Undertaking a comprehensive review of radiocarbon dates for the 12 000 years preceding the Neolithic in Britain, the author defines two periods when human remains become hard to find. One of these (already noted by Chamberlain) lies between 7-6000 BP; the other, a new addition, runs from 13 850 to 11 000 BP. What could have caused these ‘hiatuses’? Comparison of dated human remains and dated activities associated with humans, with the climatic record from ice cores, shows that the most likely explanation was a change in burial practice, even if this was itself one of a chain of behavioural changes initiated by the rise in sea level.

Discovery of a well-stratified fish hook from a cave sequence on East Timor shows a fishing technology developed at least 5000 years before the Austronesian expansion through Island South East Asia and into the Pacific. The fish hook is fashioned from shell and has been radiocarbon dated to 9741 ± 60 b.p.

A 1934 photograph of a man dressed in an animal skin and a painting of three figures in a cave at Melikane, Lesotho led to a new hypothesis about the role of the roan antelope in both the economy and beliefs of early Africa. The author shows that not only art, but language too, may reach back to a time when the need for food first began to find expression in ritual.

Cuisine, argues the author, is like language – it can be adopted, adapted or modified through time. The evidence from actual words for food is also used, together with seed assemblages and types of pottery to chronicle changing food cultures in Neolithic and later India. While some new food ideas (like African millets) were incorporated into existing agricultural practice as substitute crops, others such as the horsegram and mungbean appear to have moved from south to north with their pots (and probably the appropriate recipes) as a social as well as a dietary innovation.

Eating shellfish in the wrong season makes you ill. But early people of the Andes seem to have courted these effects to gain out-of-body experiences. It may have been these effects, as well as its distinctive colouring and appearance, that made Spondylus such a very special commodity.

In a new study the authors explore the reasons behind the remarkable change in the procurement and choice of stone tools that occurred half way through the Irish Mesolithic. The abandonment of microliths and the adoption of a broad blade technology around 7000 BC is here attributed to a need for multi-purpose tools made from a variety of materials, serving smaller and more mobile communities.

The authors present a new, two-stage model of the spread of farming along the eastern Adriatic coast based on the first appearance of pottery. The initial stage was a very rapid dispersal, perhaps by ‘leapfrog colonisation’, associated with cave sites in southern Dalmatia. The second stage was a slower agropastoral expansion associated with cave and open-air sites along the northern coast. Migration was a significant factor in the process. The mountainous hinterland formed an agricultural frontier zone, where farming was adopted piecemeal by indigenous groups.

The temptation to equate environmental change with archaeologically observed events is always with us, and matching a climatic downturn with civilisation collapse is perhaps more attractive then ever. The archaeologically observed collapse of the Tiwanaku civilisation in the twelfth century AD has been specifically related to a prolonged drought which would have affected the people’s ability to produce food. However, a careful scrutiny of the data from ice cores and lake sediments persuades the author that no such drought can be inferred: the evidence for climatic change is of quite a different scale and order to the archaeological changes and cannot be used as an explanation of social events.

The origins of anatomically modern humans, modern behaviour and the Aurignacian form one of the most dynamic fields of European research. Conard & Bolus (2003) opened a new debate by proposing that the Aurignacian arose from the migration of modern humans. Reviewing the data from the Swabian Jura, the author shows that radiocarbon dating cannot of itself presently support models of the primacy of art, industries or the arrival of modern humans at a particular place.

By examining their rock sources and mode of manufacture, the author offers a new interpretation for the Neolithic polished axe blades found in the western Alpine region. The dominant examples were made from rock extracted on the Italian side of the Alps (eclogitic) and finished in workshops on the French side. These first appeared as large blades with symbolic status, as part of the Neolithic expansion in North Italy. By the middle Neolithic the blades were reduced in size, but enjoying their widest distribution, creating a cultural zone on the left bank of the Rhône, more than 200 km from their source. In the late Neolithic, although the zone of influence was still large, the eclogites in the Rhône Valley were giving way to more local rock sources and copper. The fluctuations in this supply are interpreted as reflecting the varied political relations of Alpine communities.

Archaeological research in the Auckland Islands, south of New Zealand, has disclosed earth ovens, middens and flaked stone tools dating to the thirteenth–fourteenth centuries AD. This is the first site of prehistoric settlement in the outlying islands of the Subantarctic. Polynesians and their dogs survived on seals and seabirds for at least one summer. The new data complete a survey of colonisation in the outlying archipelagos of South Polynesia and show that it occurred contemporaneously, rapidly and in all directions from mainland New Zealand.

Ancient Egyptians are thought to have been the only people in the Old World who were practising mummification in the Bronze Age (c. 2200-700 BC). But now a remarkable series of finds from a remote Scottish island indicates that Ancient Britons were performing similar, if less elaborate, practices of bodily preservation. Evidence of mummification is usually limited to a narrow range of arid or frozen environments which are conducive to soft tissue preservation. Mike Parker Pearson and his team show that a combination of microstructural, contextual and AMS 14C analysis of bone allows the identification of mummification in more temperate and wetter climates where soft tissues and fabrics do not normally survive. Skeletons from Cladh Hallan on South Uist, Western Isles, Scotland were buried several hundred years after death, and the skeletons provide evidence of post mortem manipulation of body parts. Perhaps these practices were widespread in mainland Britain during the Bronze Age.

Did Mesolithic people regard the woodland as a wilderness or park? Previous models have portrayed the hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic as in tune with nature and making use of clearings to attract game. Using equally valid analogies, the authors propose a more hostile landscape that was conceived and managed with clearings and paths to help allay its menacing character.

The inner mechanics of Mongol empires are revealed through recent surveys by an American-Mongolian team. The large political confederations of high mobility which traditionally characterise the great Mongol empires of the first and second millennia AD are shown to have made use of highly sophisticated urban places which feature advanced planning and design, and impressive monumentality serving a variety of specific functions. Planning included open spaces within the walls reserved for the erection of tents.

The khirigsuurs are large and complex ritual sites that are major features in the landscape of Bronze Age Mongolia and represent considerable investment. The authors present recently investigated examples of this important class of monument, describe their attributes and offer preliminary deductions of the kind of society they imply – and whether it was truly nomadic.

The silex blond or honey-coloured (Bédoulien) flints which originate in the Vaucluse are distributed over a wide area of the south of France and beyond. Examination of the features of cores and blades shows that a variety of supply systems were in use: in some cases the raw material was transported as blades, in others as heated preforms to make it easier to knap. Different places were targeted with different products. The paper is dedicated to Patricia Phillips who beat a path through to this more sophisticated, more diverse Neolithic world.