The remains of pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) dating to 3460±200 and 2960±370 BP have been recovered at the archaeological site of Birimi, northern Ghana, associated with the Kintampo cultural complex. This finding represents the earliest known occurrence of pearl millet in sub-Saharan Africa. Results indicate that Kintampo peoples developed effective subsistence adaptations to savannas as well as tropical forest habitats.

Marc Azéma a Palaeolithic researcher and film maker has been exploring the representation of animal movement in cave art for more than 20 years, and here shares with us his latest examples, culled from the parietal art in the Chauvet Cave (Ardèche) and La Baume Latrone (Gard). Here he has shown that Palaeolithic artists have invented systems of breaking down movement and graphic narrative. His co-author, Florent Rivère, discovered that animal movement was also represented in more dynamic ways—with the use of animals drawn on a spinning disc. In these flickering images created by Palaeolithic people, the authors suggest, lie the origins of cinema.

A recent workshop on ‘dark earth’, the homogeneous soil layer that often separates Roman from Early Medieval and Medieval strata in towns, prompted the authors to show how this concept, which developed in England, became altered when employed in mainland Europe. They present new research on what is actually a widespread phenomenon, and warn that uncritical assumptions about such layers made on the ground are losing important information.

New excavations and survey on the island of Rapa have shown that a rockshelter was occupied by early settlers around AD 1200 and the first hill forts were erected about 300 years later. Refortification occurred up to the contact period and proliferated around AD 1700. Taro cultivation in terraced pond-fields kept pace with the construction of forts. The authors make a connection between fort-building and making pond-fields, demonstrating that the pressure on resources provoked both the intensification of agriculture and hostility between the communities of the small island.

The khirigsuurs are large and complex ritual sites that are major features in the landscape of Bronze Age Mongolia and represent considerable investment. The authors present recently investigated examples of this important class of monument, describe their attributes and offer preliminary deductions of the kind of society they imply – and whether it was truly nomadic.

Landscape archaeology depends greatly on the nature of the underlying physical landscape, and an understanding of its formation processes and change. We are pleased to publish this contribution on the Holocene river valleys of Britain, which provides important guidance on the integration of archaeological and geomorphological evidence, in building models for assessing potential archaeological preservation and erosion.

The recent study of Kis-Mohos Tó lake in Hungary reveals an important sequence of prehistoric landscape changes from the earliest land clearance to the early Middle Ages. The recognition of land degradation, through the application of new analytical methods, forms an important part of the discussion.

East of Amman in Transjordan lies the basalt area called the Harrat er Radjil (the centre is approximately 37 deg. 30 mins. east and 32 deg. 30 mins. north), and this area is archaeologically most interesting. (Fig. I). The country consists mostly of basalt broken up into blocks of various sizes, with mud-flats scattered in all the hollows. The mud-flats are fed by small watercourses which are generally deeply eroded, and although they are usually dry, water flows in them after heavy rain. Pools of water sometimes lie in the watercourses and on the mud-flats till the commencement of the summer months. Here and there rise small crater-hills, a few hundred feet high, of volcanic formation; and here and there the larger watercourses have eroded the country, leaving many small hills which, when seen from afar, are not unlike the crater-hills.

The First World War is beginning to receive archaeological attention. This paper highlights the technical, ethical and political challenges, including recovery and re-burial of the multi-faith dead, excavation of battlefield features and volatile ordnance, and incorporating the sensitive management of multi-vocal landscapes as cultural heritage and tourist destinations.

Two notable reconstructions of Neanderthal individuals are analysed in this perceptive study of the role of visual reconstructions in archaeological debate. The author concludes that such images are more than popular by-products of academic discussion, and play a crucial role in the construction of archaeological arguments.

Tierra del Fuego represents the southernmost limit of human settlement in the Americas. While people may have started to arrive there around 10 500 BP, when it was still connected to the mainland, the main wave of occupation occurred 5000 years later, by which time it had become an island. The co-existence in the area of maritime hunter-gatherers (in canoes) with previous terrestrial occupants pre-echoes the culturally distinctive groups encountered by the first European visitors in the sixteenth century. The study also provides a striking example of interaction across challenging natural barriers.

Reinvestigations of the cave of Lene Hara in East Timor have yielded new dating evidence showing occupation from before 30,000 BP. These will further fuel the debates on early colonization of the region.

The increasing availability of multi-dimensional remote-sensing data covering large geographical areas is generating a new wave of landscape-scale research that promises to be as revolutionary as the application of aerial photographic survey during the twentieth century. Data are becoming available to historic environment professionals at higher resolution, greater frequency of acquisition and lower cost than ever before. To take advantage of this explosion of data, however, a paradigm change is needed in the methods used routinely to evaluate aerial imagery and interpret archaeological evidence. Central to this is a fuller engagement with computer-aided methods of feature detection as a viable way to analyse airborne and satellite data. Embracing the new generation of vast datasets requires reassessment of established workflows and greater understanding of the different types of information that may be generated using computer-aided methods.

It is a little surprising that in spite of the relatively high standard of excavation techniques current in Britain today so little attention has been paid by practical excavators to the processes of formation of the sites which they dig.

All of us recognize, of course, that a site consists of a sequence of deposits, some formed deliberately and usually rapidly by man, and others more slowly by nature; and that some processes of formation, such as erosion and filling by the plough, are still continuing today. But there seems to be a widespread assumption (though it is difficult to be sure of this, since such things are seldom discussed) that once a constituent layer of a site has been formed, and sealed by another layer above it, it becomes immediately fossilized and remains unchanged until examined by the excavator, perhaps several millennia later. It is equally widely supposed that once an object, large or small, has come to rest in or upon a deposit it will remain in that position for all time. In short, the tacit assumption is that once formed the nexus of finds and deposits which constitutes a site is almost wholly static, and that change, if it occurs at all, occurs only at the surface.

O.G.S. Crawford, founder of ANTIQUITY, flew in the 1920s over an English landscape where the grooves and lines cut into unploughed downlands showed the courses of roads and tracks since earliest times. Similar patterns of crop- and soil-marks in the rain-fed agricultural zone of the Middle East, when studied in the same spirit, also reveal the local and the long-distance routes of a proven great age.

‘They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for pigfruit…’ Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood.

Carbon and nitrogen isotopes show a marked change in the diet of British pigs between the Neolithic and the Iron Age. The authors neatly deduce that this was due to the loss of the Neolithic wildwood where pigs were wont to root for fungus amongst the rotting trees.