] let us not be weary of bringing [scientific] facts into the debate. And if our practical conclusions will turn out to be meagre and hardly topical? All the more reason for us to propagate them liberally and energetically. (Marcel Mauss 1927, cited in Schlanger 2006: 15)

Viking graves and grave-goods in Ireland is the longawaited outcome of the Irish Viking Graves Project, which ran from 1999–2005. The project originated at a conference held in Dublin in 1995, at which the limited understanding of Viking burials was identified as a significant shortcoming of the Irish archaeological record. Stephen Harrison was appointed as Research Assistant, and began the major task of making sense of the antiquarian records of the Royal Irish Academy. The primary aim of this work was the creation of the first accurate and comprehensive catalogue of all Viking graves and grave-goods in Ireland. With this volume, that aim has been handsomely achieved.

Tilted for us to see them straight on, 45 human skeletons were stacked in tight rows, with two more, arms out-stretched, on top of them (Figure 1). Below lay artillery and musket shot set out with equal neatness. Owing, perhaps, to such clinical arrangement, or to the unfamiliar angle, or perhaps to the sturdy frame marked ‘lützen, 6. november 1632’, or else to the gallery's classical formality, the full horror only registered later, after seeing many more bones, much finely crafted weaponry and armour, and pictures and plans of fights both modern and ancient. It was the first display in Krieg: eine archäologische Spurensuche (‘War: an archaeological search for traces’), an exhibition at the Prehistory Museum in Halle shown from November 2015 to May 2016.

There are insights to be gained from comparing three very different books on the mounds, mound-builders and moundvilles of later pre-Columbian and early historic-period eastern North America. These insights stem from the range of perspectives embodied by the trio of hardbacks here, written by authors with diverse backgrounds using very different kinds of case material. In one book, historian Terry Barnhart gives us a rich reading of the historical relationship of American archaeology to ‘The Mound Builders’, identified by many Euro-Americans in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an actual lost race or civilisation that pre-dated the American Indian occupation of the continent. In another book, writer Jay Miller seeks a cosmological explanation of all eastern North American mounds, in some ways reaffirming the centrality of mound building to Native identities. In a third volume, editor-archaeologists C. Margaret Scarry and Vincas Steponaitis, and 12 other authors, present the latest archaeological synthesis on Moundville, a great town in Alabama often cited as the civic-ceremonial core of a stereotypical Mississippian-era chiefdom (c. AD 1120–1650). Tacking between the three texts, we might come to appreciate more clearly how we know, or might know, the mound-builder past by contextualising and theorising that past better than we are currently doing.

These two volumes result from extensive developer-funded fieldwork in north-western Northamptonshire, in the English midlands. Under the system introduced in 1990, local authority curatorial archaeologists assess the impact upon archaeological remains of planning applications, and make recommendations for any further investigative work. Developers are normally responsible for the costs of any archaeological evaluation or excavation work necessary, and they award the contracts to commercial field units who bid for this work in a competitive tendering process. Since 1990, there has been an enormous increase in the volume of such archaeological work in Britain and other European countries (Bradley et al. 2016), and these two volumes are representative of many of the best and worst aspects of this system.