Antequera in southern Spain is widely recognised as an outstanding example of the European megalithic phenomenon. One of its most remarkable features is the evident relationship between conspicuous natural formations and human-built monuments. Here, the authors report the results of their investigation of a tomb newly discovered at the site of Piedras Blancas at the foot of La Peña de los Enamorados, a limestone massif that dominates the Antequera plain. Excavation and multidisciplinary study, including geological, architectural and archaeoastronomical investigations, have revealed a complex funerary monument that is part natural, part built, part hypogeum, part megalith. The results emphasise the centrality of La Peña in the Neolithic worldview and encourage wider investigation of prehistoric place-making.

Archaeologists have traditionally framed the impacts of natural disasters in terms of societal collapse versus cultural resilience. The 7.3ka cal BP Kikai-Akahoya (K-Ah) ‘super-eruption’ in south-western Japan was among the largest volcanic events of the Holocene. Here, the authors deploy a multi-proxy approach to examine how K-Ah devastated Tanegashima Island. While local Jōmon populations were annihilated, surrounding communities survived and eventually returned, adjusting their subsistence base to survive in the damaged environment. The article concludes that neither ‘collapse’ nor ‘resilience’ fully capture the complex dynamics of this process and that more research is needed to understand how disasters shape cultural trajectories.

Survey around Porto Rafti Bay in Greece reveals evidence of a prosperous community that exploited near-shore islets for habitation and craft production following the Late Bronze Age collapse. Surface assemblages provide insights into the strategies undertaken by this mercantile maritime group aptly navigating a dynamic socioeconomic environment.

Detailed photogrammetry and 3D laser scanning of rock art, geophysics research and sondage excavations conducted at the Painted Hand Petroglyph Panel, a large rock art site in south-western Colorado, USA, has revealed new information about the cultural situation in the pre-Columbian and historic North American Southwest.

Excavations in Rome have long focused on the early city; only recently has attention turned to the archaeology of the medieval and later periods. Here, the authors present a rare sixteenth-century context, dating to a time when European cities contended with repeat epidemics and implemented measures to control the spread of disease. A contextual approach to the assemblage leads to its identification as a ‘medical dump’ of clinical equipment, including glass urine flasks and ‘single-serve’ ceramics, many of the latter specifically produced for the Ospedale dei Fornari. Drawing on Renaissance medical treatises, the authors argue that this material represents the disposal of potentially infected objects, shedding light on urban waste-management practices.

This new project studies the diversity of socioecological niches across the agropastoral transition in the Andes, utilising a multi-isotope approach to track human territories and allocate subsistence tasks. During the agropastoral period, we discriminate different diachronic niches with varying extents of maize farming and altitudinal mobility.

The elites of many past cultures have sought to romanticise agricultural labour—often the source of their wealth and hence their status. A recently discovered winery at the Villa of the Quintilii on the Via Appia Antica, near Rome, provides only the second known example from the Graeco-Roman world of an opulent wine production complex built to facilitate vinicultural ‘spectacle’. The authors present the architectural and decorative form of the winery and illustrate how the annual vintage was reimagined as ‘theatrical’ performance. Dating to the mid third century AD, the complex illuminates how ancient elites could fuse utilitarian function with ostentatious luxury to fashion their social and political status.

Documenting the intentional structuring of space by hunter-gatherers can be challenging, especially in complex cave contexts. One approach is the spatial analysis of discard patterns. Here, the authors consider the spatial distribution of faunal remains from the Lower Magdalenian Level 115 in El Mirón Cave, Cantabria, to assess a possible structuring function for an unusual alignment of rocks. Although it is impossible to determine whether the alignment was intentionally constructed, differences in the distributions of taxa and in specimen sizes on different sides of this feature suggest that it played a role in structuring the living space of the cave's inhabitants.

Studies of ancient Mesopotamian cities have long focused on their institutions. Here, instead, the authors draw on recent investigations at the third-millennium BC site of Lagash (modern Tell al-Hiba, Iraq) to explore urban density, economy and sustainability at one of the largest ancient urban centres of the region. Drawing on excavation, environmental and remote-sensing data, the authors adopt a multi-scalar approach, revealing dense urban occupation, with subdivision into distinct walled quarters, as well as evidence for multiple foci of intensive industrial production and the exploitation of a rich mosaic of surrounding micro-environments. The study emphasises how a combination of new field data and alternative research directions offers novel insights into early urbanism.

In Iran, studies of the transition from hunting and gathering to farming and herding have focused on early developments in the Zagros Mountains. Here, the authors present new zooarchaeological data from Hotu Cave, which throw light on sheep/goat management and domestication during the Epipalaeolithic–Neolithic transition on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. Gazelle dominate the Epipalaeolithic levels, while sheep/goat are most abundant in the Neolithic. Large quantities of perinatal sheep/goat remains from the Early Neolithic indicate that these animals were actively managed in or close to the cave. The results point towards the importance in Iran of local developments beyond the Zagros, adding nuance to the general model of domestication in South-west Asia.

Monte Verde II in southern Chile is one of the most important, and debated, sites for understanding of the early peopling of the Americas. The authors present 43 radiocarbon measurements based on cores of sediments that overlie the archaeological deposits adjacent to the site. Statistical analysis of these dates narrows the deposition of the earliest sediments sealing the occupational layer to c. 14 550 cal BP. The consistency between the dates of the site's archaeological strata and its adjacent deposits allows not only consolidation of the site's chronology, but also illustration of how a multi-pronged approach can inform debates surrounding the peopling of new lands—in the Americas or elsewhere.

Dates differ by up to 150 years in the protracted debate around the chronology of the Middle Bronze Age Near East. Here, the authors present radiocarbon and ceramic evidence from destroyed buildings at Zincirli, Türkiye, that support the Middle Chronology. Ceramics from late Middle Bronze Age sites in Syria and Anatolia, and Bayesian modelling of 18 well-stratified radiocarbon samples from site destruction contexts attributable to Hittite king Ḫattusili I, indicate a date in the later seventeenth century BC. Since the Northern Levant connects the Mesopotamian and Eastern Mediterranean second-millennium BC chronologies, this evidence supports the convergence of these long-debated schemas, with implications for the start of the Late Bronze Age and the rise of empires.

Archaeological investigation of Circum-Alpine lake, or pile, dwellings has afforded unprecedented insight into Neolithic and Bronze Age societies. The discovery in 1989 of a submerged settlement near Rome added an early (eighth millennium BP) geographical outlier to this distribution. Two decades of excavation at La Marmotta have identified more than a dozen dwellings and an enormous assemblage of organic remains. Here, the authors present an overview of the textiles, basketry and cordage recovered, and the tools used to manufacture them. The assemblage paints a more complete picture of the technological expertise of Neolithic societies and their ability to exploit and process plant materials to produce a wide range of crafts.

The emergence of monumentality in the Maya lowlands has been linked to political complexity. But how did the emergence of these monuments relate to changing human-environment interactions? Here, the author proposes that Maya monumentality embodies traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. Taking the example of Tzacauil, the gathering of fieldstone for the preparation of land for cultivation is connected to agricultural intensification and the florescence of monumentality in the Late and Terminal Formative period (300 BC–AD 250). Exploration of the relationships between monumental traditions and localised TEK practices may illuminate the entanglement of complexity, subsistence and human-environment interactions in other parts of the world.

The anaerobic conditions at the Roman fort of Vindolanda, close to Hadrian's Wall in northern Britain, have famously preserved a variety of finds made of organic materials, including wooden writing tablets and a pair of leather boxing gloves. Here, the authors re-examine a wooden object originally recovered in 1992, re-interpreting the find as a large, disembodied phallus. Stone and metal phalli are known from across the Roman world, but the Vindolanda example is the first wooden phallus to be recognised. Combining evidence for potential use-wear with a review of other archaeological and contextual information, the authors consider various possible interpretations of the function and significance of the Vindolanda phallus during the second century AD.

Recent studies relate the introduction of Early Neolithic flint mining practices to the migration and rapid expansion of agricultural groups from north-western continental Europe into present-day Britain and southern Scandinavia. Here, the authors critically analyse this hypothesis, using a case study from south-western Sweden to demonstrate how transregional processes played out locally with their own dynamics, c. 4000 BC. They conclude that migration and population change only partly can explain what happened during the centuries immediately before and after 4000 BC. Local variation in human-material relationships also needs to be considered.

The burial of multiple individuals within a single funerary monument invites speculation about the relationships between the deceased: were they chosen on the basis of status, gender or relatedness, for example? Here, the authors present the results of aDNA and isotope analyses conducted on seven individuals from an Early Iron Age barrow at Dolge njive, south-eastern Slovenia. All seven individuals are close biological relatives. While the group composition suggests strict adherence to neither patrilineal nor matrilineal structures, the funerary tradition appears highly gendered, and family links through both the male and female lines seem important in structuring of the community. The results have implications for understanding of kinship and funerary practices in late prehistoric Europe.

Recent study of Vlaho in Pelagonia confirms that it is the earliest known Neolithic settlement in North Macedonia. Multidisciplinary research of the architecture and material reveals a complex enclosure site dating to the seventh millennium BC, with dozens of ditches, daub buildings, white painted pottery and domesticated plants and animals.

In 2019, an ethnographic survey of Indian workshops and shops producing and selling putalis (Venetian ducats and their imitations) was conducted in Nashik, Maharashtra. The study, supplemented by information from written and documentary sources, provides observations relevant to archaeologists studying the process of reinterpreting Roman coin design in Early Historic India.

Terracing is found widely in the Mediterranean and in other hilly and mountainous regions of the world. Yet while archaeological attention to these ‘mundane’ landscape features has grown, they remain understudied, particularly in Northern Europe. Here, the authors present a multidisciplinary study of terraces in the Breamish Valley, Northumberland. The results date their construction to the Early to Middle Bronze Age, when they were built by cutting back the hillside, stone clearance and wall construction. Environmental evidence points to their use for cereal cultivation. The authors suggest that the construction and use of these terraces formed part of an Early to Middle Bronze Age agricultural intensification, which may have been both demographically and culturally driven.