The physical scale of buildings like the Baths of Caracalla give the clearest indication of the importance of bathing in the classical order of things – though whether what Romans did in the bath was always clean and decent may be an open question. But what about the prehistory of bathing, and particularly of bathing in steam? An answer is given here which links the historical and ethnographic record to burnt mounds, among the more common and puzzling types of north European site.

This update on radiocarbon calibration results from the 19th International Radiocarbon Conference at Oxford in April 2006, and is essential reading for all archaeologists. The way radiocarbon dates and absolute dates relate to each other differs in three periods: back to 12400 cal BP, radiocarbon dates can be calibrated with tree rings, and the calibration curve in this form should soon extend back to 18000 cal BP. Between 12400 and 26000 cal BP, the calibration curves are based on marine records, and thus are only a best estimate of atmospheric concentrations. Beyond 26000 cal BP, dates have to be based on comparison (rather than calibration) with a variety of records. Radical variations are thus possible in this period, a highly significant caveat for the dating of middle and lower Paleolithic art, artefacts and animal and human remains.

A comparison of the evidence for the earliest scripts in different parts of the world suggests that an apparent preponderance of ceremonial; and symbolic usage should not be interpreted too literally. It seems to have more to do with archaeological preservation–the better survival in archaeological contexts of the durable materials preferred as vehicles for ceremonial texts–than with any deep-seated differences in the function of the scripts. It may well be that the earliest Chinese, Egyptian or Mesoamerican texts were largely as utilitarian in their application as those of Mesopotamia.

Why did humans walk upright? Previous models based on adaptations to forest or savannah are challenged here in favour of physical incentives presented by steep rugged terrain—the kind of tectonically varied landscape that has produced early hominin remains. “Scrambler man” pursued his prey up hill and down dale and in so doing became that agile, sprinting, enduring, grasping, jumping two-legged athlete that we know today.

Advances in our understanding of the Quaternary history of the earth's magnetic field provide the means to correct the radiocarbon time-scale for long-term (millennia) deviations from the calendrical one beyond the upper limit of the tree-ring-based calibration. The conversion is essential when Middle and Upper Palaeolithic archaeological sites are to be placed within the context of the complex climatic history of the last glacial interval and following deglaciation.

Many claims have been made linking ancient languages with genetically identified prehistoric and modern populations. There is much new ‘evidence’ and intense debate on the validity and appropriateness of such interdisciplinary work. Here Patrick Sims-Williams provides a timely comment on linguistics and the quest for ancient populations.

Stonehenge continues to surprise us. In this new study of the twentieth-century excavations, together with the precise radiocarbon dating that is now possible, the authors propose that the site started life in the early third millennium cal BC as a cremation cemetery within a circle of upright bluestones. Britain's most famous monument may therefore have been founded as the burial place of a leading family, possibly from Wales.

The discovery in a long pollen diagram from East Anglia of a substantial curve for a pollen-grain referable to Cannabis sativa, L., the Indian hemp, raised the hope that we might, through palynology, have the means of tracing the history of cultivation of this important and sinister economic plant in England and in Western Europe. It was clearly essential that pollen-analytic evidence should be related fully to existing historical and archaeological knowledge, and aided by a notice in this journal (ANTIQUITY, 1964, 287), and by the notable kindness of a great many academic colleagues, I have put together a condensed historical account of the plant in antiquity as preface to a description of the pollen-analytic data.

The authors explore the arrival of the earliest Gravettian in north-west Europe, using new high precision radiocarbon dates for bone excavated at Maisières-Canal in Belgium to define a short-lived occupation around 33 000 years ago. The tanged points in that assemblage have parallels in British sites, including Goat's Hole (Paviland). This is the site of the famous ochred burial of a young adult male, confusingly known as the ‘Red Lady’, now dated to around 34 000 BP. The new results demonstrate that this British ‘rich burial’ and the Gravettian with tanged points may belong to two different occupation horizons separated by a cold spell.

In the period 1970–85, tree-ring research in Europe had resulted in the production of long oak chronologies for both Ireland and Germany going back over 7000 years (e.g. Brown et al. 1986; Leuschner & Delorme 1984). In England, there was a network of regional chronologies covering the historic period, and almost no chronological coverage for the prehistoric. For the archaeologist this meant that, provided a site from the historic period produced a replicated site chronology, the chances of dating by dendrochronology were very high. The chances of this happening for a prehistoric site were poor by comparison, although some sites were successfully dated, for example the Iron Age causeway from Fiskerton in Liricolnshire and the Hasholme log boat found in North Humberside (Hillam 1987).

The period 1985–88 saw an intense effort to outline a prehistoric oak tree-ring chronology in England (Baillie & Brown 1988). This work centred on sub-fossil oaks from East Anglia and Lancashire and built on a previous chronology from Swan Carr, near Durham which spanned 1155–381 BC (Baillie et al. 1983). The approach to chronology-building was to produce wellreplicated chronology units which could be located precisely in time against the existing Irish (Pilcher et al. 1984) and North German (Leuschner & Delorme 1984) chronologies.

Hand stencils are an intriguing feature of prehistoric imagery in caves and rockshelters in several parts of the world, and the recent demonstration that the oldest of those in Western Europe date back to 37 000 years or earlier further enhances their significance. Their positioning within the painted caves of France and Spain is far from random, but responds to the shapes and fissures in the cave walls. Made under conditions of low and flickering light, the authors suggest that touch—‘palpation’—as much as vision, would have driven and directed the locations chosen for these stencils. Detailed study of the images in two Cantabrian caves also allows different individuals to be distinguished, most of whom appear to have been female. Finally, the project reveals deliberate associations between the stencils and features on the cave walls.

This debate piece offers a critique of some recent ‘new materialist’ approaches and their application to Roman expansionism, particularly those positing that the study of ‘Romanisation’ should be about ‘understanding objects in motion’—a perspective that carries important political and ethical implications. Here, the authors introduce the alternative notion of a ‘predatory’ political economy for conceptualising Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. The aim is to illuminate the darker sides of Roman expansionism in order to produce more balanced and inclusive accounts. Two cases studies—the archaeology of the Roman conquest and of rural communities—illustrate the potential of such a perspective.

Glass – one of the most prestigious materials of the early Islamic empire – was traded not only as vessels and bangles but as raw glass blocks. One of its raw materials, plant-ash, was also traded. This means that tracking the production of this precious commodity is especially challenging. The authors show that while chemical composition can relate to vessel type, it is a combination of chemical compositions with strontium and neodymium isotope ratios that is most likely to lead to (a geological) provenance for its manufacture. The materials used by the glassmakers were local sand and plant ashes. Reported here is the first application of the method to the glass made at the primary glass making centre of al-Raqqa, Syria in an environmental context.

In Southeast Asia the archaeological record is virtually silent about early rice cultivation, for which there is now good evidence from the Chinese Neolithic. Here, new fieldwork from Thailand provides both direct evidence of rice cultivation and, earlier, an indirect clue from palynological indicators.

The discovery of carbonized date stones in the United Arab Emirates has made a contribution to the dating of early date consumption in the Near East.

The prime-mover for the arrival of the Neolithic in Island Southeast Asia is thought to be the expansion of rice farmers speaking an Austronesian language and coming from the north (see Spriggs, above). Much less is known of the indigenous hunter-gatherers and their interaction with the new farming communities. The mutually occupied area, in the definition of Peter Bellwood, was a ‘Friction Zone’, where two radically different cultures met. This paper emphasises how much land, and information, was lost when the rising sea drowned Sundaland, an area the size of India, and brings to bear archaeological and DNA evidence to emphasise the continuing role of hunter-gatherers in the later prehistory of Southeast Asia.