Here is a paper of pivotal importance to all prehistorians attempting to reconstruct societies from assemblages of shells or stone artefacts in dispersed sites deposited over tens of thousands of years. The authors demonstrate the perilous connections between the distribution and content of sites, their geomorphic formation process and the models used to analyse them. In particular they warn against extrapolating the enticing evidence from Pleistocene Willandra into behavioural patterns by drawing on the models presented by nineteenth-century anthropologists. They propose new strategies at once more revealing and more ethical.

Refitting flakes to cores is a well-developed way to investigate how stone tools were made. Here the author takes on the formidable task of refitting the stone blocks of menhirs, orthostats and megalithic tombs to their quarries. The results are impressive: the order of erection in a row of menhirs, the method of construction in a passage grave and the monumental chronology of a region are just three of the rewards of this promising new method.

Introducing the methods of archaeoclimatology, the authors measure the relative locus of the monsoons, the intensity of winter rains and the volume of water in the rivers in the Upper Indus, in the region of Harappa. They also note the adoption of a multi-cropping agricultural system as a possible strategy designed to adjust to changing conditions over time. They find that around 3500 BC the volume of water in the rivers increases, and the rivers flood, implying annual soil refreshment and the consequent development of agriculture. By contrast, from around 2100 BC the river flow begins to fall while the winter rains increase. This time-bracket correlates nicely with the brief flourishing of Harappa. The locally derived evidence from Harappa combined with the Beas survey data provide a model for understanding the abandonment of settlements in the Upper Indus and possibly the wider civilisation.

Using pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, the authors show that amber was imported into Late Bronze Age Syria and used for making the prestige artefacts found in a Royal tomb of c. 1340 BC. The objects included beads and a unique vessel in the form of a lion, likely fashioned in Syria from raw amber imported from the Baltic via the Aegean.

Bronze Age objects found in the English Channel off Salcombe, southern Britain, include an implement which has its normal home in Sicilian agriculture – perhaps as a plough shoe. The authors assemble and classify the objects and consider the web of exchange networks that brought the artefact from Sicily to Devon via France around the thirteenth century BC.

The authors find numerous cut-marks on human bones from an Early Iron Age cemetery in Kazakhstan and review a wide range of possible explanations. They discount cannibalism and find that the cuts and fractures fit best with a range of ritual mutilations known to ethno-archaeologists of the Altai region

High status burial remains one of archaeology's most evocative types of site – but it is not always easy to know why they were built, where and when they were. The author describes a group of élite burials that appeared in north Europe in the late eleventh-twelfth century in a historical context that is unusually clear, and proposes the rise of a pagan élite in the face of aggressive Christianisation from the neighbours.

The Luzira head, a pottery figure discovered in a Ugandan prison compound in 1929, has remained curiously anonymous ever since. New archaeological work on the northern shores of (Lake) Victoria Nyanza has defined a formative period of political centralisation at the end of the first millennium AD. The authors show that this period of early to late Iron Age transition is where this remarkable object and related figurative material belongs. This has implications both for the formation of kingdoms in Uganda and for the story of African art more generally.

Analysis of a set of bones redeposited in a medieval abbey graveyard showed that the individual had been beheaded and chopped up, and this in turn suggested one of England's more gruesome execution practices. Since quartering was generally reserved for the infamous, the author attempts to track down the victim and proposes him to be Hugh Despenser, the lover of King Edward II.

The archaeological sites of Iraq, precious for their bearing on human history, became especially vulnerable to looters during two wars. Much of the looting evidence has been anecdotal up to now, but here satellite imagery has been employed to show which sites were looted and when. Sites of all sizes from late Uruk to early Islamic were targeted for their high value artefacts, particularly just before and after the 2003 invasion. The author comments that the ‘total area looted … was many times greater than all the archaeological investigations ever conducted in southern Iraq and must have yielded tablets, coins, cylinder seals, statues, terracottas, bronzes and other objects in the hundreds of thousands’.

Using a new approach that combines high-quality coring with AMS dating, the authors are mapping the start of the Neolithic in Aegean Thrace – a missing link in the arrival of agriculture in Europe. The method also revealed the edge of the marine transgression dating to some 2900 years ago, implying that sites located near the coast in early Neolithic times have in all likelihood been lost to the sea.

Maya Blue is a colour that is more than a pigment; it had roles in status, ritual and performance, being daubed onto pots and people before sacrifice. Here researchers use experimental and historical evidence to discover how it was made, including direct scientific analysis of Maya Blue on a pot thrown into the sacred well at Chichén Itzá. The results indicate that the formation of the colour was actually part of the ritual.

Beatrice de Cardi has been a figure in British archaeological life for much longer than most of us can remember. Less well-known outside Asia are her achievements as an explorer of the archaeology of the countries of the lower Persian Gulf. Here she offers a brief mémoire for us, penned at the age of 93. It is a story of pottery, peoples and vast tracts of ancient lands, then little known.

Archaeological investigation in India begins conventionally with the interest of Europeans. But India's own historical texts reveal examples of indigenous, curiosity-driven fieldwork as early as the sixteenth century. Describing the systematic search for lost sacred images and sites in places associated with Krishna's earthly pastimes, the author makes a spirited case for regarding this activity as real archaeology, comparing it with today's heritage projects.

Instances of cultural interaction between Norse and native American have long been accepted. But current archaeological research recognises that the indigenous peoples of the north were themselves diverse and had diverse histories. Here the author shows that the culture of one of them, the Dorset people, owed nothing to the Norse and probably had no contact with them.