Researchers in the High Andes in northern Chile report the study of a fine cave sequence, supported by 19 radiocarbon dates. The initial occupation at c. 11 500 cal BP represents the earliest human occupation known at this altitude. The toolkit suggests a hunting (logistical) camp used to take advantage of the animals gathering in the rich wetland of the neighbourhood.

The generalised picture of Mesolithic marine diet giving way to a Neolithic terrestrial diet, as derived from isotope measurements, has been both championed and challenged in this journal. Here new results from the Balkans offer a preliminary picture of a diversity of food strategy, both before and after the great transition.

Through integrated analysis of archaeobotanical and artefactual distributions across a settlement, the authors discover ‘neighbourhoods’ using different cultivation areas in the surrounding landscape. Differences between groups also emerge over the life of the settlement in the use of special plants, such as opium poppy and feathergrass. Spatial configurations of cultivation and plant use map out the shifting social geographies of a Neolithic community.

Examining the earliest grand mortuary monuments of the Neolithic, the authors question the assumption that they mark the resting place of society's higher ranks. Using the skeletal remains, the grave goods and the burial rites, they find no great differences in commemoration between the monumental cemeteries, with their long barrows, and the flat graves, without structures. In this analysis, the children proved to be the most vivid players: while the very young are largely excluded, some toddlers were selected to carry hunting equipment, a distinction shared with selected adult males. Some children were also laid to rest in the long barrows, with some adults. Thus hunting has a spiritual value for these agriculturalists, and whether inherited or marked at birth, the children signal something more variable and subtle than linear rank.

Aerial photography and excavations have brought to notice a major prehistoric ceremonial complex in central Scotland comparable to Stonehenge, although largely built in earth and timber. Beginning, like Stonehenge, as a cremation cemetery, it launched its monumentality by means of an immense circle of tree trunks, and developed it with smaller circles of posts and an earth bank (henge). A change of political mood in the Early Bronze Age is marked by one of Scotland's best preserved dagger-burials in a stone cist with an engraved lid. The perishable (or reusable) materials meant that this great centre lay for millennia under ploughed fields, until it was adopted, by design or by chance, as a centre of the Pictish kings.

Why do early artists draw eyes? The author argues that they reflect the evolution of the brain in its expressions of fear, love and behaviour, and invites us to apply this ethological approach more widely to the study of early symbolism.

Chance discoveries of weapons, horse bones and human skeletal remains along the banks of the River Tollense led to a campaign of research which has identified them as the debris from a Bronze Age battle. The resources of war included horses, arrowheads and wooden clubs, and the dead had suffered blows indicating face-to-face combat. This surprisingly modern and decidedly vicious struggle took place over the swampy braided streams of the river in an area of settled, possibly coveted, territory. Washed along by the current, the bodies and weapons came to rest on a single alluvial surface.

In this paper the author places the rock art of Uganda in context. It probably belongs to the Late Stone Age period to the Holocene and its symbolism may be interpreted in the light of later belief systems recorded amongst the historical Pygmy people. Pongo is the bark cloth used to make the distinctive loin cloths of men and aprons of women. Pongo are probably depicted in the rock art to evoke the fecundity of ndura, linking the real and supernatural within the Pygmy cosmos.

The authors take us to the salt lakes of Villafáfila in north-west Spain, where they have demonstrated by excavation that salt extraction had begun by the second half of the third millennium BC. The salt pans uncovered were accompanied by copious amounts of decorated Beaker pottery, for which political and symbolic interpretations are proposed.

Dated and stratified potsherds excavated at Nabta Playa belong to the earliest phase of pottery-making in the Sahara – relatively sophisticated bowls decorated with a toothed wheel. The authors explore the origins of post-Pleistocene settlers in the Sahara and the Nile Valley and discuss what prompted them to make pottery.

The demise of the Iceman is archaeology's current long-running detective story, in which the time and mode of death have yet to be agreed. Recent discussion in these pages favoured a ceremonial burial on the mountain, following his death and the conservation of the corpse in the home village. In a new forensic contribution, the author shows that, in addition to his other woes, the Iceman might have been taking medicine in the form of bark. This in turn implies that his final adventure might have taken place at anytime between spring and autumn, leaving the burial hypothesis without constraint.

The activities of hunter-gatherers are often captured in rockshelters, but here the authors present a study of a riverside settlement outside one, with a rich sequence from 1300 BC to AD 800. Thanks to frequent flooding, periods of occupation were sealed and could be examined in situ. The phytolith and faunal record, especially fish, chronicle changing climate and patterns of subsistence, emphasising that the story here is no predictable one-way journey from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Right up to the period of the famous nineteenth-century rock paintings in the surrounding Maloti-Drakensberg region, adaptation was dynamic and historically contingent.

The authors examine the role of horses as expressed in assemblages from settlement sites and cemeteries between the Eneolithic and the Bronze Age in Kazakhstan. In this land, known for its rich association with horses, the skeletal evidence appears to indicate a fading of ritual interest. But that's not the whole story, and once again micro-archaeology reveals the true balance. The horses are present at the funeral, but now as meat for the pot, detected in bone fragments and lipids in the pot walls.

The early Neolithic in northern Central Europe ought to be the theatre in which incoming farmers meet local hunter-gatherers, with greater or lesser impact. By way of contrast, the authors use isotope analysis in a cemetery beside the Danube to describe a peaceful, well-integrated community with a common diet and largely indigenous inhabitants. Men and women may have had different mobility strategies, but the isotopes did not signal special origins or diverse food-producing roles. Other explanations attend the variations in the burial rites of individuals and their distribution into cemetery plots.

A massive Late Bronze Age fortified settlement in Central Europe has been the subject of a new and exemplary investigation by excavation and site survey. This prehistoric enclosure, nearly 6km across, had a complex development, dense occupation and signs of destruction by fire. It can hardly be other than a capital city playing a role in the determinant struggles of its day — weighty and far reaching events of the European continent now being chronicled by archaeology.

Examination of skeletal material from graves at Phum Snay in north-west Cambodia revealed an exceptionally high number of injuries, especially to the head, likely to have been caused by interpersonal violence. The graves also contain a quantity of swords and other offensive weapons used in conflict. The authors propose a context for these warriors in the struggle between emergent polities in the Iron Age before the domination of Angkor.

Colleagues who find the current climate inhibiting to pure scholarship and authors eager to see their name in print should read this: an ultimately uplifting account of Jacobsthal's struggle to establish one of the foundations of European archaeology at a time of grave political persecution. Not the least of the achievements of this paper is the definitive rehabilitation of the lost co-author of Early Celtic Art, Eduard Neuffer, whose name never appeared on the cover and whose contribution was perforce unrecognised.

The authors present and interpret rock drawings found in caves in the Lenggong Valley, Perak, Malaysia. The drawings, which begin by depicting ritually important patterned mats, and continue with images of cars, bicycles and figures with their hands on their hips, provide rare and precious insights into how the indigenous people of the area came to terms with changes that occurred as the result of the arrival of Europeans in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

The author reports an object of modest appearance but great significance — a small bone beam for weighing precious commodities. Weighing indicates the regulation of quantities for exchange or manufacture and is thus a key agent of social and economic complexity. Well-stratified and dated to the early third millennium BC, this find puts the people of the Levant among the earliest to quantify mass. We are rightly urged to inspect faunal assemblages for similarly subtle modifications of bones.

The extraction and processing of metal ores, particularly those of copper and tin, are regarded as among the principal motors of Bronze Age society. The skills and risks of mining lie behind the weapons, tools and symbols that drove political and ideological change. But we hear much less about the miners themselves and their position in society. Who were these people? Were they rich and special, or expendable members of a hard-pressed workforce? In this study the spotlight moves from the adits, slags and furnaces to the bones and seeds, providing a sketch of dedicated prehistoric labourers in their habitat. The Mauken miners were largely dependent on imported meat and cereals, and scarcely hunted or foraged the resources of the local forest. They seem to be the servants of a command economy, encouraged to keep their minds on the job.