‘Hair-rings’, like other artefact categories of the European Bronze Age, are distinctive in form, and distinctively placed in space and in time. But we have not easily come to know just what they were for, or in what other ways we can discern meaning in and from them. Although modest in appearance, it does appear that ‘hair rings’ were significant objects that possibly indicate social ranking but also trading activities.

Sir John Beazley (1885-1970), founder of the modern and archaeological study of Classical vases, was a master of method. Is the Beazley method just that, a well-judged method fitting to the material under study? Or does that considered method in truth amount to a considered theory, held and used by a consciously most untheoretical archaeologist?

Ambrose (this issue, above) and Sand (this issue, above) reported on Lapita in the specific, without being parochial in their concerns. This paper looks at the largest Lapita picture, but is itself in turn based on new reports in the specific, here from the coast of Papua New Guinea which is key for the relations in space, in time and in cultural affinity of whatever human it is that Lapita is.

The Emeryville Shellmound is a famous but now destroyed midden once located on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. Analyses of the fish remains from the stratified late Holocene deposits indicate that prehistoric peoples had substantial impacts on the sturgeon populations of the Bay. This calls into question the commonly held belief that native peoples lived in harmony with nature and has important implications for the management of modern vertebrate populations.

Further work inside the Grotte Cosquer, the Palaeolithic painted cave near Marseilles only accessible by a deep-water dive, improves our knowledge and makes it clear there can be no artificial entrance made to create a dry-land access.

The Smithsonian Institution Press (with a patience one no longer expects of a scholarly publisher) early this year issued the second volume of Tom Dillehay's monograph on Monte Verde, in far southern Chile — 8 years after the first volume (Dillehay 1989; 1997). What is the standing of the site? Is it the long-sought-after proof of a ‘pre-Clovis’ human presence in the Americas? And if it is, why is it by the southern tip of the Western Hemisphere, rather than close to its northern portal from Siberia?

For half a century now — ever since radiocarbon dating began — there have been regional reconciliations between relative chronologies and the new absolute dating. Sometimes they have been friendly, some times less so when the two schemes have not matched well. For Inner Asia — centre of the Old World — there is belatedly now the means to resolve some fundamentals.

The later Palaeolithic sites on the East European plain are celebrated for their solid buildings constructed of mammoth bones. Were these permanent settlements, occupied all the year round? Or were they seasonally occupied, in a land where winters are harsh? Stratigraphic explorations at Mezhirich, and excavation of the empty space between the buildings, leads to a decisive interpretation.

A first rule of statistics is that the existence of a correlation does not itself prove a causal connection. This is the heart of the recurrent question in later European prehistory — whether in the Mediterranean or in the Atlantic northwest — about volcanic eruptions, their impact on climate, and then of the climatic impact on human populations. The burial under tephra of the Late Bronze Age settlement of Santorini is proof of a particular catastrophe: but is there the evidence to prove wider European calamity?

Just over 50 years ago, the most magnificent treasure of late Antique silver ever found in Britain was brought out of hiding in a sleepy village in rural Suffolk. The late Roald Dahl, the children's writer, may have held the answer.

Two fundamentals for the place of the individual in society are age and gender; well-studied cemeteries can provide an good archaeological base for their study. This examination of the Copper Age site of Tiszapolgár-Basatanya, Hungary, explores the relationship between age and gender though the course of prehistoric lives and how it might be possible to distinguish sex from gender in archaeological contexts.

The human capacity for recognizing categorical forms and their defining characterstics extends to a recognition of natural forms and shapes that may suggest these categories. The issue is raised below by the analysis of an archaic figure from the Levant in which a natural form was apparently intentionally modified to produce an enhanced human image.

Where there are wet sites and organic artefacts are preserved, one can study artefacts of perishable materials which may by their nature offer more information than do lithic assemblages. On the US/Canadian Northwest Coast, with its series of celebrated wet sites, basketry and wooden fish-hooks survive so often that a decisive issue in the region's regional pattern can be explored this way — with archaeo-experimental help from unlucky inhabitants of the local aquarium!

Half a century on, the principals in the Mildenhall affair are deceased. Paul Ashbee, senior prehistorian of East Anglia, has no direct evidence, but material recollections from near to the time. His account, drawing on those memories, notices aspects different to those which are stressed by Richard Hobbs (above), a researcher of a younger generation looking at the written record.

Even after decades of spearthrower studies, researchers have relatively little reliable data on spearthrower performance, and yet prehistoric lifeways are often reconstructed through consideration of the capabilities of such weapon systems. Experimental study and considered dependence on ethnographic knowledge clarify the realities of the spearthrower in use.

A generation ago, enquiries into the astronomical and mathematical knowledge of the standing stone-erectors of prehistoric Britain dealt largely with statistical patterns. Since then, the great passage grave at Newgrange, eastern Ireland, has proved to be engineered to address the midwinter sunrise. It is time once more to look at another great chamber tomb, Maeshowe in northernmost Scotland, with these concerns in mind.

The trade of dried fish played an important role in the transformation from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages in Scandinavian polities such as Arctic Norway. This paper develops zooarchaeological methods to investigate whether similar processes occurred in the less well documented Norse colonies of northern Scotland — the joint earldoms of Orkney and Caithness.

The concept of ‘Celtic’ is fittingly ambiguous, ambivalent and disputed in its archaeological definition: ‘fittingly’ because later prehistoric and Roman iconography in temperate Europe is ambiguous and ambivalent. And ambiguous and ambivalent things are hard to understand unambiguously!

The prodigious quantities of refuse recovered from excavations at Runnymede Bridge, Berkshire, England — and at other late prehistoric British sites — highlight those archaeological entities we call ‘rubbish’ and ‘middens’. What is a ‘midden’? General thoughts on an archaeology of refuse are applied to the specific case of these 1st-millennium BC sites in southern England in an attempt to comprehend their origin and scale in terms of the period's social geography.

CC intro: The genesis of urnfield cemeteries and of Late Bronze Age culture change is often related to an economic and environmental crisis. In the Lower Rhine Basin, changes in burial rites, settlement structure and hoarding practices show a transformation of ideology, consistent with the dissolution of a society into smaller, more autonomous social units.