At Jerf el Ahmar in northern Syria the authors have excavated a settlement where the occupants were harvesting and processing barley 1000 years in advance of its domestication. Rows of querns installed in square stone and daub buildings leave no doubt that this was a community dedicated to the systematic production of food from wild cereals. Given the plausible suggestion that barley was being cultivated, the site opens a window onto a long period of pre-domestic agriculture. Rye was also harvested, its chaff used to temper mud walls.

Grinding stones have provided a convenient proxy for the arrival of agriculture in Neolithic China. Not any more. Thanks to high-precision analyses of use-wear and starch residue, the authors show that early Neolithic people were mainly using these stones to process acorns. This defines a new stage in the long transition of food production from hunter-gatherer to farmer.

The archaeological sites of Iraq, precious for their bearing on human history, became especially vulnerable to looters during two wars. Much of the looting evidence has been anecdotal up to now, but here satellite imagery has been employed to show which sites were looted and when. Sites of all sizes from late Uruk to early Islamic were targeted for their high value artefacts, particularly just before and after the 2003 invasion. The author comments that the ‘total area looted … was many times greater than all the archaeological investigations ever conducted in southern Iraq and must have yielded tablets, coins, cylinder seals, statues, terracottas, bronzes and other objects in the hundreds of thousands’.

The oxygen-isotope curve, derived from the record of organisms stratified in the deep ocean ooze, has replaced the old pattern of four glaciations with a more complex record of cool and warm events. Since people live by their local sea-level, rather than an abstract world average, that global pattern is itself mediated by other geological forces, on several scales, before it directs the possibilities of human settlement. Here the effect of those forces is unravelled and illustrated.

The determination of the leafy vegetable constituents of the diets of early societies is notoriously difficult using traditional archaeobotanical techniques. In an effort to provide a solution to this problem, a new approach, using gas chromatography (GC) and GC/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), has been adopted to detect the presence of preserved epicuticular leaf wax components absorbed in potsherds. The characteristic compounds identified can serve as chemotaxonomic indicators of the vegetables prepared in vessels during their usage.

Grinding-stones as a technology are seen as a key element in the artefactual transformations of the latest Pleistocene – both for themselves and the foods which were ground on them. In Australia, as in other regions, their age and status is also material to what (if any) kind of a broad-spectrum revolution in foraging accompanied them.

The pig appears to have been among the earliest domesticated animals in China, with evidence for pig domestication at Cishan from 8000 BP. The authors propose a model for the development of animal domestication.

The famous upper Palaeolithic (Gravettian) burial with shell ornaments known as “Il Principe” was discovered in Italy sixty years ago. Here the authors present recent scientific research on his skeleton, leading to new assessments of the date of the burial and indications of diet.

The declassification of CORONA high-resolution space photography has made a valuable new resource available for the study of ancient landscapes. Using a recent case-study from Syria, examples are given of various ways in which CORONA imagery can significantly enhance regional survey work.

This paper defines the potential reasons for low population levels in Oxygen Isotope Stages 6–4: climate, habitat preferences and sea level.

The late Pleistocene colonization of Greater Australia by humans by c. 40,0130 b.p. is now generally accepted. This landmass, which comprised at periods of lower sea levels Tasmania, Australia and Papua New Guinea, has now produced sites with rich and diverse sequences extending towards or now mainly beyond 30,000 b.p., in the present arid country of western New South Wales (Barbetti & Allen 1972), in southwest Western Australia (Pearce & Barbetti 1981), in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (Gillieson & Mountain 1983), and recently even in Tasmania (Cosgrove 1989).

Prior to 1985, with the exception of an 11,000 b.p. date for occupation in Misisjl Cave on New Britain (Specht et al. 1981), the tropical lowlands of Papua New Guinea and its attendant nearer Melanesian island chain had remained a blank on the region’s map of Pleistocene human expansion.

Not every first footstep on a virgin shore leaves enduring trace, nor every first human settlement an enduring deposit that chances to survive, and then chances to be observed archaeologically. Good environmental evidence from Mangaia Island, central East Polynesia, gives — it is contended — a fairer picture of the human invasion of remote Oceania than the short and sceptical chronology recently published in ANTIQUITY.

When did the market economy come to Europe? Fish might seem an unlikely commodity to throw light on the matter, but the authors use fish bones from English sites to offer a vivid account of the rise and rise of the market as a factor in European development from the late tenth century.

The authors offer a new chronological framework for prehistoric Southeast Asia, based mainly on the Bayesian modelling of 75 radiocarbon dates from well-stratified excavations at Ban Non Wat. The results are revolutionary. Neolithic practice now begins in the second millennium and hierarchical state-forming activity is dated to a ‘starburst’ around 1000 BC. The authors reflect on the social implications of the new model – and on the criteria for an ever stronger chronology.

Recent excavations in southern Jordan have revealed the largest Early Bronze Age (c. 3600-2000 BC) metal manufactory in the ancient Near East. On-site Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analyses of the finds provide new evidence concerning the scale and organization of metal production at a time when the first cities emerged in this part of the Near East. Materials and lead isotope analyses of the metallurgical finds provide important data for reconstructing ancient metal processing and for identifying trade networks.

CORONA satellite imagery, preserving an account of the earth's surface from 40 years ago, is a most important archaeological survey tool and we have often sung its praises. Here the authors use new procedures to extend the competence and revelations of CORONA even further. Stereo pairs derived from images taken from fore and aft of the satellite give three dimensional images of landscapes and even individual sites. Techniques of modelling and rectification restore the sites to their original shape without recourse to survey on the ground – in many cases no longer possible since the sites have been buried, inundated or erased. The ingenuity shown here indicates that results from CORONA are only going to get better.

For many years, the southern Mesopotamia of Ur and Uruk, ancient Sumer, has been seen as the origin centre of civilisation and cities: ‘The urban implosion of late-fourth- and early-third-millennium Mesopotamia resulted in a massive population shift into large sites’ said Nissen in 1988. ‘These new city-states set the pattern for Mesopotamia as the heartland of cities’ (Adams 1981; Yoffee 1998). And for Stone & Zimansky (2005) ‘Remains of the world's first cities are the most noteworthy feature of the landscape in southern Iraq’. But at Tell Brak Joan Oates and her team are turning this model upside down. A long campaign of study, culminating in the new discoveries from 2006 reported here, show that northern Mesopotamia was far along the road to urbanism, as seen in monumentality, industrialisation and prestige goods, by the late fifth millennium BC. The ‘world's earliest cities’ are as likely to have been in north-eastern Syria as southern Iraq, and the model of a core from the south developing a periphery in the north is now ripe for revision.

The Teouma site, on Efate in central Vanuatu, was uncovered during quarrying in 2003 and has proved to be one of the most significant discoveries to date for the colonisation of Remote Oceania. Not only did it bring to light a fine assemblage of the famously diagnostic Lapita ceramics, but a cemetery of more than 25 individuals along with the pots. The skeletons offer an opportunity to investigate the origins of the ‘Lapita people’ who first appeared in the Bismarck archipelago around 3300 years ago and rapidly moved through island Melanesia and Western Polynesia over the next few centuries.