Back in 2013, Rob Witcher, in his first NBC, mused on the future of academic publishing, and especially the potential impact of open access and e-books on traditional book reviews. Reading these lines five years later as incoming Reviews Editor, it is striking how little an impression e-books in particular have made on the market, and more generally how persistent print editions of both journals (including Antiquity) and books have remained in the face of rapidly changing digital technologies. Sales of major e-reader brands have declined since their height in 2014, at least in the UK, and e-book sales have stabilised since then at around 25 per cent of all book purchases. At Antiquity, we still receive upwards of 300 books per year, and send out over 120 to review across the six issues. NBC is an attempt to provide some critical perspective on a selection of the remaining books, many of which merit reviews in their own right but cannot be included for reasons of space. This section will continue in much the same manner as in the past, safe in the knowledge that, as Groucho Marx put it, ‘Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend . . .’ (the second half of the quotation is less relevant here but perhaps worth including—‘. . . inside of a dog, it's too dark to read’).

For this issue of NBC, we investigate a range of different approaches to the archaeology of ritual. The attribution of unexplained phenomena to ritual practice is something of a cliché in public perceptions of archaeology (just try googling ‘ritual archaeology cartoon’!), and even within the discipline there are those who remain sceptical that we can ascend Hawkes's ladder of inference (1954) to such dizzy heights. Yet several recent books coming in to the Antiquity office show how both theory and method are advancing our understanding of this complex concept. Sparked by the publication of two major volumes from Cambridge, we here take the pulse of the archaeology of ritual, and find it in rude health.

A new project aims to define the origins and dispersal patterns of the opium poppy in Neolithic Western Europe through a comprehensive programme of radiocarbon dating.

Newly discovered archaeological sites in the Uribe Kosta region of northern Spain are illuminating the establishment of late prehistoric coastal farming settlements and specialised tool-production activities.

The Alay site represents the earliest, high-altitude human-occupation site currently known in western Central Asia. Recent recovery and analysis of a lithic assemblage from Alay underlines the importance of this site and its role in the cultural and technological development in later Eurasian prehistory.