Six years ago we reported the discovery of a central place at Uppåkra in southern Sweden which promised to be unusually rich and informative (Hårdh 2000). At 40ha it already stood out as the largest concentration of residual phosphate in the whole province of Scania, with surface finds of Roman and late Iron Age metalwork (second-tenth century AD). Following this thorough evaluation, the project moved into its excavation phase which has brought to light several buildings of the first millennium AD, among them one that has proved truly exceptional. Its tall structure and numerous ornamented finds suggest an elaborate timber cult house. This is the first Scandinavian building for which the term ‘temple’ can be justly claimed and it is already sign-posting new directions for the early middle ages in northern Europe.

A classic exposition of the difficulties of dating a major monument and why it matters. Silbury Hill, one of the world's largest prehistoric earth mounds, is too valuable to take apart, so we are reliant on samples taken from tunnels and chance exposures. Presenting a new edition of thirty radiocarbon dates, the authors offer models of short- or long-term construction, and their implications for the ritual landscape of Silbury and Stonehenge. The sequence in which monuments, and bits of monuments, were built gives us the kind and history of societies doing the building. So nothing matters more than the dates…

Houses burnt down at the Neolithic site of Dikili Tash in northern Greece preserved the remains of wild grapes and figs. The charred shapes showed that there was a pile of grape pips with skins – clear evidence for the extraction of juice. The authors argue that the juice was probably used to make wine – towards the end of the fifth millennium BC the earliest so far from the Aegean. The occupants of the houses also had two-handled cups, providing another clue to consumption of a special kind.

The exploratory investigation of two sites in Kenya throws new light on the transition from a ‘stone age’ to an ‘iron age’. The model of widespread cultural replacement by Bantu-speaking iron producers is questioned and instead the authors propose a long interaction with regional variations. In matters of lithics, ceramics, hunting, gathering, husbandry and cooking, East African people created local and eclectic packages of change between 1500BC and AD500.

The Yafteh cave in Iran has an intact Aurignacian sequence over 2m deep. First explored by Frank Hole and Kent Flannery in the 1960s, its strata and assemblage are here re-evaluated at first hand by a new international team. The authors show that the assemblage is genuine Aurignacian and dates back to about 35.5K uncal BP. They propose it as emerging locally and even as providing a culture of origin for modern humans in West Asia and Europe.

The remains of a hunting site dated to 15000 years ago, captured in an ice wedge, included woolly rhinoceros, horse and arctic fox. Also present were 30 flint plaquettes with curvy feminine outlines. The authors show that these unworn flint profiles can be assigned to a canon of Magdalenian art that extends over much of northern Europe.

This report of the discovery of low walls running across the slopes east of the Dead Sea presents an important landmark in the history of farming, for these were terrace walls put in place to conserve soil and control water around 6000 cal BC. The authors point to some of the implications of what they see as early landscape modification at the scale of a small community or household.

Did towns return to early medieval Europe through political leadership or economic expansion? This paper turns the spotlight on a particular group of actors, the long-distance traders, and finds that they stimulated proto-towns of a special kind among the Vikings. While social and economic changes, and aristocratic advantage, were widespread, it was the largely self-directed actions of these intrepid merchants which created what the author calls ‘the nodal points.’ One can think of many other periods and parts of the world in which this type of non-political initiative may well have proved pivotal.

A British colonial estate in eastern Australia, built by 1830 and abandoned 20 years later, survives as the ruins of the Big House surrounded by stables, a farm and servants' quarters. The authors recovered pottery assemblages from a number of different servants' dwellings and here show that they differed from each other, revealing a ‘hierarchy of servitude’. It is natural to think that such a situation would provide helpful analogies for earlier empires, like the Roman, but historical archaeology has its own framework, varying even from country to country.

CORONA satellite photography taken in the 1960s continues to reveal buried ancient landscapes and sequences of landscapes – some of them no longer visible. In this new survey of the Mughan Steppe in north-western Iran, the authors map a ‘signature landscape’ belonging to Sasanian irrigators, and discover that the traces of the nomadic peoples that succeeded them also show up on CORONA – in the form of scoops for animal shelters. The remains of these highly significant pastoralists have been virtually obliterated since the CORONA surveys by a new wave of irrigation farming. Such archaeological evaluation of a landscape has grave implications for the heritage of grassland nomads and the appreciation of their impact on history.

Satellite surveys in Syria have made use of imagery recorded some 30 years apart. By comparing the earlier pictures (Corona) with the later (Ikonos), sites captured on the former can be accurately located by the latter. The comparison also reveals the stark implications for archaeology as large parts of west Asian landscape change from a state of ‘benign neglect’ to active redevelopment. Based on their experience in the Homs survey, the authors have important advice to offer in the design and costing of surveys using satellite imagery.

The Gravettian is considered one of the first pan-European cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic, spreading from Portugal to Russia between 28-20000 years BP and characterised by backed blades and points. The Noaillian is a local variant in southern Europe (Northern Spain, Southern France and Italy). In France Noaillian is supposedly evolving into the Rayssian which is replaced later by recent Gravettian. By reconsidering the formation processes of some key stratigraphic sequences, the author demonstrates that the Rayssian is an idiosyncratic culture that does not have abrupt-backed bladelets, and that runs chronologically in parallel with the others. A case study, based on new work at the site of La Picardie (Indre-et-Loire), suggests that we should expect to define different contemporary regional groups during this long period.

How useful is archaeology to historians? Do they use it in their work? If so how? Catherine Hills considers a number of mighty histories of early medieval Europe that have recently appeared and examines how far the extremely productive archaeology of the last two decades has affected them – or failed to.