The study of the proportions of stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen which survive in ancient human and animal bones offers highly suggestive indications of ancient diets. Among the most remarkable results from such investigations is the dramatic change in diet which is thought to have occurred between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic when people turned from maritime to terrestrial food, from fish to meat and vegetables. The three contributions which follow challenge, modify, enhance or reflect on this model. In a pivotal critique of the evidence from Britain and Denmark, Milner et al. present a range of explanations for the signals of a maritime or terrestrial emphasis in diet and conclude that the change need not have been either rapid or total. Lidén et al. show that, in southern Sweden, the preferences for fish over meat were related less to period or culture, but (reasonably enough) to location: fish-eaters live by the sea. Finally Robert Hedges takes up the question of partial marine diets and how to detect them, developing the idea that marine diets might give a fainter signal in people who were only getting small amounts of protein. Perhaps there were many such people in the new order of the Neolithic …

New dating of several key sites in eastern Central Europe refines our view of human presence there around the Last Glacial Maximum. The author shows that, with the advancing Ice Age, this part of Europe was abandoned later than the west, and a critical environmental factor was increasing aridity rather than the dropping temperatures.

The authors describe clay features dating from c. 34-23 000 years ago discovered in a stratified occupation sequence in a Greek cave. The clay was brought from outside the cave, puddled with water and shaped into shallow basins. Laboratory analyses have shown that these clay features were burnt. This together with the occurrence of fragments of wood ash and phytoliths lying on their surfaces suggest that these features were hearths used for cooking, including the roasting of wild grasses.

The authors present the musical properties of well-preserved bone flutes recently recovered from Jiahu, an early Neolithic site in central China with a sequence beginning in the seventh millennium BC (Antiquity 77: 31–44). Tonal analyses of five of the flutes indicate a gradual development from four-tone to seven-tone scale. By adding more holes to the pipe, structuring the pitch intervals closer to each other, and by alternating the keynote, the prehistoric musicians could play increasingly expressive and varied music. In addition, the flutes became progressively standardised in pitch, presumably so they could play in harmony. The study shows that the Jiahu flute makers and their musicians became progressively familiar with acoustics and developed a cognitive scheme of music comparable to that of modern times.

Why were infants buried beneath house-floors at the Mesolithic and early Neolithic site of Lepenski Vir? Undertaking a new analysis of the neonate remains at Vlasac and Lepenski Vir the authors reject the idea of sacrificial infanticide, and demonstrate a consistency of respect in these burials. They suggest that the deaths were mourned and the dead, like the living, were given protection by the houses they were buried in. The treatment of mothers and children suggests increasing social cohesion from the Mesolithic at Vlasac to the early Neolithic at Lepenski Vir.

Excavation of a Classic Kerma cemetery in Sudan revealed a number of burials segregated by age, throwing into question a presumed disregard for the burial of the young. Burial rites were varied according to the age of the deceased and show a remarkable concern for the ritual burial of infants and the stillborn

The recent discovery of a cache of 70 groundstone axe-heads at the Grossmann site, near Cahokia, in the Mississippi valley prompts a new interpretation of the commemorative and ritual value of such deposits. The makers of these axe-heads seem to belong to a community of specialists who had a contributory role in the foundation of the Cahokia polity.

Neanderthal diet is explored by examining stone tools found at the site of La Quina for residues and microwear. The Neanderthal people are found to be using their scrapers for working plants and woods as well as meat.

The authors demonstrate that a temple examined at the Classic Maya site of Aguateca, Guatemala, was still in the process of construction when it was attacked and abandoned at the beginning of the ninth century AD. Study of the ruin has provided valuable information on Maya building methods and processes, as well as guidance on how unfinished buildings may be identified.

The authors present a unique long record of inner bark use by the Sami people of northern Scandinavia extending back to 2800 BP. Consistent patterns with respect to the direction and size of bark peeling scars shows that common values and standards were early applied. They further conclude that inner bark was important as a regular food and a vitamin C source at these northern latitudes. Bark-peeled trees as biological artefacts in forests also provide important data to understand subsistence strategies and spatial patterns of land use unique to areas with long winter seasons.

Is ecology or agency the principal imperative of the formation of complex societies? Using new survey data, the author shows how both interest in the development of the riverside settlement area of the American Bottom and how the different modern histories of the northern (industrial) and the southern (agricultural) American Bottom, have affected the survival of evidence and how this in turn has favoured a different emphasis in interpretation for each.

The authors report the discovery of a cemetery of richly furnished graves in the western desert of south Egypt. Artefacts, burial rites and radiocarbon dates relate the cemetery to pastoralists practising transhumance in the later Neolithic period. The first such cemetery to be investigated, its cultural affiliations offer a pre-echo of what would become the Egyptian civilisation.

DNA analysis of a tooth found with imported pottery in Bali offers a strong possibility of the presence of a trader of Indian extraction in the late first millennium BC.