The authors have identified starch grains belonging to wild plants on the surface of a stone from the Gravettian hunter-gatherer campsite of Bilancino (Florence, Italy), dated to around 25000bp. The stone can be seen as a grindstone and the starch has been extracted from locally growing edible plants. This evidence can be claimed as implying the making of flour – and presumably some kind of bread – some 15 millennia before the local ‘agricultural revolution’.

Two new examples of decorative art have turned up at the Gravettian site of Předmostí, dating to the twenty-sixth to twenty-fifth millennium BP: rectilinear grid patterns are executed on one side of flat bones, probably of reindeer. The authors speculate that the two pieces may have come from a single larger decorated object. The grids themselves join a growing repertoire of patterns known from Upper Palaeolithic society, but their role remains enigmatic: counting, calendars or ornament? Art or science?

A sickle, 21 flint lunates for tipping spears and evidence of the hunted quarry – gazelle bones – lay together by the wall of a Natufian building. The author deduces that these objects were contained in a bag and constituted the versatile working equipment of a hunter-gatherer.

An Aboriginal man done to death on the dunes 4000 years ago was recently discovered during excavations beneath a bus shelter in Narrabeen on Sydney's northern beaches. The presence of backed microliths and the evidence for trauma in the bones showed that he had been killed with stone-tipped spears. Now we know how these backed points were used. A punishment ritual is implied by analogies with contact-period observations made in the eighteenth century AD.

Erlitou is one of the most important settlements in early China, a prime site for the investigation of early cities and states. Traditionally, it has been described, dated and explained in terms of dynastic succession – the dynasties of the Xia and the Shang being the ethnically-distinct actors and prime movers that made history here. In a brilliant analysis, the authors decouple the semi-legendary textual histories from the up-to-date archaeological sequence at Erlitou itself. This article strikes a blow for archaeological reasoning that will be felt far beyond the Yellow River.

Evidence for a Neolithic funeral feast has been excavated in northern Israel. A herd of eight wild cattle (aurochs) were slaughtered and joints of their meat placed in a pit which was covered over and the human burial laid on top. This was covered in turn with plaster, but the human skull was later removed through an accurately sited hole. It was the feast that began this funerary sequence, and the authors conservatively calculate that it provided a minimum of 500kg of meat. Given a 200g steak apiece this could theoretically feed some 2500 people, endorsing the authors' claim that the site was a central cult site serving surrounding villages. It is also suggested that the aurochs skulls, missing from the pit, may have been reserved for ritual purposes elsewhere, an early example of the Near Eastern bull cult that was later to have a long history in Europe.

Beside one of the earliest Preclassic pyramids in Guatemala the authors discovered a large basin fashioned in clay and shaped like a quatrefoil. The use of the quatrefoil theme on other carvings reveals its association with water and its symbolic role as the mouth of an underworld. Excavations in an adjacent mound exposed an affluent community, rich in figurines. This juxtaposition of monuments and residence at La Blanca shows a society of 900-600 BC in which ritual and the secular power were well integrated.

Funeral pyres identified at a fourth-century BC cemetery on Thasos have produced a range of plants. The authors show that strongly represented among them are pomegranate, garlic and grape, as well as bread – foodstuffs for funeral feasts and with significance for religious practice.

The image on a Greek coin of the second-first century BC is identified as an ammonite fossil and linked to the eponymous Ammon, the Egyptian ram-headed god.

Lands in south-central Chile, long thought to have been marginal until the Spanish conquest, are here shown to have been developing complex societies between at least AD 1000 and 1500. Part of the motor was provided by coastland cultivation on raised platforms, here identified and surveyed for the first time. The authors date the field systems and suggest that they were introduced by farmers from the north seeking wetlands in the face of increasing aridity in the central Andes and southern Amazon.

The authors show that the Jomon clay figurines made by hunter-gatherers use imagery that emphasises a narrow waist and full hips, showing that a female construct was part of the symbolism of these possibly shamanistic objects. In creating these figurines, prehistoric people were no doubt turning a recognition of health and fertility into more cultural icons. Admirers of the female form will be interested to learn that preference for the fuller, curvaceous ‘hourglass’ shape ‘has probably been the norm over much of human evolution’.

Ever since Wheeler's triumphant discovery of Roman pottery at Arikamedu in the 1940s, it has been appreciated that the east coast of India was in reach of the Roman Empire. Tracking down the finds of Roman pottery on the Indian sub-continent reported since then, the author discovered that many of the supposed Roman amphorae were actually ‘torpedo jars’ from Mesopotamia. Here the areas of influence of these two great imports, probably of wine, are mapped for the first time.

Investigations in a catacomb revealed an early mass grave, in which the bodies were bound tightly with plaster and textile in a type of mummification. Over 100 individuals, mostly young adults, including women, were stacked in rows apparently following a communal fatal incident, perhaps an epidemic. The presence of traces of gold, silver and probably amber with many of the bodies, and their burial in an imperial property suggests a group of some status being interred in the early years of the catacomb, at the end of the second century AD or beginning of the third.

As well as being modes of supplying metal, cross-shaped copper ingots in Zimbabwe are shown to be emblems of currency and status. The author dates them to the first half of the second millennium AD and connects the appearance of ingots to increased social stratification.

In this study of the Murray River basin in south-eastern Australia, the author shows that Aboriginal burials are persistently attracted to specific kinds of landscape feature intermittently over long periods of time. Some attributes of burial, like body position, vary from site to site and over much shorter periods; others, like orientation, are even more local, relating only to a specific group of graves. Burial rites are thus sets of variables which may be independent of each other and change at different rates. Far from reflecting cultural arrivals and departures, in south-eastern Australia burial grounds were never formally founded and continually abandoned.

Stable isotope analysis is a new, not-so-secret weapon which promises much in mapping population movement on a regional and local scale. Lining up these movements with certain economic strategies, such as farming or foraging, with social strategies such as exogamy or with ethnicity and ranking constitutes forgivable temptation. Here our astute authors urge caution. Taking the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in south-west Germany as their example, they show that caution does not inhibit interpretation, but opens the door to more subtle, more human possibilities.

When does Neolithic life begin in Britain? The author gathered up the current evidence for radiocarbon-dated first use of cereals, distinguishing between dates from charcoal in contexts with cereals, and dates from the charred grains themselves. The charred grains begin to appear around 4000 cal BC and become prominent in settlements between 3800 and 3000 cal BC. This correlates well with the appearance of megalithic tombs (3800-3500 cal BC) and argues for a relatively rapid adoption of the Neolithic package during an experimental phase of two centuries, 4000-3800 cal BC. The early cereals reported in the pollen record (from 5000 BC) are attributed to wild species.

Neolithic northern Greece has both tell sites and extended ‘flat’ sites, with an implication that people lived differently and may have managed their animals differently on each type of site. The author investigates these differences using characteristic plant assemblages deriving from animal dung. She finds that samples from tells are rich in processed crops and wild seeds, indicating grazing on and off the fields near home. But those from the flat sites were rich in chaff and contain no wild seeds, indicating the absence of animals out grazing on the hills when the wild plants are in seed. These were seemingly two alternative categories of Neolithic farmer, the one organising grazing differently from the other.