Key locations identified with the lives of important religious founders have often been extensively remodelled in later periods, entraining the destruction of many of the earlier remains. Recent UNESCO-sponsored work at the major Buddhist centre of Lumbini in Nepal has sought to overcome these limitations, providing direct archaeological evidence of the nature of an early Buddhist shrine and a secure chronology. The excavations revealed a sequence of early structures preceding the major rebuilding by Asoka during the third century BC. The sequence of durable brick architecture supplanting non-durable timber was foreseen by British prehistorian Stuart Piggott when he was stationed in India over 70 years ago. Lumbini provides a rare and valuable insight into the structure and character of the earliest Buddhist shrines.

As the temperature rises each year, the assemblages of prehistoric hunters emerge from the ice. Archaeologists in Norway are now conducting regular surveys in the mountains to record the new finds. A recent example presented here consists of a whole tunic, made of warm wool and woven in diamond twill. The owner, who lived in the late Iron Age (third–fourth centuries AD), was wearing well-worn outdoor clothing, originally of high quality.

The Heuneburg on the Upper Danube has been one of the best-known archaeological sites of Early Iron Age Europe since the first excavations of the 1950s. Fieldwork carried out during recent years, however, has radically changed our accepted understanding of what was clearly a central place of supra-regional importance. In addition to the three-hectare hilltop fortification with its famous mudbrick wall, an outer settlement some 100ha in extent has been discovered. Its investigation has given new insights into the centralisation process that took place from the end of the seventh century BC. Moreover, recent discoveries from the richly furnished burials in the surrounding area offer significant clues to issues of social hierarchy and status transmission within Late Hallstatt communities. The results provide an entirely new picture of the earliest stages of urbanisation north of the Alps.

The authors show that the principal correlates of feasting in Viking Age Iceland were beef and barley, while feasting itself is here the primary instrument of social action. Documentary references, ethnographic analogies, archaeological excavation and biological analyses are woven together to present an exemplary procedure for the recognition of feasting more widely.

The authors' research project in the Pyrenees mountains has located and excavated Roman kilns for producing pitch from pine resin. Their investigations reveal a whole sustainable industry, integrated into the local environmental cycle, supplying pitch to the Roman network and charcoal as a spin-off to the local iron extractors. The paper makes a strong case for applying combined archaeological and palaeoenvironmental investigations in upland areas, showing mountain industries to have been not so much marginal and pastoral as key players in the economy of the Roman period and beyond it into the seventh century AD.

This vitally important article sets out the obstacles and opportunities for the protection of archaeological sites and historic buildings in zones of armed conflict. Readers will not need to be told that modern munitions are devastating and sometimes wayward, nor that cultural heritage once destroyed cannot simply be rebuilt. The author makes a vivid case for the role of respect for the past in mitigating hostility and so winning the peace as well as aiding the victory, and guides us through the forest of players. Agencies so numerous, so obscure and so often ineffective might prompt the response ‘a plague on all your acronyms’. All the more important, then, that the author and his associates continue their campaign and are supported by everyone who believes that cultural property has a value that lies beyond sectional interests.

Southern Arabia was an important trading partner for the Roman world but owing to geography and politics its archaeology has been less intensively studied than that of neighbouring regions. A succession of kingdoms rose and fell in the last centuries BC and first centuries AD, but in the late Roman period the dominant power was Ḥimyar, with its capital at Ẓafār. In 2008 a relief sculpture was discovered at the site depicting a crowned ruler accompanied by symbols of office. This study reviews the arguments surrounding the date of the sculpture, but more importantly throws light on the cultural and political connections that it embodies. The proposal is that it represents an Aksumite puppet-ruler of the sixth century, at a key moment in the history of the Ḥimyarite kingdom. The crowned king of Ẓafār is significant not only in itself but also in helping to delineate the cultural and political stage on to which Islam was shortly to emerge.

The megalithic burials of southern India—a wonderfully varied set of monuments—have long needed a chronology and a context. Broadly contemporary with the Roman and Sasanian empires, these dolmens, cairns and cists have continually raised contradictions with their material contents. The authors attack the problem using luminescence applied to pottery at the site of Siruthavoor in north-east Tamilnadu. Although sharing material culture, this first pilot project gave dates ranging from 300 BC to AD 600, so exposing the problem and perhaps, in OSL, its long-term solution.

At first sight Saharan oases appear unlikely locations for the development of early urban communities. Recent survey work has, however, discovered evidence for complex settlements of the late first millennium BC and early first millennium AD, surrounded and supported by intensive agricultural zones. These settlements, despite their relatively modest size, satisfy the criteria to be considered as towns. The argument presented here not only presents the evidence for their urban status but also argues that it was not agriculture but trade that conjured them into existence. Without the development of trans-Saharan trade, these complex oasis communities would have been unsustainable, and their subsequent economic fortunes were directly linked to the fluctuating scale and direction of that trade.

The development of small-scale kingdoms in the post-Roman world of northwestern Europe is a key stage in the subsequent emergence of medieval states. Recent excavations at Rhynie in north-eastern Scotland have thrown important light on the emergence of one such kingdom, that of the Picts. Enclosures, sculptured ‘symbol stones’ and long-distance luxury imports identify Rhynie as a place of growing importance during the fifth to sixth centuries AD. Parallels can be drawn with similar processes in southern Scandinavia, where leadership combined roles of ritual and political authority. The excavations at Rhynie and the synthesis of dated Pictish enclosures illustrate the contribution that archaeology can make to the understanding of state formation processes in early medieval Europe.

Shallow oval bowls used on the Baltic coast in the Mesolithic have been suggested as oil lamps, burning animal fat. Here researchers confirm the use of four coastal examples as lamps burning blubber—the fat of marine animals, while an inland example burned fat from terrestrial mammals or freshwater aquatics—perhaps eels. The authors use a combination of lipid biomarker and bulk and single-compound carbon isotope analysis to indicate the origin of the residues in these vessels.

Tangas are small convex triangular pottery covers found in large numbers in the Amazon delta. Their suggestive shape has long been attributed to use as a cover or shield for the female Mound of Venus, for protection, modesty (‘cache-sexe’ is the French term) or embellishment. Here the author offers a typology and searches for correlations between the shapes, sizes and patterns of the tangas and the date, location, purpose and status of the women who wore them. He emphasises that in spite of this advance, better understanding requires new information from properly designed excavations; 85 per cent of known tangas have been acquired by looting, purchase or low-precision digging.

The domed stupas are among the most distinctive of South Asia's religious monuments and have been shown to be sensitive indicators for their society. Since arguments for economic and political change depend on accurate dating, and since the stupas are largely composed of brick, the authors here assess the potential for dating building sequences by applying optically stimulated luminescence to brick fabric. As so often, good scientific dates obtained from specimens must be tempered by their context: brick may be replaced or recycled during repair and embellishment. Nevertheless, the method promises important insights by distinguishing different episodes of building, and so writing ‘biographies’ for stupas with different functions.

Archaeologists today do not as a rule seek to excavate the remains of famous people and historical events, but the results of the project reported in this article provide an important exception. Excavations on the site of the Grey Friars friary in Leicester, demolished at the Reformation and subsequently built over, revealed the remains of the friary church with a grave in a high status position beneath the choir. The authors set out the argument that this grave can be associated with historical records indicating that Richard III was buried in this friary after his death at the Battle of Bosworth. Details of the treatment of the corpse and the injuries that it had sustained support their case that this should be identified as the burial of the last Plantagenet king. This paper presents the archaeological and the basic skeletal evidence: the results of the genetic analysis and full osteoarchaeological analysis will be published elsewhere.

Indian Ocean maritime networks have become a special focus of research in recent years, with emphasis not only on the economics of trade but also the movement of domesticated plants and animals (see Fuller et al. in Antiquity 2011: 544–58). But did such contacts inevitably lead to radical social change? Excavations at Tumbe reveal a settlement of the late first millennium AD that was heavily engaged in the traffic in exotic materials and may have been producing shell beads for export. This activity seems to have flourished within a domestic context in a village setting, however, and does not seem to have stimulated pronounced social stratification nor to have led inexorably towards urbanisation. These results demonstrate that some communities were able to establish a stable balance between the demands of the domestic economy and long-distance trade that could persist for several centuries. Activities at Tumbe should hence be viewed in their own right, not as precursors to the formation of the Swahili trading towns of the later medieval period.

Settlements and cemeteries associated with a European colonial presence provide rich opportunities to gain insights into the character and composition of those populations, even in the absence of written records. The study reported here has the added fascination of a detective story, seeking to match an unknown burial ground to a series of known but long lost cemeteries. The systematic analysis of the graves and their occupants is carried out within a comparative framework which highlights the variable composition and distinguishing features of the different types of graveyard that are encountered within a colonial context. The authors conclude that the Baillif cemetery was a nineteenth-century military graveyard, and that many of the young men who were buried here were new recruits who fell victim to endemic diseases such as dysentery, yellow fever and malaria.

Japanese archaeology benefits from the large number of rescue excavations conducted during recent decades that have led to an unparalleled record of archaeological sites. That record is here put to use to interrogate changing settlement patterns in the north-eastern corner of Tokyo Bay during several millennia of the Jomon period (Early, Middle and Late Jomon: 7000–3220 cal BP). Jomon hunter-gatherer occupation is characterised by large numbers of settlements, some of them substantial in size, containing hundreds of individual pit-house residential units. Detailed analysis of the rank-size distribution of these settlements reveals a pattern in which periods of settlement clumping, with few large settlements, alternate with more dispersed settlement patterns on a regular cycle of approximately 600 years. The regularity of this cycle might suggest a correlation with cycles of climatic change, such as Bond events. Closer scrutiny shows, however, that such a correlation is unconvincing and suggests that cyclical change in Jomon settlement patterns may instead be due to other factors.

Enhanced by recent survey, the authors define new kinds of rock art along the Lennard and Fitzroy rivers in Western Australia—black pigment and scratch-work images featuring anthropomorphic figures with elaborate head-dresses. These are shown to belong to the Contact period and represent the response of Indigenous artists to European land-taking by recalling and restating traditional themes from earlier times.

The author describes a process of systematic integration of aerial and satellite imagery, which has provided a huge increase in the number of known burial mounds in the area where the Danube meets the Black Sea. Careful evaluation of newly acquired and archival imagery from satellites and lower level platforms shows where data is comparable and how visibility varies with imagery type. Excavations to date suggest the majority of the mounds are of Greco-Roman date and associated with the large towns and their road networks. Clusters of barrows exist, hinting at associated settlement aggregation, but a large proportion are single tumuli, raising interesting questions about their social role in this period. Above all, the large numbers revealed by the survey must invite new thoughts on whether, or in what way, the mounds reflect social ranking.

The colonisation of the Pacific islands represents one of the major achievements of early human societies and has attracted much attention from archaeologists and historical linguists. Determining the pattern and chronology of colonisation remains a challenge, as new discoveries continue to push back dates of earliest settlement. The length and direction of the colonising voyages has also led to lively debate seeking to trace languages and artefactual techniques and traditions to presumed places of origin. Seafaring simulation models provide one way of resolving these controversies. One of the most remote of these island groups, the Marianas, is shown here to have been settled not from Taiwan or the Philippines, as has been argued in Antiquity by Hung et al. (2011) and Winter et al. (2012), but from New Guinea or Island Southeast Asia to the south. It represents an incredible feat of early navigation over an ocean distance of some 2000km.