This paper presents new data on agricultural production, the palaeoenvironment and social change during the Bronze Age of southeast Spain. The authors argue against the inference of irrigation as the basis for agriculture and relate the emergence of cereal monoculture to the extraction of surplus and the exploitation of human labour.

Good archaeology relies on ever more precise dates – obtainable, notably, from ice-cores and dendrochronology. These each provide year-by-year sequences, but they must be anchored at some point to real historical time, by a documented volcanic eruption, for example. But what if the dating methods don't agree? Here the author throws down the gauntlet to the ice-core researchers – their assigned dates are several years too old, probably due to the spurious addition of ‘uncertain’ layers. Leave these out and the two methods correlate exactly…

And now what? This anxious question torments many of us in the current socio-political moment: that of Trumpism and Brexit; of resurgent xenophobia and racism expressed through election results and policies around Europe; and of the return of fascism and Nazism. It is this moment that has prompted González-Ruibal et al. (above) to call for a new, politicised archaeology. In so doing, they urge archaeologists to abandon the soothing liberal but ineffective embrace of communities and the public. They also argue against identitarian politics and the discourse of apolitical and abstract multiculturalism. I am in broad agreement with them, and called some years ago for a shift from ethics to politics, and for an explicit, public political stance (Hamilakis 2007). If the politicisation of archaeology was important 10 years ago, it is much more urgent now.

Excavation of a site not just of the ‘contact period’ but of contact itself gives a new view of those darkest years around 1840 when the remaining free Tasmanian Aboriginal people were tracked down and transported to death in exile.

When excavating in the hill-fort of Cissbury a few years ago the writer found nothing by which to date a certain group of pits except a piece of a revolving handmill (FIG. 23). Even this could not supply the necessary chronological evidence, because the developmental history of the quern or hand-mill had not yet been worked out in sufficient detail to enable one to say that a certain form is characteristic of a certain period. Being thus impressed with the need for such a study the writer endeavoured to collect data, but was met at the outset with the difticulty that of all the hand-mills preserved in our Museums extremely few have been dated at all closely by associated finds of pottery—at least so far as records go—while it seems to be exceptional even for modern excavators to note such associations when querns are found. After all, it is, as Pitt Rivers said, the common objects that are often more important than the rare ones, just because they are common, and it is surely one of the prime objects of excavation to obtain data for the study of the evolution, not only of pottery, but of all common objects.

What is the role of women in processes leading towards a more sedentary way of life? Pottery plays an important role as a functional factor and in symbolic expressions. With sedentism hearth-centred activities organized around females grew, and the position of the woman as the nurturer. Some of this symbolism, expressed on a multitude of ritual occasions, may be retrievable archaeologically.

Mediterranean obsidian-provenance studies are changing in direction and focus of modern research, with characterization of the Sardinian sources, application of minimally destructive and inexpensive analytical techniques, analysis of complete or large parts of assemblages, and the integration of provenance data with reduction technology and use-wear traces.

The careful study of faunal and artefact remains associated with Bandkeramik houses in France has shown new details about activity zones and village organization in the Early Neolithic. Lamys Hachem describes the result of work from Cuiry-lès-Chaudardes in the Aisne valley, France.

The artefact assemblages from early Upper Palaeolithic sites in eastern European Russia contain flint tools of more Middle Palaeolithic type. With these artefacts are bifacially thinned triangular forms that may represent the first use of this technology in the area, and perhaps anywhere in Europe.

Terraced field systems are a feature of many regions of the world and have been dated as early as 6000 cal BC in the Levant (Kuijt et al. in Antiquity 81 (2007: 106–18)). The discovery of agricultural terraces in the northern Caucasus, reported here, extends their distribution into a new area. Relatively low population levels in the late medieval and early modern periods have preserved several blocks of terraced fields, some of them created at the beginning of the first millennium BC, others in the mid first millennium AD. The earlier terraced fields, associated with material and settlements of the Koban culture, culminated in over-exploitation of the land and exacerbated erosion during environmental change in the mid first millennium BC. The later series of terraced fields are of different form and are associated with the settlement in the area of communities of Alans in the first millennium AD. They largely avoided the areas rendered infertile by Koban period overexploitation. The morphology and chronology of the terraced field systems are explored using a combination of aerial photography, GIS analysis and field investigations.

How early did steppe dwellers penetrate the forests? The authors compare and contrast settlement on the steppe, in the forest and on the steep sea coast of western Patagonia, finding that the steppe is occupied first, from 11400 calendar years BP. But around 2800 calendar years BP settlements enter the forest almost simultaneously for a brief period along the length of the Cisnes river valley. Within a few centuries the experiment appears to be abandoned, and the focus of prehistoric peoples returns to the steppe.

Ian Hodder's book, Reading the past (1986), was reviewed in the last number (Gardin 1987). Here a further comment is offered on Hodder's proposal for a ‘contextual archaeology’.

Two-and-a-half years ago, in September 1991, a mummified body was discovered in a high snowfield on the Italian-Austrian border. It dates to about 3200 BC. Several sources and accounts, mostly in German, now exist of ‘Ötzi the Iceman’, but there is no collected report in English. We invited Lawrence Barfield, himself a specialist on the region and period, and co-author of one of the first Ötzi books, to review these accounts of a great prehistoric discovery.