Flints scattered in the earliest stratum of Mandrin, a rock shelter in the Rhône valley, were clustered by k-means and Principal Component Analysis to reveal areas dominated by particular tools or waste products. These areas suggest the way in which Palaeolithic people managed their domestic space.

Radiocarbon dating and stratigraphy here offer a new chronological structure for the Iron Age in the Levant. The credit for the construction of massive public monuments in the northern part of Israel is here wrested from David and Solomon and attributed to the later Omride dynasty. The early Israelite monarchs actually ruled over a small kingdom in the highlands around Jerusalem rather than a great empire.

Certain kinds of food can be classed as “luxurious” because they are difficult to procure and reserved for an élite – but luxury foods can be more surely defined from their context of use. Using examples from Andean archaeology the author shows how different foodstuffs perform ceremonial roles in different sectors of society. Many ordinary people use them to feed the ancestors, while the élite may put significance on a variety of consumables, including human blood.

Dorothy Garrod's classic excavation of Shukbah Cave revealed a sequence of burials from the middle Palaeolithic into a period transitional between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic which she named the Natufian after the wadi in which the cave is located. Using the original field notebooks, the author re-examines the stratigraphy (Layers A–D) and proposes most of the human bone is Natufian (from Layer B) except a group burial which may in fact belong to a later layer. This research implies a redefinition of burial-types belonging to the Natufian.

This paper represents the joint work of two very different specialists. The fieldwork was undertaken by Sillitoe as part of his ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the interpretative work was done by an archaeologist, Hardy. The work described here represents some of the last direct evidence from users of stone tools. It shows how procurement, manufacture, use, storage and the relative roles of men and women in the process was dependant on what other materials were available – material often sadly elusive in the archaeological record. Discard did not reflect use, but was often guided by the thoughtful wish to avoid cut feet.

The sudden conflagration of an Early Bronze Age room at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh in the Jordan valley resulted in the preservation of a remarkable assemblage of plant remains. Using microscopy and experiment, the author was able to detect fruits previously sun dried for preservation. Grapes, figs, pomegranate, olives, cereals, legumes and capers provided the most conclusive evidence for the drying and preservation of food.

Middle-eastern archaeologists are winning new information from declassified military photographs taken 25 years ago. This study shows how pictures of north-eastern Syria are revealing the routeways, and by inference the agricultural systems of Mesopotamia in the early Bronze Age.

Antiquity is pleased to present a preliminary report on the stone statue of a Celtic warrior recently discovered at the celebrated excavation at Lattes, southern France, and dating to around 500 BC.

A recent workshop on ‘dark earth’, the homogeneous soil layer that often separates Roman from Early Medieval and Medieval strata in towns, prompted the authors to show how this concept, which developed in England, became altered when employed in mainland Europe. They present new research on what is actually a widespread phenomenon, and warn that uncritical assumptions about such layers made on the ground are losing important information.

The author studies prehistoric sea travel along the coast between West Mexico and Ecuador using a computer simulation incorporating the performance characteristics of sailing rafts. The model predicts that while northward voyages may have taken as little as two months, southward voyages would have entailed at least five months and may have required a strategy that took the rafts offshore for as long as a month.

Dating initial colonisation and environmental impacts by Polynesians in New Zealand is controversial. A key horizon is provided by the Kaharoa Tephra, deposited from an eruption of Mt Tarawera, because just underneath this layer are the first signs of forest clearance which imply human settlement. The authors used a log of celery pine from within Kaharoa deposits to derive a new precise date for the eruption via “wiggle-matching” – matching the radiocarbon dates of a sequence of samples from the log with the Southern Hemisphere calibration curve. The date obtained was 1314 ± 12 AD (2σ error), and the first environmental impacts and human occupation are argued to have occurred in the previous 50 years, i.e. in the late 13th – early 14th centuries AD. This date is contemporary with earliest settlement dates determined from archaeological sites in the New Zealand archipelago.

Making sense of rock carvings requires that the busy scenes depicted be resolved into groups. Using Swedish examples, John Coles shows how the depth of carvings can help identify images and subjects and urges that the depths become a regular part of the record.

Pottery found at Spirit Cave, Thailand, has been claimed as among the earliest ceramics in the world – a radiocarbon date of 7500 BP being obtained from associated charcoal. However radiocarbon dating of organic resin found on some of the sherds gave a date of around 3000 BP. This is another example of improved precision in dating by pin-pointing the context and using AMS. The authors describe how it was done and assess its validity

How did the pyramid builders prepare and fit large stone blocks so that they were horizontal, orthogonal and flattened to within one hundredth of an inch? The author's experiments suggest that the surfaces were prepared using basic instruments made of rods and string, while to move the blocks the immutable laws of friction were mitigated by lubricating with mud and gypsum.

Multi-spectral imaging (MSI), which was developed to explore the surface of the earth and other planets from space, has been adapted to read and record faded or burnt manuscripts. The authors show how MSI achieved new readings from carbonised and damaged fragments of papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum, Petra and the Judean Desert. The method has potential for investigating the degraded ornamental surfaces of other artefacts.

How were stone tools hafted? Based on experimental evidence the author shows how hafting arrangements can be recognised from macro-and microwear traces on the stone objects.

One of the most important techniques to be applied in medieval archaeology is access analysis, in which the spaces inside a structure are categorised by their relative ease of access and interpreted in terms of privilege and privacy. The author demonstrates the method, taking buildings from Salisbury town and Cathedral Close as a case study.

New discoveries of cave art at Chauvet and elsewhere have produced radiocarbon dates which may seem startlingly early and demand dramatic revision to the traditional stylistic sequence. The authors warn that the radiocarbon dates may themselves need better validation.

The authors deconstruct the fictional image of Neanderthals, showing why we see them in the way we do.

After more than a decade after its demolition, the December 1992 destruction of the sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya remains a powerful heritage issue. The site is considered sacred by Hindus as the birthplace of their god Rama, and the mosque's demolition caused the loss of about 2000 Indian lives in Hindu-Muslim rioting across India and led to the destruction of Hindu temples in the neighbouring countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh.