The Early to Middle Pleistocene Transition (EMPT) is characterised by major environmental changes and evolutionary innovations within the genus Homo but the scarcity of the African EMPT fossil and archaeological records obscures its palaeoecological context. Here, we present archaeological and faunal evidence from a newly excavated West-Turkana EMPT site—Kanyimangin.

Why, how and when villages emerged across medieval Europe are enduring questions for archaeologists and historians because of the wider social and economic transformations implied—and because many of these settlements persist to the present day. Most archaeological investigations have focused on the nucleated centres of these communities; here, instead, the authors examine the role of agroscapes. Focusing on an agricultural area near the village of Tobillas, changes in soil chemistry are used to document the creation and maintenance of common fields attesting to collective agrarian practice pre-dating the foundation of the medieval village. Reversing the accepted narrative, the authors argue it was these pre-existing agrarian communities who coalesced to constitute villages such as Tobillas.

Debate surrounds the identity of the Europeans who settled Iceland and Greenland in the early medieval period. Historical sources record settlers travelling from Norway to Iceland and then Greenland, but recent analyses of biological data suggest that some settlers had British and Irish ancestry. Here, the authors test these hypotheses with 3D-shape analyses of human crania from Scandinavia, Britain and Ireland, and one of the Norse colonies in Greenland. Results suggest that some 63 per cent of the ancestry of the Greenlandic individuals can be traced to Britain and Ireland and 37 per cent to Scandinavia. These findings add further weight to the idea that the European settlers who colonised Iceland and later Greenland were of mixed ancestry.

Bronze and Early Iron Age hoards in Poland are the focus of a multi-faceted study combining archival research with laboratory analyses and landscape studies. The diverse dataset is expected to reveal new insights into the phenomenon of metal deposition.

Climate change is often cited in the ‘collapse’ of complex societies and linked to agricultural resilience or lack thereof. In this article, the authors consider how demand affected agricultural strategies as farmers navigated the transformations of the Late Harappan phase (c. 1900–1700 BC) of the Indus tradition. Through the modelling of monocropping/multicropping, low/high yield crops, and supply-driven versus flexible production, various economic, environmental and social demands are explored with reference to the choices of farmers and how these decisions differed regionally, and how they impacted the wider Late Harappan de-urbanisation process. The authors’ archaeobotanical perspective on the Indus contributes to wider understanding of how urban societies and their agricultural bases change over time.

This article presents details of the recent discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in Cova Dones, Valencia. The preliminary results reveal a rich graphic assemblage with features that are unusual for Mediterranean Upper Palaeolithic art and were previously unknown for the Pleistocene in the eastern Iberian coast.

In its early decades, Antiquity regularly featured the subject of linear earthworks that criss-cross the British landscape. Subsequently, however, discussion has been largely relegated to period-specific and local journals. As a result, interpretations of these imposing but often poorly dated earthworks have been drawn in the contrasting research traditions of later prehistory and the early medieval period. Here, the authors propose a comparative dialogue as a means for reinterpreting these landscape features, and as a lens through which to explore social complexity. Combined with advances in archaeometrical dating, this new approach promises to reinvigorate the study of some of Britain's largest archaeological monuments.

Palaeoenvironmental data indicate that the climate of south-western Madagascar has changed repeatedly over the past millennium. Combined with socio-political challenges such as warfare and slave raiding, communities continually had to mitigate against risk. Here, the authors apply social network analysis to pottery assemblages from sites on the Velondriake coast to identify intercommunity connectivity and changes over time. The results indicate both continuity of densely connected networks and change in their spatial extent and structure. These network shifts coincided with periods of socio-political and environmental perturbation attested in palaeoclimate data and oral histories. Communities responded to socio-political and environmental risk by reconfiguring social connections and migrating to areas of greater resource availability or political security.

Hedeby was the largest town in the Viking North. Investigations have identified imports at the site from central and northern Scandinavia revealing long-distance connections. The chronology of this trade, however, is unclear. Here, the authors use a typological-biomolecular approach to examine connections during the early Viking Age. The application of ZooMS to an assemblage of antler combs, stylistically dated to the ninth century AD, reveals nearly all were made of reindeer antler. As most craft production waste from Hedeby comprises red deer antler, it is argued that these combs were manufactured elsewhere, perhaps hundreds of kilometres further north. The results have implications for understanding of production and regional connectivity in early medieval Scandinavia.

Cantabrian cave art is familiar from photographs reproduced in textbooks, but these two-dimensional images do not capture the irregularities of the rock surfaces on which animals and other designs were painted or engraved. Here, the authors use stereoscopic photography to review the parietal art of La Pasiega cave. By documenting the uneven surfaces of the cave's walls alongside painted and engraved marks, they identify new animal figures and reinterpret others, previously thought to be partial representations, as complete. The results show the positioning of animal figures to make use of concave/convex surfaces and rock edges to define the outlines of animals, reinforcing the need to record and interpret cave art three-dimensionally.

Cyril Fox's publication The archaeology of the Cambridge region (1923) is celebrated as a milestone in the development of landscape archaeology. Its centenary invites reflection on Fox's approach to landscape and on the development of knowledge about the archaeology of the Cambridge region over the intervening years. Here, the authors compare the evidence available to Fox with the results of three decades of development-led archaeology. The latter have revealed very high numbers of sites, with dense ‘packing’ of settlements in all areas of the landscape; the transformation in knowledge of clayland areas is particularly striking. These high-density pasts have far-reaching implications for the understanding of later prehistoric and Roman-period land-use and social relations.

How did the Roman Empire supply and maintain its frontier garrisons? What was the impact on populations and landscapes of conquered territories? The Feeding the Roman Army in Britain project will answer these questions by establishing how soldiers were provisioned and how frontiers operated as economic as well as militarised zones.

One defining characteristic of Homo sapiens is the production and use of personal ornamentation. Evidence from Africa and western Eurasia has dominated discussion, but a growing number of finds directs attention towards Island Southeast Asia. In this article, the authors report on an assemblage of Nautilus shell beads from the Indonesian cave site of Makpan, Alor Island. The highly standardised forms, mostly with two perforations, and evidence of use wear, indicate that these beads were utilised as appliqués. Dating to the terminal Pleistocene, these beads appear to form part of a wider tradition also attested on Timor and Kisar, suggesting an early inter-island network across southern Wallacea.

Archaeologists of East and southern Africa have long been attracted to large urban centres, such as those on the Swahili coast, and to the circulation of imported goods. Here, the authors aim to refocus attention on the diversity of objects that were produced and transformed by the inland societies of East and southern Africa during the Middle Iron Age (AD 750–1250). Recognition of the remaking, bundling and repurposing of small, portable objects emphasises the innovative practices that helped to bestow power on their makers. A socially embedded approach to studying objects and practices re-presents African communities as innovators and active transformers of non-local objects, and facilitates new narratives about the political economy of Africa at that time.

From the seventh century AD, successive Islamic polities were established around the Mediterranean. Historians have linked these caliphates with the so-called ‘Islamic Green Revolution’—the introduction of new crops and agricultural practices that transformed the economies of regions under Muslim rule. Increasingly, archaeological studies have problematised this largely text-based model of agrarian innovation, yet much of this research remains regionally and methodologically siloed. Focusing on the Western Mediterranean, the authors offer a theoretically informed, integrated environmental archaeology approach through which to contextualise the ecological impact of the Arab-Berber conquests. Its future application will allow a fuller evaluation of the scale, range and significance of agricultural innovations during the ‘medieval millennium’.

During the early first millennium BC, Phoenician peoples settled the Iberian coasts instigating cultural innovations known as the orientalising; indigenous communities of the interior have long been considered as passively dependent on, or isolated from, these developments. Recent excavations at the Early Iron Age village of Cerro de San Vicente in central Spain, however, have yielded domestic contexts that prompt reconsideration of this relationship. The authors use settlement layout, architecture and locally made tablewares to identify heterarchical organisation around virilocal and bilateral kinship and hybrid practices that attest to adoption of know-how and practices from distant places. Emphasis is placed on the role of embodied craftworking skills and female mobility in transculturation processes.

Geophysical prospection and archaeological excavation are helping to contextualise a group of Middle Bronze Age metalwork hoards in Brittany. At Kerouarn, three hoards with a total of 89 bracelets were found buried in a semi-circular enclosure with a monumental entrance, bounded by two deep ditches and their associated embankments. No domestic or funerary remains were discovered.