The Mesolithic has been characterised as temporally homogeneous: a period of stagnation or degeneration with hunter-gatherers focused on routine economic practices in an endlessly repeating seasonal round. Characterisation of the Mesolithic as timeless and unchanging derives in part from our current poor internal chronological resolution, which appears even more acute given the recent ground-breaking advances for chronological precision in adjacent time periods. However, these tendencies are exacerbated by a focus in Mesolithic studies on an outdated and simplified bipartite typological framework for the period, linked to a small number of well-preserved sites that come to stand for human lifeways across millennia. These approaches produce a peculiar temporal model within Mesolithic studies. We argue that we need both more accurate and precise chronologies, and narrative approaches that write stories of these people in their own emergent and uncertain times. To begin to do so, this paper presents a new chronological framework for British Mesolithic assemblages, based on collation, audit, and Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon measurements associated with particular microlith forms. With this new approach, we outline different understandings of temporality and inhabitation for the period c. 9800–3600 cal bc.

This paper presents the results of new research on two sarsen stones, known as the Cuckoo Stone and Tor Stone, both former standing stones that lie on opposite banks of the River Avon and straddle the eastern border of the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site. Geochemical analysis indicates that both stones were probably transported to their present site from West Woods on the Marlborough Downs in north Wiltshire, a source that likely also supplied the large sarsen monoliths at Stonehenge. The paper examines the geological conditions necessary for the formation of sarsen across the site of the present-day Salisbury Plain to address the apparent absence of natural sarsen in the area. The results are integrated with those of archaeological fieldwork from nearby contemporaneous sites to suggest that the Cuckoo Stone and Tor Stone were probably introduced into the Stonehenge landscape in the early part of the Late Neolithic period, ie, contemporary with Phase 1 of Stonehenge and some 400–500 years before the construction of the principal sarsen settings at the monument. Visibility analysis indicates that the two stones were probably intervisible and likely to have formed part of a planned landscape and were positioned to create a formal portal to the Stonehenge area on either bank of the River Avon.

An abundance and diverse range of prehistoric fishing practices was revealed during excavations between 2012 and 2022 at the construction site of the Femern Belt Tunnel, linking the islands of Lolland (Denmark) and Femern (Germany). The waterlogged parts of the prehistoric Syltholm Fjord yielded well preserved organic materials, including the remains of wooden fish traps and weirs, and numerous vertical stakes and posts driven into the former seabed – evidence of long term fishing practices using stationary wooden structures from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age (c. 4700–900 cal BC). Here, we present the results of a detailed study on these stationary wooden fishing structures, making this the most comprehensive and detailed description of prehistoric passive fishing practices in Syltholm Fjord to date. The exceptional scale of the excavated area (57 ha) and abundance of organic materials encountered during excavations provides us with a rare opportunity to identify individual weir systems and information on their construction, maintenance, and use. To contextualise further, we provide an up-to-date compilation of comparable finds in the Danish archaeological record, including a dataset of directly dated specimens, based on both published and unpublished sources. Our results show that stationary wooden fishing structures are an invaluable archaeological resource, and their study, combining landscape reconstruction, ethnographic analogy, and fishing technology, together with artefactual evidence and radiocarbon dating, allows us to reconstruct prehistoric fishing strategies in depth. Due to the long chronology and diversity of the study materials, our results complement previous research on the many nuances and regional specificities of the persistence of fishing practices in the western Baltic Sea over time, despite introductions of new cultures, populations, and livelihoods. Finally, we emphasise that the Neolithisation process in Northern Europe was not as straightforward and uniform in terms of subsistence as commonly assumed.

Farming developed in Britain during the Neolithic period but across much of England the earliest good archaeological evidence for fields and enclosures in which crops were grown and livestock kept dates from the Middle Bronze Age, c. 1600/1500 bc. While these Bronze Age sub-divided agricultural landscapes are widespread across southern and eastern England, Suffolk and Norfolk were, until recently, essentially a ‘blank’ in their distribution. Over the last 15 years an increasing number of such field systems have been excavated, particularly in Norfolk, and some have started to appear in print. This article adds to this developing picture by briefly describing parts of seven additional Bronze Age – and probable Bronze Age – field systems that have been investigated through recent development-led excavation in south-east Suffolk. Currently published and unpublished evidence from elsewhere in the county is also considered, with the aims of identifying how widespread such land divisions were and establishing the current state of knowledge regarding the location, date, development, layout, and agricultural function of Bronze Age fields in the county. Some of the implications are of wider interest for understanding Bronze Age landscape organisation and land use in lowland England.

This paper derives from new work on Mesolithic human skeletal material from Strøby Egede, a near coastal site in eastern Sjælland, with two foci. The first confirms sex identifications from original work carried out in 1986. The second, and central focus, re-examines comments by one of us (CM) based on work in 1992, and a new statistical analysis including data from the two Strøby Egede adults. In 1998 it was suggested that the Strøby Egede sample more closely resembled Skateholm, on the coast of Skåne in southern Sweden, than Vedbæk-Bøgebakken on Sjælland, fitting lithic patterns noted earlier by Vang Petersen. We revisit the 1998 suggestion below, comparing data from Strøby Egede to those available from southern Scandinavia and Germany, and suggest that the 1998 comment was, in all probability, incorrect. The analysis below suggests overall morphological similarity between individuals in eastern Sjælland and Skåne, while noting the existence of apparent outliers.

Ever since Alexander Thom visited Calanais in the Outer Hebrides, groups of Neolithic monuments in western Scotland have been studied in relation to the land and the sky. Less attention has been paid to their close relationship with the sea. These places were secluded and could be difficult or dangerous to reach, yet details of their architecture suggest that there were close links between them. How important were long distance connections between 3000 and 2000 bc? Were some ceremonial centres visited by boat? And was the journey itself treated as a rite of passage? The case extends to structures in Orkney and Ireland.

A 2300 year old bark shield found in Enderby, Leicestershire, in 2015 is the only known example of its type. Made from the bark of a willow tree, it has a woven basket boss, a roundwood handle, and a rim of split roundwood edging and lime bast bindings. Pre-Roman shields made from organic materials rarely survive in Britain and Ireland and those without metal components are exceptionally rare. Contemporaneous wooden shields are known from anaerobic environments in Scandinavia but, unlike Enderby, none of these has a body of tree bark. The complexity of the design of the Enderby shield, the skill with which it was made, and the similarities between this and metal examples suggests it was a tried and tested design, rather than a one-off. With no other example against which to compare it, experiments in reproducing the shield have been used as a tool for interpretation and have proved vital to understanding the original design. As a result of this research, it is proposed that this single artefact represents a more commonly available form of shield in the 1st millennium bc than does any metal enhanced version.

For many years, scholars consistently dated cup marks – shallow depressions found on both portable and immovable stones – of northern Germany and southern Scandinavia to the Bronze Age. Novel findings trace them back to at least as far as the Late Neolithic period (LN, c. 2350 bc). Recently, portable cup marked stones belonging to a late Funnel Beaker context (c. 2800 bc) have been found. There are even indications of cup marks dating back to the 4th millennium bc. At present, a gap exists in the knowledge of cup marks and non-figurative art in general during the Younger Neolithic (YN) Corded Ware Culture (CWC) (c. 2800–2250 bc). This paper establishes the significance of three related types of secondary treatments of battle axe fragments, namely the addition of (hourglass shaped) unfinished shaft holes, deep pecking holes, and shallow cup marks. The argument put forward is that they were present in small numbers in the 4th millennium bc, becoming increasingly common during the proposed ‘gap phase’ in the context of CWC societies. The late 3rd millennium is a period of enormous social change. During this period, of the three types of secondary treatment only cup marks persist, while the potential media on which such cup marks are applied diversifies, with them appearing on objects and items other than battle axe fragments. It is proposed that this development is related to the social changes that characterise the onset of the LN. Finally, it is suggested that the LN and Bronze Age cup mark tradition is based on an earlier tradition initially associated with battle axes.

Humans have utilised caves for funerary activities for millennia and their unique preservational conditions provide a wealth of evidence for treatments of the dead. This paper examines the evidence for funerary practices in the caves of Scotland and northern England from the Bronze Age to the Roman Iron Age (c. 2200 bc–ad 400) in the context of later prehistoric funerary ritual. Results suggest significant levels of perimortem trauma on human skeletal remains from caves relative to those from non-cave sites. We also observe a recurrent pattern of deposition involving inhumation of neonates in contrast to excarnation of older individuals.

Geoarchaeological research as part of the AHRC funded Living with Monuments (LwM) project investigated the upper Kennet river system across the Avebury World Heritage landscape. The results demonstrate that in the early–mid-Holocene (c. 9500–1000 bc) there was very low erosion of disturbed soils into the floodplain, with floodplain deposits confined to a naturally forming bedload fluvial deposit aggrading in a shallow channel of inter-linked deeper pools. At the time of the Neolithic monument building in the 4th–early 3rd millennium bc, the river was wide and shallow with areas of presumed braid plain. Between c. 4000 and 1000 bc, a human induced signature of soil erosion became a minor component of fluvial sedimentation in the Kennet palaeo-channel but it was small scale and localised. This strongly suggests that there is little evidence of widespread woodland removal associated with Neolithic farming and monument building, despite the evidently large timber requirements for Neolithic sites like the West Kennet palisade enclosures. Consequently, there was relatively light human disturbance of the hinterland and valley slopes over the longue durée until the later Bronze Age/Early Iron Age, with a predominance of pasture over arable land. Rather than large Neolithic monument complexes being constructed within woodland clearings, representing ancestral and sacred spaces, the substantially much more open landscape provided a suitable landscape with areas of sarsen spreads potentially easily visible. During the period c. 3000–1000 bc, the sediment load within the channel slowly increased with alluvial deposition of increasingly humic silty clays across the valley floor. However, this only represents small-scale landscape disturbance. It is from the Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age when the anthropogenic signal of human driven alluviation becomes dominant and overtakes the bedload fluvial signal across the floodplain, with localised colluvial deposits on the floodplain margins. Subsequently, the alluvial archive describes more extensive human impact across this landscape, including the disturbance of loessic-rich soils in the catchment. The deposition of floodplain wide alluvium continues throughout the Roman, medieval, and post-medieval periods, correlating with the development of a low-flow, single channel, with alluvial sediments describing a decreasing energy in the depositional environment.

Countering the passive representation of rivers in many previous accounts of later prehistory – as static vessels for spectacular deposits, highways for transport and communication, and backdrops for settlement and farming – this paper asks if and how rivers actively shaped prehistoric lives. Rivers have long been hailed as conduits for prehistoric materials and ideas. However, positive archaeological correlates of the processes involved are notoriously difficult to identify and have rarely been scrutinised in detail. Using the example of Late Bronze and Early Iron Age pottery in the east of England (1150–350 bc), we examine in detail how prehistoric pottery-making traditions cohered around river valleys over an extended time period and were thus, to a certain extent, generated by rivers. Drawing on wider evidence for the flow of people and things in this region we build a broader multi-dimensional account of how people, objects, and practices moved in a period of diverse lifeways in which the makeup of human mobility is not well understood. In doing so, we hope to tether abstract arguments about the active role of rivers and other non-human elements in shaping past lives and to approach the often missing ‘middle ground’ – small-scale movements at local and regional scales – in existing archaeological discussions about mobility.

This study presents the first extensive radiocarbon dating programme of Bronze Age material from northern Germany, and it combines radiocarbon dates, relative typo-chronological date ranges, and stratigraphic data within a Bayesian chronological framework. We estimate the cemetery complex at Mang de Bargen (Bornhöved, distr. Segeberg, Schleswig-Holstein) to be in use for more than two millennia, which is exceptionally long in northern Germany and in a wider European context. The site provides a unique insight into the dynamic nature of burial monuments and associated burial practices, from the Late Neolithic and into the Pre-Roman Iron Age (c. 2500–50 bc). The barrow building tradition lasted around a millennium (c. 2350 –1300 bc), with several barrows in concurrent use. The barrows were persistently re-used as burial ground, both within ‘living memory’ of the primary graves, but also long after. The burial intensity varied over the cemetery’s use-life, with distinct peaks in the Late Neolithic, when the first barrows were erected; in the Older Bronze Age when more barrows were erected; in the Younger Bronze Age, when secondary cremation graves were added to existing barrows; and finally in the Pre-Roman Iron Age, with the addition of an urnfield. The funerary rituals vary considerably over the period: from inhumation to cremation, and from primary and secondary graves in barrows to flat graves. Cremation was introduced in the 14th century bc but inhumation and cremation were used in parallel for around a century before the former ritual was abandoned c. 1300 bc. The study provides absolute chronological distributions of the grave types present at Mang de Bargen and shows them to be comparable to other sites at a regional and over-regional scale, successfully demonstrating how new types were quickly adopted across large parts of north-western Europe.

The waterscape, including the sea, rivers, and lakes, was highly important to communities living during the Nordic Early Bronze Age (1800/1700–1100 bc). Waterways acted as highways that facilitated journeys, trade, and warfare, enabling maritime warriors and others to distinguish themselves. This is reflected in the maritime location of rock art and important Early Bronze Age burials, which have been used to reconstruct the Nordic Bronze Age cosmology. This centres on the journey of the sun across the sky during the day, and the underworld during night. This article analyses the use of water-related resources, such as seaweed, petrified organics, beach pebbles, and molluscs, in the construction of burials, which has received little attention despite renewed interest in the maritime seascape. The data demonstrate that local communities used different resources, indicating that a common belief system was realised in local differences. These marine materials were collected from the beach, which can be conceptualised as the liminal zone between the land of the living and the sea of the dead. It is suggested that these materials, in line with other funerary practices, helped to guide the recently deceased into the afterlife in the sea.