The Sujala site in northern Finnish Lapland is a reindeer hunters' camp from the early post-glacial period, discovered by the authors in 2002. The site was originally linked with the Preboreal occupation of the north Norwegian coast, but further excavations and analyses indicate that it actually represents a totally new phenomenon: evidence for an eastern influx into Lapland around the Preboreal–Boreal transition. This discovery has far-reaching implications for the colonisation of north Scandinavia, but also for the subsequent development of Early Mesolithic settlement in northern Finland and Norway.

Lapita pottery seems to arrive in the Pacific out of the blue, and signal a new social, economic or ideological network. The authors show that widespread interaction, articulated by obsidian tools and stone mortars and pestles decorated with various motifs, was already in existence in New Guinea and New Britain. These earlier networks provide a preview of the social interaction that was to light up with the advent of Lapita.

Caves in Ireland, as elsewhere, have been used for shelter and burial over much of recorded time. The author here focuses on their use during the Neolithic, carefully isolating the available material and arguing from it that caves then had a primary role in the remembrance of the dead, and were used for excarnation, token deposition or inhumation. The author compares these practices to other contemporary types of burial and concludes that there was a strong symbolic or ritual sense shared in Neolithic Ireland between passage tombs and those certain kinds of cave that they resembled.

Bronze Age objects found in the English Channel off Salcombe, southern Britain, include an implement which has its normal home in Sicilian agriculture – perhaps as a plough shoe. The authors assemble and classify the objects and consider the web of exchange networks that brought the artefact from Sicily to Devon via France around the thirteenth century BC.

The authors find numerous cut-marks on human bones from an Early Iron Age cemetery in Kazakhstan and review a wide range of possible explanations. They discount cannibalism and find that the cuts and fractures fit best with a range of ritual mutilations known to ethno-archaeologists of the Altai region

A small group of exotic obsidian blades supplied from over 600km distant reached a particular area of the East Mound at Çatalhöyük in the Early Ceramic Neolithic (7000-6300 cal BC). The authors explore a variety of explanations and contexts, including changes in technology, agricultural expansion, gift exchange, bride-wealth and incomers from the east.

The Baden culture, like others in central Europe, has long been assumed to be the material indication of a people. In a searing analytical deconstruction, the author shows that ‘Baden’ pottery has no equivalence with other cultural practices, and is itself an amalgam of a number of different pottery fabrics and styles, many of them regionally diverse. Singled out among them is the early Boreláz fine ware which is actively spread in central Europe, perhaps accompanied by a knowledge of the first wheeled vehicles.

Excavations at a cave site on the island of Palawan in the Philippines show occupation from c. 11000 BP. A fine assemblage of tools and faunal remains shows the reliance of hunter-foragers switching from deer to pig. In 9500-9000 BP, a human cremation burial in a container was emplaced, the earliest yet known in the region.

The Torres Strait is often in the research literature – unsurprisingly since it is not only a key area for early settlement but one where ancient and modern practice resonate. Rock art is a prominent archaeological source for the region – but not the only one. In this study the author shows how rock art interconnects with imagery on portable artefacts and scarification – scarring patterns on skin – to define cultural zones of the last few centuries in territories occupied by both horticulturalists and hunter-gatherers.

High status burial remains one of archaeology's most evocative types of site – but it is not always easy to know why they were built, where and when they were. The author describes a group of élite burials that appeared in north Europe in the late eleventh-twelfth century in a historical context that is unusually clear, and proposes the rise of a pagan élite in the face of aggressive Christianisation from the neighbours.

The rondels – circular earthworks of late Neolithic Europe – have a repeated form highly suggestive of deliberate design and symbolism. The concentric ditches are cut by two, three or most often four causeways at right angles. Here the authors investigate the orientation of the causeways in 51 rondels belonging to the Lengyel culture and conclude that they correlate well with the sunrise. The idea of a solar cult receives some corroboration from patterns on contemporary pottery.

Beehives were discovered in a densley built area in the Iron Age city of Reḥov (tenth-ninth century BC). They consisted of hollow clay cylinders, each with a little hole at one end (for the bee) and a removable lid at the other (for the bee keeper). These beehives, the earliest found in the Near East, were identified by analogy with examples pictured on Egyptian tombs and in use by traditional peoples. The suggested identification was confirmed by chemical analysis.

The famous headdress of Pu-abum at Ur is an object of great beauty. But the authors show that the gold leaves of the headdresses and diadems of her court circle can tell an even richer story. Identifying among them the leaves of the sissoo tree, they show that its symbolic usage celebrated a wide range of properties, from medicine to furniture. These were properties appreciated not only in Mesopotamia but in eastern Iran and the Indus Valley, home to the sissoo tree as well as to neighbouring civilisations.

The Luzira head, a pottery figure discovered in a Ugandan prison compound in 1929, has remained curiously anonymous ever since. New archaeological work on the northern shores of (Lake) Victoria Nyanza has defined a formative period of political centralisation at the end of the first millennium AD. The authors show that this period of early to late Iron Age transition is where this remarkable object and related figurative material belongs. This has implications both for the formation of kingdoms in Uganda and for the story of African art more generally.

The authors provide an overview of animal exploitation in the Chinese Neolithic, emphasising regional differences in meat procurement strategies. While the Yellow river peoples turned from hunting wild animals to the rearing of pigs, dogs, sheep and cattle during the Neolithic, the peoples of the Yangzi valley continued to rely on an abundant supply of wild creatures into their Bronze Age. Their staples were deer, fish and birds and there was a special relationship with fish that extended even to the grave.

This study explores bedrock geology, topographic setting, compass orientation, soil profile and plant cover at 84 temples of Classical (480-338 BC) mainland Greece, several Aegean islands and Cyprus. A striking pattern emerges: the soil and vegetation matches the dedications to particular deities, suggesting an economic basis for particular cults.

The authors describe the discovery of a Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic basalt axe factory in the Manasseh Hills in Israel and suggest it had a primary role in the region for the production of these functional and symbolic tools. The form of discarded roughouts and flakes is used to deduce the principal eventual product and its sequence of manufacture.

Meticulous survey of the banks, channels and reservoirs at Angkor shows them to have been part of a large scale water management network instigated in the ninth century AD. Water collected from the hills was stored and could have been distributed for a wide variety of purposes including flood control, agriculture and ritual while a system of overflows and bypasses carried surplus water away to the lake, the Tonle Sap, to the south. The network had a history of numerous additions and modifications. Earlier channels both distributed and disposed of water. From the twelfth century onwards the large new channels primarily disposed of water to the lake. The authors here present and document the latest definitive map of the water network of Angkor.

Analysis of a set of bones redeposited in a medieval abbey graveyard showed that the individual had been beheaded and chopped up, and this in turn suggested one of England's more gruesome execution practices. Since quartering was generally reserved for the infamous, the author attempts to track down the victim and proposes him to be Hugh Despenser, the lover of King Edward II.

Emotional news for lovers of a dry white wine. The blissful Hippocrene was composed from wild grapes from the sixth millennium BC in the lands of its natural habitat. But, as the author shows, the cultivation, domestication and selective breeding of the grape following in the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age was aimed primarily at the enjoyment of its sweetness.