It has long been believed that the earliest ceramics in the central plain of China were produced by the Neolithic cultures of Jiahu 1 and Peiligang. Excavations at Lijiagou in Henan Province, dating to the ninth millennium BC, have, however, revealed evidence for the earlier production of pottery, probably on the eve of millet and wild rice cultivation in northern and southern China respectively. It is assumed that, as in other regions such as south-west Asia and South America, sedentism preceded incipient cultivation. Here evidence is presented that sedentary communities emerged among hunter-gatherer groups who were still producing microblades. Lijiagou demonstrates that the bearers of the microblade industry were producers of pottery, preceding the earliest Neolithic cultures in central China.

Mesolithic hunter-gatherer settlements generally leave ephemeral archaeological traces and are notoriously difficult to detect. Nowhere is this more so than on the northern coast of Spain, despite a long tradition of Mesolithic research. In this project, evidence of Mesolithic activity together with the geomorphological and topographical suitability of particular locations were used to select areas for large-scale geophysical survey. The results demonstrate the potential of the new methodology: magnetometry survey at El Alloru revealed the very first Asturian open-air settlement site to be discovered.

Light has been considered in various archaeological contexts from the Bronze Age to post-Classical periods, but largely in association with religion and ritual. The importance of light in the daily routines of a Neolithic dwelling is the context for this investigation, which employs 3D computer visualisation to test light levels in a variety of different architectural structures and weather conditions. The results reveal how opportunities for using domestic space for specific tasks changed at particular times of day. Light may have operated not simply in a functional sense but also to divide domestic space and provide a distinction between public and private areas.

The west European Neolithic is famed for its funerary and ceremonial monuments, but the evidence for houses is sparse. Can this be explained by the materials of which they were built? On the northern coast of Brittany, the site of Lillemer rises from the surrounding marshes and presents abundant evidence of Middle Neolithic occupation, contemporary with the passage graves of the region. Surprisingly, their evidence includes the remains of collapsed earthen-walled structures, providing the northernmost example of this type of architecture in a Neolithic context and a possible explanation for the invisibility of much Neolithic domestic architecture.

The cultivation of rice has had a major impact on both societies and their environments in Asia, and in China in particular. Phytolith assemblages from three Neolithic sites in the Lower Yangtze valley reveal that in early rice fields the emphasis was on drainage to limit the amount of water and force the rice to produce seed. It was only in the later third millennium BC that the strategy changed and irrigated paddies came into use. The results demonstrate that plant remains, including weed assemblages, can reveal wetter or drier growing conditions, showing changes in rice cultivation from flooded and drained fields to large, intensively irrigated paddies.

Death during childbirth was a significant risk for women in prehistoric and pre-modern societies, but it has rarely been documented by archaeology. The evidence for twins in the archaeological record has likewise been largely circumstantial, with few confirmed cases. Maternal mortality in childbirth is often obscured by the special ritual practices associated with this type of death. In the case of twin births that difficulty is compounded by past social attitudes to twins. The earliest confirmed evidence for obstructed labour comes from the burial of a young woman who died attempting to deliver twins in the middle Holocene hunter-gatherer cemetery at Lokomotiv in southern Siberia some 7000 to 8000 years ago.

Recent excavations at the site of Soro Mik’aya Patjxa in the south-central Andes have revealed the earliest securely dated cultural features in the Lake Titicaca Basin. Radiocarbon assays show that the site was occupied across the Middle to Late Archaic period transition between 8000 and 6700 cal BP. The rich material assemblage makes it possible to identify behavioural patterns among these last hunter-gatherers of the Titicaca Basin, which anticipate later developments in the trajectory to socioeconomic complexity. Mobile hunter-gatherers appear to have occupied the site repeatedly for more than a millennium. Evidence for intensive subsistence practices and interpersonal violence foreshadow the emergence of incipient sedentism, food production and land tenure in subsequent periods.

Shell artefacts in Island Southeast Asia have often been considered local variants of ground-stone implements, introduced in the Late Pleistocene from Mainland Southeast Asia. The discovery of a well-preserved Tridacna shell adze from Ilin Island in the Philippines, suggests, however, a different interpretation. Using radiocarbon dating, X-ray diffraction and stratigraphic and chronological placement within the archaeological record, the authors place the ‘old shell’ effect into context, and suggest that shell technology was in fact a local innovation that emerged in the early Middle Holocene. The chronology and distribution of these artefacts has significant implications for the antiquity of early human interaction between the Philippines and Melanesia. It may have occurred long before the migrations of Austronesian-speaking peoples and the emergence of the Lapita Cultural Complex that are traditionally thought to mark the first contact.

Studies of human behavioural responses to climate change have begun to address traditional archaeological questions in new ways. Hitherto, most of these studies have focused on western Eurasia, but the question of human response to rapid climatic changes in northern Japan during the Upper Palaeolithic period opens up new perspectives. Combining artefact studies and palaeoenvironmental evidence, Japan provides a case study for how quickly modern humans adapted to new environmental challenges, and how that adaptation can be charted through the lithic technologies employed in different geoclimatic circumstances.

Bayesian statistical frameworks have been used to calculate explicit, quantified estimates for site chronologies, and have been especially useful for resolving the complex probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates to the level of individual prehistoric lifetimes and generations. Here the technique is applied to the Neolithic tell of Vinča-Belo Brdo in order to answer long-standing questions about the timing and circumstances of its demise. Modelled date estimates place the end of the site in the second half of the forty-sixth century cal BC. Two successive horizons of closely spaced houses each suffered extensive burning; the interval between them was placed at a maximum of 25 years, with the last house probably used for less than 15 years. The evidence suggests that these house burnings were deliberate, and opens new considerations for the causes of the end of the tell-based system in south-east Europe.