‘Not another trendy and incomprehensible title,’ some will sigh. No, the title means what it states, albeit with metaphorical flourish. The Lapita cultural complex of Melanesia and western Polynesia, an entity beloved of a generation of Pacific prehistorians and ever a hot source of debate, can now be shown to have retained at least some links with contemporary populations far to the west of its known distribution. This is significant, not least because some scholars identify the immediate source zone for Lapita as having existed somewhere in the islands of Southeast Asia. At the same time, the obsidian quarried by Lapita artisans from Talasea on the Melanesian island of New Britain can be shown to have been among the most far-traded commodities of the Neolithic world.

Stable isotopes in teeth are providing important correlations between ancient people and the geographical location of their childhood homes. In an exciting new application, the authors measured the varying signatures of strontium, oxygen and carbon isotopes in the teeth of a sequence of people buried in Thailand during the period of the introduction and intensification of agriculture. Preliminary results point to the arrival of immigrant men, followed by a change in the relationship between the sexes: the women grow up on local food, the men have access to more widespread resources. This perhaps implies a matrilocal system, where forager men raised elsewhere marry into farming communities. It provides a likely antithesis to the social consequences of introducing agriculture into central Europe.

The Matupi cave is one of the 40 caves within the Mount Hoyo limestone massif, a touristic site in Ituri, Zaïre. The author recognized its archaeological possibilities in February 1973 during a prospection tour in the northern part of the country. This expedition had been organized by the Institut des Musées nationaux du ZaYre in collaboration with the Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale at Tervuren, Belgium. Upon the visit to the cave a I sq m trial trench was excavated. More extended excavations (10 sq m) took place during January-March 1974. The excavations were carried out in spits of 5 cm on a I m grid system. Matupi is a large cave with an ideal living room at its entrance (c. 7 m high, c. 8 m deep and c. 5 m wide).

Everyone who has dug up anything knows the excitement of bringing an ancient object to its first light for centuries. Everyone who has directed an archaeological excavation knows the excitement of finding sense in the pattern of many ancient objects revealed. Why is it, then, that the publication of that pattern in a site report is a more wearisome business when—if ever—it take place? Is that just the nature of the business, or is there more to be revealed?

The prodigious quantities of refuse recovered from excavations at Runnymede Bridge, Berkshire, England — and at other late prehistoric British sites — highlight those archaeological entities we call ‘rubbish’ and ‘middens’. What is a ‘midden’? General thoughts on an archaeology of refuse are applied to the specific case of these 1st-millennium BC sites in southern England in an attempt to comprehend their origin and scale in terms of the period's social geography.

The earliest tin bronze artefacts in Eurasia are generally believed to have appeared in the Near East in the early third millennium BC. Here we present tin bronze artefacts that occur far from the Near East, and in a significantly earlier period. Excavations at Pločnik, a Vinča culture site in Serbia, recovered a piece of tin bronze foil from an occupation layer dated to the mid fifth millennium BC. The discovery prompted a reassessment of 14 insufficiently contextualised early tin bronze artefacts from the Balkans. They too were found to derive from the smelting of copper-tin ores. These tin bronzes extend the record of bronze making by c. 1500 years, and challenge the conventional narrative of Eurasian metallurgical development.

Early Neolithic graves at Jiahu, Henan Province, China, include tortoise shells which are incised with signs – some of which anticipate later Chinese characters and may be intended as words. Is this the earliest writing? The authors decide rather that the signs in this very early period performed as symbols connected with ritual practice, but they presage a long period of sign use which led eventually to a writing system.

The tuffaceous sandstones and siltstones of the Ola Bula Formation in central Flores. east Indonesia, contain many fossil sites. Here, excavations at Boa Lesa and Dozu Dhalu and the results of regional site surveys are described. Stone artefacts indicate that hominids had arrived on the island by 840,000 years ago, post-dating a major change in the Lower Pleistocene fauna. Since water crossings were required to reach Flores from mainland Southeast Asia, this evidence has implications for the intellectual, technological and linguistic capabilities of early hominids.

Stone artefacts reported from the Orce region (Grenada, Spain) indicate a first human presence in western Europe as early as the Plio-Pleistocene boundary, making a ‘long chronology’ for European hominids against the claims for a briefer human presence. Excavations of Barranco León-5 and Fuentenueva-3a in 1995 have produced two groups of lithic artefacts of ‘Oldowan’ type, seen as the most ancient of western Europe by faunal associations and palaeomagnetic study.

It is probable that ‘The Farm Beneath the Sand’ will come to stand for a revolution in archaeological investigation. The authors show that a core of soil from an open field can provide a narrative of grazing animals, human occupation and their departure, just using DNA and AMS dating. In this case the conventional archaeological remains were nearby, and the sequence obtained by the old methods of digging and faunal analysis correlated well with the story from the core of ancient ‘dirt’ DNA. The potential for mapping the human, animal and plant experience of the planet is stupendous.

Archaeology, like many of the sciences, works to a masculine metaphor, the (male) archaeologist as hero explores and tames the mysteries of his (female) subject. Feminist theory has made important criticism of positivist science on these grounds, drawing on much the same postmodern theory as ‘post-processual’ archaeology. How do the ‘post-processuals’ appear, seen in the feminist light?

The implications of new evidence are presented for the generally high level of marine diet in the coastal Mesolithic populations of Wales. Within these generally high levels, some variations may point to seasonal movement. These data provide a strong contrast with the mainland terrestrial diet of early Neolithic populations in the same area.

The south-east coast of Africa in the later first millennium was busy with boats and the movement of goods from across the Indian Ocean to the interior. The landing places were crucial mediators in this process, in Africa as elsewhere. Investigations at the beach site of Chibuene show that a local community was supplying imported beads to such interior sites as Schroda, with the consequent emergence there of hierarchical power structures.

This paper is a first study of duration of breastfeeding using bone stable isotopes in infants in a British palaeopopulation, from the deserted Mediaeval village of Wharram Percy, England. Nitrogen stable isotope analysis suggests cessation of breastfeeding between 1 and 2 years of age. Comparison with Mediaeval documentary sources suggests that recommendations of physicians regarding infant feeding may have influenced common practice in this period.

Stable isotopes get personal in this analysis of burials at a medieval cathedral. Compared with the local meat-eating rank and file, those people identified as bishops consumed significantly more fish and were incomers from the east. These results, while not so surprising historically, lend much increased confidence that isotope analysis can successfully read the status and mobility of individuals in a cemetery.

Genetic studies of modern populations are raising many interesting questions about how far the modern gene pool is owed to incoming populations during the agricultural revolution in Neolithic Europe. But, as the authors show, studies of isotopic data from cemeteries reveal a picture of increasing subtlety at local level. While early farmers may have been initially newcomers in the upper Rhine they may also have soon intermarried with contemporary hunter-gatherers in the uplands.

‘Any study of Great Zimbabwe has to rely a great deal on re-examining and re-assessing the work of early investigators, the men who removed all the most important finds from the ruins and stripped them of so much of their deposits’ (Garlake 1973: 14). The authors have here done us a great service in reviewing the surviving archaeological evidence from this world famous site. They challenge the structuralist interpretation – in which different parts of the site were allocated to kings, priests, wives or to circumcision rituals – and use the architectural, stratigraphic and artefactual evidence accumulated over the years to present a new sequence. The early enclosures on the hill, the Great Enclosure and the valley enclosures now appear as the work of successive rulers, each founding a new residence and power centre in accord with Shona practice.

In this latest contribution to our ‘Archaeological Futures’ series, Julian Thomas reflects on the current state of Western archaeological theory and how it is probably going to develop over the next few years. Archaeological theory has not ossified in the period since the processual/post-processual exchanges. The closer integration of archaeological thought with philosophical debate in the human sciences has gradually given rise to a theoretical landscape that would have been unrecognisable 30 years ago, wherein ‘new materialisms’ figure significantly.

Sambaqui is the name given to a certain type of archaeological evidence left by fisher/hunter/gatherer groups who inhabited large expanses of the Brazilian coast. The word is of Tupi etymology, tamba meaning shellfish and ki a piling-up (Prous 1991: 204). The Tupi were a horticultural/potter group who lived on the Brazilian coast at the time of the first European arrivals; they coined the term which describes the main characteristic of the sites — the accumulation of great quantities of mollusc shells (FIGURE 1) .

The authors present new research on social and economic developments in southern China in the Early Holocene, ninth to fifth millennia BC. The ‘Neolithic package’ doesn't really work for this fascinating chapter of the human experience, where pottery, social aggregation, animal domestication and rice cultivation all arrive at different places and times. The authors define the role of the ‘pottery-using foragers’, sophisticated hunter-gatherers who left shell or fish middens in caves and dunes. These colonising non-farmers shared numerous cultural attributes with rice cultivators on the Yangtze, their parallel contemporaries over more than 5000 years. Some agriculturalists became hunter-foragers in turn when they expanded onto less fertile soils. No simple linear transition then, but the practice of ingenious strategies, adaptations and links in a big varied land.