The Jwalapuram Locality 9 rockshelter in southern India dates back to 35 000 years ago and it is emerging as one of the key sites for documenting human activity and behaviour in South Asia. The excavated assemblage includes a proliferation of lithic artefacts, beads, worked bone and fragments of a human cranium. The industry is microlithic in character, establishing Jwalapuram 9 as one of the oldest and most important sites of its kind in South Asia.

In the Neolithic megasite at Çatalhöyük families lived side by side in conjoined dwellings, like a pueblo. It can be assumed that people were always in and out of each others' houses – in this case via the roof. Social mechanisms were needed to make all this run smoothly, and in a tour-de-force of botanical, faunal and spatial analysis the authors show how it worked. Families stored their own produce of grain, fruit, nuts and condiments in special bins deep inside the house, but displayed the heads and horns of aurochs near the entrance. While the latter had a religious overtone they also remembered feasts, episodes of sharing that mitigated the provocations of a full larder.

The authors have provided some of Antiquity's most stunning frontispieces since we introduced them in 2006. We asked them to show how aerial archaeology has developed in Jordan over some 90 years, tell us about the techniques and approaches used and its potential here and in other desert and mountainous lands.

The Early Neolithic central place at Herxheim is defined by a perimeter of elongated pits containing fragments of human bone, together with pottery imported from areas several hundred kilometres distant. This article offers a context for the centre, advancing strong evidence that the site was dedicated to ritual activities in which cannibalism played an important part.

We are honoured to present this pivotal paper by a senior Danish scholar (born in 1922) that promises to revise many views of Late Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. Prehistoric daggers found in graves in Scandinavia and beyond have long been interpreted as weapons wielded by warriors, giving the whole period a rather belligerent flavour. In a radical re-interpretation, the author demonstrates that their use was most probably for the despatch of cattle or other livestock, and the dagger is thus the implement of sacrifice and the symbol of its office.

The authors use metrical, demographic and body part analyses of animal bone assemblages in Anatolia to demonstrate how cattle were incorporated into early Neolithic subsistence economies. Sheep and goats were domesticated in the eighth millennium BC, while aurochs, wild cattle, were long hunted. The earliest domesticated cattle are not noted until the mid-seventh millennium BC, and derive from imported stock domesticated elsewhere. In Anatolia, meanwhile, the aurochs remains large and wild and retains its charisma as a hunted quarry and a stud animal.

Early farming in northern China featured the cultivation of two species of millet, broomcorn and foxtail. Although previously seen as focused on the Yellow River, the authors show that the earliest agriculture is actually found in the foothills of the neighbouring mountain chains, where drier and better drained locations suited millet cultivation, particularly broomcorn. In this they echo new thoughts on the locale of early agriculture in south-west Asia, on the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent rather than in the valleys of the Nile or the Euphrates.

A recent review of all ivory from excavations in Chalcolithic and Beaker period Iberia shows a marked coastal distribution – which strongly suggests that the material is being brought in by sea. Using microscopy and spectroscopy, the authors were able to distinguish ivories from extinct Pleistocene elephants, Asian elephants and, mostly, from African elephants of the savannah type. This all speaks of a lively ocean trade in the first half of the third millennium BC, between the Iberian Peninsula and the north-west of Africa and perhaps deeper still into the continent.

New research into the Neolithic of Island Southeast Asia is broadening the old models and making them more diverse, more human – more like history: people and animals can move through the islands in a multitude of ways. The domestic pig is an important tracker of Neolithic people and practice into the Pacific, and the authors address the controversial matter of whether domestic pigs first reached the islands of Southeast Asia from China via Taiwan or from the neighbouring Vietnamese peninsula. The DNA trajectory read from modern pigs favours Vietnam, but the authors have found well stratified domestic pig in the Philippines dated to c. 4000 BP and associated with cultural material of Taiwan. Thus the perils of relying only on DNA – but are these alternative or additional stories?

We are very pleased to present a summary account of the People's Republic of China's project on the Origins of Chinese Civilization. It has focused on Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age sites of the Central Plains – the cultural heartland of the first three dynasties of Xia, Shang and Zhou. Particularly notable is the emphasis of methodology which was driven almost entirely by the archaeological sciences.

‘They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for pigfruit…’ Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood.

Carbon and nitrogen isotopes show a marked change in the diet of British pigs between the Neolithic and the Iron Age. The authors neatly deduce that this was due to the loss of the Neolithic wildwood where pigs were wont to root for fungus amongst the rotting trees.

The famous monumental Bronze Age cairn Bredarör on Kivik with its decorated stone coffin or cist has been described as a ‘pyramid of the north’. Situating his work as the latest stage in a long history of interpretation that began in the eighteenth century, the author analyses the human bone that survived from the 1930s excavation and shows that the cist and chamber must have remained open to receive burials over a period of 600 years.

The author notes that livestock herding in the Kalahari Desert would require water during the dry season. By mapping and dating artificially dug or enlarged waterholes, he shows when and where such herding would have been possible. Dating is by radiocarbon, artefact scatters and cartography. Comparison with climatic, documentary and oral evidence shows that the use of the artificial wells correlates with what is known so far about the movement of peoples over the last two millennia. This inspires confidence in the connection between the wells and herding and in the survey methods.

The Xiongnu people have long been considered an archetypical nomadic group, characterised archaeologically mainly from their tombs – which have reinforced the stereotype. Thanks to a sophisticated survey project, the authors are able to reveal the Xiongnu's economic complexity. Although primarily pastorialists they practiced cultivation and their ceramics reveal a settlement hierarchy which chimes with the broader social and settlement system of the region.

The authors present a remarkable site with a remarkable interpretation: a structured platform of dugong bones, containing skulls laid in parallel and ribs in sets, together with artefacts of the Neolithic period. They propose that the bones have been symbolically arranged and the mound as a whole had a ritual purpose – an interpretation endorsed by analogy with dugong platforms noted in the Torres Strait in recent times.

The authors reconsider the origins of metallurgy in the Old World and offer us a new model in which metallurgy began in c. eleventh/ninth millennium BC in Southwest Asia due to a desire to adorn the human body in life and death using colourful ores and naturally-occurring metals. In the early sixth millennium BC the techniques of smelting were developed to produce lead, copper, copper alloys and eventually silver. The authors come down firmly on the side of single invention, seeing the subsequent cultural transmission of the technology as led by groups of metalworkers following in the wake of exotic objects in metal.

High ranking burial mounds in Bronze Age Sudan featured burials in a corridor leading to the central burial – supposedly of a king. Were the ‘corridor people’ prisoners captured during periodic raids on Egypt, or local retainers who followed their king in death? The authors use the skeletal material to argue the second hypothesis – coincidentally that advanced by George Reisner, the original excavator.

Studying the pottery produced in the Granada region between the eighth and eleventh centuries AD, the author describes a changing discourse of Roman and Islamic forms. This in turn can be held to reflect the changing social relations between conquerors and conquered.

Does the riding of horses necessarily go with the emergence of Eurasian pastoralism? Drawing on their fine sequence of animal bones from Begash, the authors think not. While pastoral herding of sheep and goats is evident from the Early Bronze Age, the horse appears only in small numbers before the end of the first millennium BC. Its adoption coincides with an increase in hunting and the advent of larger politically organised groups.

The authors offer a new chronological framework for prehistoric Southeast Asia, based mainly on the Bayesian modelling of 75 radiocarbon dates from well-stratified excavations at Ban Non Wat. The results are revolutionary. Neolithic practice now begins in the second millennium and hierarchical state-forming activity is dated to a ‘starburst’ around 1000 BC. The authors reflect on the social implications of the new model – and on the criteria for an ever stronger chronology.