The report announces the important radiocarbon-dated sequence recently obtained at Dzudzuana Cave in the southern Caucasus foothills. The first occupants here were modern humans, in c. 34.5–32.2 ka cal BP, and comparison with dated sequences on the northern slope of the Caucasus suggests that their arrival was rapid and widespread. The rich, well-dated assemblages of lithics, bone tools and a few art objects, coloured fibres, pollen and animal remains deposited at Dzudzuana through 20 millennia provide an invaluable point of reference for numerous other sites previously excavated in western Georgia. Detailed information has been placed in a supplementary excavation report online. The data support the significance of these excavations for a better understanding of modern human dispersals.

The authors present a new type of communal and monumental structure from the earliest Neolithic in western Asia. A complement to the decorated stone pillars erected at Göbekli Tepe in the north, ‘Wadi Faynan 16 Structure O75’ in the southern Levant is a ritualised gathering place of a different kind. It serves to define wider western Asia as an arena of social experiment in the tenth millennium BC, one in which community seems to take precedence over economy.

Intensive research on China's Western Loess Plateau has located 63 Palaeolithic deposits, which together allow the authors to present a general model of hominin occupation from 80 000 to 18 000 years ago. Tools, subsistence and settlement correlate nicely with the climate: the warm wet MIS3 seeing expansion and more organised acquisition of quartz, and the Late Glacial Maximum that followed, a reduction in human presence but possibly an increase in ingenuity.

Excavations in the rockshelter at Pınarbaşı, 24.5km south-east of Çatalhöyük, have brought to light a sequence of structures and a rich assemblage of animal bones, with some of the bones embedded in plaster objects. The authors argue for a strong link with Çatalhöyük, and propose a hunter-herder site operated by a close-knit group from that settlement, supplying meat to it, but practising their own up-country rituals — so providing a glimpse of the ‘lived landscape’.

Through integrated analysis of archaeobotanical and artefactual distributions across a settlement, the authors discover ‘neighbourhoods’ using different cultivation areas in the surrounding landscape. Differences between groups also emerge over the life of the settlement in the use of special plants, such as opium poppy and feathergrass. Spatial configurations of cultivation and plant use map out the shifting social geographies of a Neolithic community.

Chance discoveries of weapons, horse bones and human skeletal remains along the banks of the River Tollense led to a campaign of research which has identified them as the debris from a Bronze Age battle. The resources of war included horses, arrowheads and wooden clubs, and the dead had suffered blows indicating face-to-face combat. This surprisingly modern and decidedly vicious struggle took place over the swampy braided streams of the river in an area of settled, possibly coveted, territory. Washed along by the current, the bodies and weapons came to rest on a single alluvial surface.

The demise of the Iceman is archaeology's current long-running detective story, in which the time and mode of death have yet to be agreed. Recent discussion in these pages favoured a ceremonial burial on the mountain, following his death and the conservation of the corpse in the home village. In a new forensic contribution, the author shows that, in addition to his other woes, the Iceman might have been taking medicine in the form of bark. This in turn implies that his final adventure might have taken place at anytime between spring and autumn, leaving the burial hypothesis without constraint.

Examination of skeletal material from graves at Phum Snay in north-west Cambodia revealed an exceptionally high number of injuries, especially to the head, likely to have been caused by interpersonal violence. The graves also contain a quantity of swords and other offensive weapons used in conflict. The authors propose a context for these warriors in the struggle between emergent polities in the Iron Age before the domination of Angkor.

The authors present and interpret rock drawings found in caves in the Lenggong Valley, Perak, Malaysia. The drawings, which begin by depicting ritually important patterned mats, and continue with images of cars, bicycles and figures with their hands on their hips, provide rare and precious insights into how the indigenous people of the area came to terms with changes that occurred as the result of the arrival of Europeans in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The circular fortress of Trelleborg on Zealand in Denmark is well known as a military camp with a key role in the formation of the Danish state under Harald Bluetooth in the tenth century AD. Taking a sample of 48 burials from the fort, strontium isotope analysis once again demonstrates its ability to eavesdrop on a community: at Trelleborg, the young men in its cemetery were largely recruited from outside Denmark, perhaps from Norway or the Slavic regions. Even persons buried together proved to have different origins, and the three females sampled were all from overseas, including a wealthy woman with a silver casket. Trelleborg, home of Harald Bluetooth's army, was a fortress of foreigners with vivid implications for the nature of his political mission.

Few parts of the world have seen such an acceleration in the output of outstanding archaeological research as Southeast Asia, and we are fortunate to have persuaded some of the leading players to provide our readers with a major update of work in progress. The idea arose from a session at the recent IPPA congress, where a number of scholars gathered to pay tribute to Peter Bellwood, on the point of his retiring from his position as Secretary-General. We are very grateful to them for allowing versions of the papers they gave to find a wider audience through Antiquity, and delighted to have the chance to add our tribute to theirs.

The Niah Caves in Sarawak, Borneo, have captured evidence for people and economies of 8000 and 4000 years ago. Although not continuous on this site, these open two windows on to life at the cultural turning point, broadly equivalent to the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic. They have much in common, inferring that the occupants, perhaps belonging to an older maritime dispersal, had a choosy appetite for the Neolithic package.

For many years the author has been tracking the spread of the Neolithic of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) and its extension eastwards into the western Pacific, as a proxy for dating the spread of the Austronesian (AN) languages across that same vast area. Here he recalls the evidence, updates the hypothesis and poses some new questions.

The prime-mover for the arrival of the Neolithic in Island Southeast Asia is thought to be the expansion of rice farmers speaking an Austronesian language and coming from the north (see Spriggs, above). Much less is known of the indigenous hunter-gatherers and their interaction with the new farming communities. The mutually occupied area, in the definition of Peter Bellwood, was a ‘Friction Zone’, where two radically different cultures met. This paper emphasises how much land, and information, was lost when the rising sea drowned Sundaland, an area the size of India, and brings to bear archaeological and DNA evidence to emphasise the continuing role of hunter-gatherers in the later prehistory of Southeast Asia.

Here is a major research project that is peopling the Indian Ocean with prehistoric seafarers exchanging native crops and stock between Africa and India. Not the least exciting part of the work is the authors' contention that the prime movers of this maritime adventure were not the great empires but a multitude of small-scale entrepreneurs.

An important group of spindle whorls found at Tha Kae in Thailand carries traces suggesting the use of iron spindles, and includes an unusual type of whorl shaped like a door knob. The author explores the implied contacts reaching into south China, but is also able to add a probable link with India in the early first millennium AD, well in advance of the better known Dvaravati period (sixth–thirteenth centuries AD).

In the spring of 1970, tired of the chilly Philadelphia winters where I was studying archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, I arranged to spend a semester at the University of Hawai'i. There I enrolled in Professor Wilhelm G. Solheim II's course inthe prehistory of Southeast Asia. Bill Solheim — a colorful character if ever there was one, with his handle-bar mustache and endless anecdotes — was just then stirring up the sleepy field of Southeast Asian archaeology and prehistory. Together with his graduate students Chet Gorman and Don Bayard, Bill was making all kinds of startling claims about thecourse of cultural evolution in what most scholars had taken to be a secondary backwater: evidence for strikingly early plant domestication from Spirit Cave, precocious advances in bronze metallurgy at Non Nok Tah, and similar claims. At the time, Peter Bellwood, then based at the University of Auckland, was still focused on research among the islands of eastern Polynesia. But Peter saw the exciting developments coming out of Southeast Asia and soon decamped to The Australian National University in Canberra. Out of this new base he began his long and fruitful career of fieldwork in island Southeast Asia, and as the preeminent synthesiser of the region's prehistory.

The author shows how pollen and oribatid mites recovered from the small lake of Marcacocha provide a detailed proxy record of agro-pastoralism over the last 4200 years in the central Andes. The introduction of highland maize and weeding practices 2700 years ago corresponds with major settlement development, as well as evidence for large herds of llamas not only facilitating trade but supplying abundant fertilizer and fuel in the form of excrement. Prolonged droughts and pre-Colombian epidemics probably influenced many of the social changes observed.

Two conflicting theories put the introduction of bronze into Southeast Asia 1000 years apart, one (before China) at 2000 BC, the other at 1000 BC. Both were drawn from radiocarbon dates, the first of pottery, the second of bone. The authors cut the Gordian Knot by showing the earlier dates to be unreliable — but their study has implications way beyond Thailand. The direct dating of pottery, it seems, is full of pitfalls…