The authors present new research on the Chifeng area of north-eastern China where they have been studying the remains of a society of the second millennium BC. This northern region, which saw the introduction of agriculture at the same time as the Yellow River basin experienced a brief and intensive period of fortification in the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age: natural ridges above the valleys were ringed with double stone walls and semicircular towers enclosing clusters of round houses with yards. Using large-scale survey and analysis of the structures at the key site of Sanzuodian, they place this phenomenon in its cultural and social context.

The Royal Tombs at Ur have been long famous for their chilling scenario of young soldiers and courtesans who loyally took poison to die with their mistress. The authors investigate two of the original skulls with CT scans and propose a procedure no less chilling, but more enforceable. The victims were participants in an elaborate funerary ritual during which they were felled with a sharp instrument, heated, embalmed with mercury, dressed and laid ceremonially in rows.

As Mesolithic people living on the Baltic coast began to adopt farming in the later fifth millennium BC, imports of a new type and quality started to reach them from the south — highly decorated pots and then copper axes from the Hungary-Serbia area. With new excavations at the site of Dąbki 9 in northern Poland, the authors are able to show how high quality thin-walled shiny black vessels are travelling over 1000km in the early fourth millennium BC, bringing prestige cups and jugs to the Baltic shore.

Careful examination of the probable natural conditions for travel in the North Sea and Irish Sea during the late Mesolithic are here combined with the latest radiocarbon dates to present a new picture of the transition to the Neolithic in the British Isles. The islands of the west were already connected by Mesolithic traffic and did not all go Neolithic at the same time. The introduction of the Neolithic package neither depended on seaborne incomers nor on proximity to the continent. More interesting forces were probably operating on an already busy seaway.

The generalised picture of Mesolithic marine diet giving way to a Neolithic terrestrial diet, as derived from isotope measurements, has been both championed and challenged in this journal. Here new results from the Balkans offer a preliminary picture of a diversity of food strategy, both before and after the great transition.

Why do early artists draw eyes? The author argues that they reflect the evolution of the brain in its expressions of fear, love and behaviour, and invites us to apply this ethological approach more widely to the study of early symbolism.

Dated and stratified potsherds excavated at Nabta Playa belong to the earliest phase of pottery-making in the Sahara – relatively sophisticated bowls decorated with a toothed wheel. The authors explore the origins of post-Pleistocene settlers in the Sahara and the Nile Valley and discuss what prompted them to make pottery.

The authors examine the role of horses as expressed in assemblages from settlement sites and cemeteries between the Eneolithic and the Bronze Age in Kazakhstan. In this land, known for its rich association with horses, the skeletal evidence appears to indicate a fading of ritual interest. But that's not the whole story, and once again micro-archaeology reveals the true balance. The horses are present at the funeral, but now as meat for the pot, detected in bone fragments and lipids in the pot walls.

Colleagues who find the current climate inhibiting to pure scholarship and authors eager to see their name in print should read this: an ultimately uplifting account of Jacobsthal's struggle to establish one of the foundations of European archaeology at a time of grave political persecution. Not the least of the achievements of this paper is the definitive rehabilitation of the lost co-author of Early Celtic Art, Eduard Neuffer, whose name never appeared on the cover and whose contribution was perforce unrecognised.

An excavated sequence from Burkina Faso shows that the Asian jungle fowl Gallus gallus, also known as the chicken, had made its way into West Africa by the mid first millennium AD. Using high precision recovery from a well-stratified site, the author shows how the increasing use of chickens could be chronicled and distinguished from indigenous fowl by both bones and eggshell. Their arrival was highly significant, bringing much more than an additional source of food: it put a sacrificial creature, essential for numerous social and economic transactions, in reach of everyone.

A goldsmith's toolkit found in an Iberian tomb reveals ground-breaking details about the manufacture of the gold ornaments for which this culture is renowned. Two blowpipes for joining gold with a high precision jet of air unlock the techniques of brazing, granulation and filigree. The authors go on to propose that the buried man was no ordinary craftsman, but a member of the warrior class in control of producing the treasures of the age.

Arguing from the overall settlement plan and the form of buildings, the authors present a persuasive case that the Late Postclassic city of Tlaxcallan and its near neighbour Tizatlan constitute the central elements of a republican state. This is an unusual political prescription, not only in Mesoamerica but further afield.

The authors report the first exposure of prehistoric salt-working in the Pacific, one that used solar evaporation of sea water on large flanged clay dishes. This short-lived industry of the seventh century AD disappeared beneath the dunes, but its documented nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors offer it many useful analogies: the salt, now extracted by boiling brine, was supplied to inland communities upriver, where it functioned as a prime commodity for prestige and trade and an agent of social change.

A large and intriguing collection of gold and silver fragments dating mainly to the seventh century AD was found in the parish of Ogley Hay near the south Staffordshire border (England) in 2009 by Mr Terry Herbert, while using a metal detector. With its peculiar composition and uncertain context, the origins and purpose of the Staffordshire Hoard currently remain something of a puzzle.

The Staffordshire (Ogley Hay) hoard was found on the 5–10 July 2009 by Mr Terry Herbert while metal-detecting on arable land at a site in south Staffordshire in the English Midlands (Figure 1).Mr Herbert contacted Duncan Slarke, the Portable Antiquities Scheme's Finds Liaison Officer for Staffordshire and the West Midlands, who visited the finder at his home and prepared an initial list of 244 bags of finds. These were then taken to Birmingham Museum and HM Coroner was informed. Duncan Slarke also contacted the relevant archaeological authorities including English Heritage, the Staffordshire Historic Environment Record, the Potteries Museum, Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery and the Portable Antiquities & Treasure Department at the British Museum. A meeting was held in Birmingham on 21 July at which it was agreed that the controlled recovery of the remaining objects of the hoard and an archaeological investigation of the findspot was a priority. It was also agreed that one of the Portable Antiquities Scheme's National Advisors, Dr Kevin Leahy, should compile a hand-list of finds in preparation for the Coroner's Inquest.

The hoard presents us with a startling number of unfamiliar images from the Anglo-Saxon past, not least in the new icon of treasure that it presents. As the descriptions of treasure and gift-giving in Beowulf so vividly remind us, the gaining of treasure, and its corollary, gift-giving, were major preoccupations for Anglo-Saxons and their northern European contemporaries, whether Clovis, showering the crowds in Tours with gold solidi when he was created consul in 508, Oswiu attempting to buy off Penda before the Battle of Winwæd with what Bede (HE III.24; Colgrave & Mynors 1969: 288–91) described as an incalculable and incredible store of royal treasures or the huge Danegelds extorted by Vikings in the tenth and early eleventh century. But until July 2009, the picture presented by the archaeological evidence for Anglo-Saxon treasure could hardly have been more different: the material remains of treasure with which we are familiar come overwhelmingly from high-status burials, or as individual gold finds without context, most of them the result of relatively recent metal-detecting activity. Only one seventh-century Anglo-Saxon gold hoard exists, from Crondall in Hampshire, dated to c. 640; but that is essentially a coin hoard, the only non-numismatic items two small clasps which must have fastened the purse or satchel containing the coins.

This is certainly a strange business: on the one hand, the thrill of discovery, the glory of gold, the flattery of the media and the purring of officialdom; on the other, the agonised frustrations of academics whose job it is to make sense of everything brought to light on this island. An editor is supposed to remain neutral, but in this case there is no contest. Antiquity champions research — so while we are happy to welcome the arrival of a mass of shiny things, we are bound to lament the loss of an opportunity to understand what they mean. Then there is the paradox of the English system: the treasure hunters are applauded and rewarded, but the archaeologists are seemingly obliged to lurk in the shadows, anxious not to spoil the party. Does it have to be like this?

Few events of European prehistory are more important than the transition from ancient to modern humans around 40 000 years ago, a period that unfortunately lies near the limit of radiocarbon dating. This paper shows that as many as 70 per cent of the oldest radiocarbon dates in the literature may be too young, due to contamination by modern carbon. Future dates can be made more secure — and previous dates revised — using more refined methods of pre-treatment described here.

Children are often under-represented in excavated populations due to the poor survival of their bones. Using a group of medieval burials from Serbia, our researchers examine the differential survival of children and of different parts of the body within the same terrain, and rightly urge us to take these factors into consideration before attempting demographic, ritual or social interpretations.