Camels were not native to Europe during the Holocene and were evidently imported by conquering peoples. The discovery of camel bones at two sites in Slovenia is an important contribution to understanding the distribution and function of these animals during the Roman Imperial Period.

Archaeological evidence for prehistoric gardening practices in Polynesia includes stone boundary walls, storage pits and structures, drainage systems and evidence for the modification of soil, but often the remains of horticultural practise are ephemeral. Maori developed a range of novel modifications to their traditional horticultural methods which enabled the successful introduction of the range of Polynesian cultigens into the temperate New Zealand environment, the furthest southwards these crops were introduced. They modified the soil by adding charcoal, shell and alluvial gravels to change the friability and temperature retention, and stored tubers in semi-subterannean pits for the next growing season (Jones 1991: 14–8; Challis 1976). Here, we report what we believe is the first direct archaeological evidence for the actual layout of prehistoric kumara gardens in New Zealand. Our interpretation receives support from the accounts of early Europeans in New Zealand, including Joseph Banks and William Colenso.

Research in the Altai region of central Asia is attempting to establish the development and expansion of the Aurignacian to Europe and the Caucasus. New sites and early dates provide important new data on this key question about the emergence of modern humans in Eurasia.

Stratigraphic and palynological evidence from trenches at Wollaston, Northamptonshire, suggest viticulture was extensively practised at this Roman site. It is argued that the apparent lack of viticultural tools and wine presses in the archaeological record in Britain is not reliable evidence for the absence of viticulture at that time.

In 1998 extensive investigations were undertaken on Water Island, US Virgin Islands, by a research team from the Southeast Archeological Center, National Park Service. The US government is relinquishing ownership of the island, an action that would affect cultural resources. Earlier surveys had located a number of sites, including the remains of three 18th- and l9th-century plantations, historic wells, prehistoric shell middens and an extensive World War II fortification complex (Wild & Anderson 1992; Knight 2001; Anderson et al. in preparation).

Water Island, located off St Thomas, encompasses about one square mile, and is characterized by steep rocky slopes, a pronounced central ridgeline and a highly indented coastline with numerous bays and beaches (FIGURE 1). Fresh water comes from rainfall, and in small brackish ponds. Vegetation ranges from dry tropical thorn scrub to mangrove/salt ponds.

The long houses of the Linear Pottery Culture and its immediate successors are usually interpreted in functional terms, but they have certain anomalous features. This paper considers the processes by which they were built, lengthened, abandoned and replaced and suggests that they may have charted the development of the households who lived inside them. The buildings in Linear Pottery settlements were generally orientated towards the areas of the origin of the communities who lived there.

The author attributes the claimed migrations of the Irish into Argyll to a set of élite origin myths, finding no support in archaeological evidence. He goes on to ask how the Iron Age populations of Argyll established and changed their personal and group identity.

Fasting was an important element of early Christian behaviour in Egypt. In spite of a wealth of Late Antique monastic sources describing acts of fasting, the reality must be that food was consumed at regular intervals. To date, discussion of monastic dietary practice has been largely a historical debate. Although we do not discount this approach and will use it ourselves, this paper departs from this academic tradition by incorporating new archaeobotanical evidence from the recent excavations of the 5th–7th-century AD monastery at Kom el-Nana. Middle Egypt into the study of monastic diet. It is our belief that the use of independent forms of evidence (in this case written sources on attitudes to fasting and archaeobotanical evidence) is the best way forward to answering fundamental questions about what monastic diet was like in Late Antique Egypt.

The historically documented burial samples of the Babenberg and Habsburg dynasties allow a detailed analysis of the circumstances that led to dismemberment, evisceration, disturbance, exhumation and reburial over a millennium. The results may provide deeper and more broadly applicable insights into relevant cultural formation processes of élite burials.

Terrestrial mammals are frequently undervalued in interpretations of prehistoric coastal economies where middens are used to examine seasonality and diet. Using case-studies from the Northwest Coast of North America, and from Arctic Norway, a more integrated approach to subsistence and technology is proposed

Under the old Treasure Trove laws, small, single items of precious metal were frequently dismissed by Coroners as casual losses (although they still had to be reported). This meant that numbers of small items never went to inquest, as one of the criteria for Treasure was that in all likelihood objects had been buried with the intention to recover them (the animus revertendi). This criterion was removed when the new Act was passed some five years ago. The extension of the law to cover such items has thrown up at least one problem of definition.

A later Bronze Age gold penannular ring was recently found not to be treasure at inquest, because the piece was held to be a coin. Single, stray finds of coins are not counted as treasure, whereas any ornament of precious metal at least 300 years old, small or large, is now eligible under the 1996 Treasure Act. This raises two issues. The first concerns the definition of ‘coin’ as explained in the Code of Practice; the second is about terminology, and specifically the use of the term ‘ring-money’ to describe such objects.

The author reports on experiments in megalithic construction using axe-based technology and proposes methods whereby relatively small groups of skilled workers could effectively transport and erect standing stones and dolmens.

Forgeries of ancient seals have been found in modern times, but there has been little previous analysis of how much security ancient seals might have offered. In this paper, we demonstrate four different vulnerabilities of clay seal impressions using attack methods and materials that were available thousands of years ago. The success of these attacks suggests that ancient stamp and cylinder seals may have been highly vulnerable to spoofing.

With the advent of relatively inexpensive image-handling computer programmes, digital image enhancement is more readily available to archaeologists. This paper describes the principles behind image enhancement and its application to rock-art in particular. Its use at a site in Torres Strait shows how it can be used successfully to reveal faded rock paintings.

A female skeleton, whose 14C age is about 8540 BP (c. 7500 cal BC), from the basal part of the Holocene loess at Fenpo Gully, west of the village of Donghulin, Mentougou district of Beijing, was associated with a shell necklace restored from 68 gastropod shells. This unprecedented find also contributes new environmental information.

Horses were status symbols in central-west Africa in the last millennium. Here, the importance of some very early horse bones is discussed in the context of emerging African society.

We are pleased to present this assessment of a recent seminar on West Heslerton, one of the key sites of Anglo-Saxon northern England, as a prelude to the impact of its publication.

For most archaeologists across the globe, mention of Africa in the context of archaeological research will probably bring to mind the important discoveries of early stone tools and hominid remains in eastern and southern Africa, the spectacular stone-walled enclosures and other structures at Great Zimbabwe, and images of ‘tribal’ culture, subsistence practices, artefacts and housing that, to some Western eyes at least, can seem reminiscent of a more distant non-African past. For some, the architectural and artistic splendours of Egyptian civilization may also form part of this image of archaeology on the continent, although for complex geopolitical, historical and academic reasons the study of Egyptian archaeology, in all but a few instances, continues to be regarded as distinct from that of the rest of Africa. While accepting that the preceding sentences are something of a caricature of the non-Africanist’s understanding and perception of the work of archaeologists on the continent, and that general introductory texts on archaeological methods and theory nowadays give wider coverage of African case-studies than was the case even a decade ago (e.g. Renfrew & Bahn 1991; Fagan 1995), the level of awareness of the breadth of African archaeology, current discoveries and research issues, as well as the many problems that practitioners and managers face on a daily basis, remains abysmally low.

Direct dating, using the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) 14C method, indicates that some petroglyphs (rock art) at El-Hosh in Upper Egypt pre-date the early 7th millennium BP (mid 6th millennium cal BC), making it the oldest graphic activity recorded in the Nile Valley.

The Paso Otero 5 site is located in the middle basin of the Quequén Grande river (Buenos Aires Province, Argentina). This site is the first recorded Pleistocene-Holocene archaeological context in the grasslands of the Interserrana Bonaerense Area at which extinct megamammals and a ‘fish-tail’ projectile point have been recovered in association from buried soil dated to c. 10,200–10,450 BP.