Newly discovered open-air sites along the Dorps River in the arid Karoo (South Africa), a region with uneven archaeological coverage, demonstrate multiple visits to this favoured habitat in the late Holocene Later Stone Age (c. 3000–2000 BP).

This study investigates Escuadrón 41, a former colonial battery turned detention and torture centre, to examine the material and mnemonic afterlives of state violence in Cuba. Through excavation, archival research and oral histories, it reveals how ruins, memory and erasure intersect, positioning archaeology as critical engagement with difficult pasts.

Ostrów Lednicki was a centre of the Piast dynasty (tenth–fourteenth centuries AD), laying the foundations for the development of the Polish state. A collapsed tenth-century wooden fortification associated with Bolesław the Brave (the first king of Poland) and its unique sculptural element provide insights into early-medieval construction techniques.

This project investigates archaeological material collected from north-west China in the 1920s and housed at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm. Finds and archival materials are examined and catalogued to learn about prehistoric cultural interactions and to reconnect discoveries with the original excavation contexts and excavators.

Adapting to a global urban future requires diverse, long-term perspectives on urbanism. URBank supports this by bringing together global deep-time urban datasets in a modern open-science computing platform. Its design eschews checklist definitions of cities, representing the variability of past urbanism and enabling systematic comparative spatiotemporal research.

Analysis of historic aerial photography has identified a possible monumental formal garden complex on the outskirts of Tabriz, Iran. Here, the authors describe this complex and explain why it is an important addition to our knowledge of elite Persian garden design practice that spread globally over time.

The Linear Pottery Culture site of Eilsleben, Germany, is the earliest potential fortified settlement in the borderland between the Early Neolithic world and Late Mesolithic populations. Building on extensive excavations and new fieldwork, an interdisciplinary programme investigates models of interaction between early farmers and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in this region.

Two seasons of excavations at the site of Tapeh Tyalineh in western Iran retrieved the largest known corpus of late prehistoric administrative artefacts in the ancient world, including more than 7000 seal impressions, more than 200 clay figurines, several clay tokens and two cylinder seals, dating to 5000 years ago.

This article introduces an archaeological project in the Flinders Islands Group, Queensland, Australia. A collaboration between academics, the islands’ Traditional Owners and Cape Melville National Park, the project focuses on the islands’ important corpus of rock art.

Recent research at the Chimú site of Quebrada del Oso in the Chicama Valley, Peru indicates that the site functioned as a pre-Hispanic agricultural centre. This finding is relevant to debates about the nature and viability of the Chicama-Moche canal built by the Chimú state around the eleventh century AD.

Polished stone axes are one of the most iconic types of tools of Europe’s first farmers. Despite their ubiquity, we know relatively little about how they were used. Here, the authors outline how macroscopic wear analysis is revealing diversity in the use and treatment of axe-heads from Neolithic Orkney.

Preliminary results from the first archaeological excavations of Early Modern mercury-production sites at Idrija, Slovenia, confirm the use of ceramic vessels for mercury roasting following the techniques described in Agricola’s De re metallica, which was published in 1556.

Use-wear analysis is rarely conducted for ground stone axes (GSAs) from West Africa. Here, the results of use-wear analysis of 50 GSAs from Akwanga and other parts of Central Nigeria are discussed, contributing to our understanding of their functional attributes.

Following the identification of more than 600 suspected house platforms on aerial survey data from Brusselstown Ring hillfort, four test excavations revealed evidence of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age occupation, positioning the site as the largest nucleated settlement so far identified in prehistoric Ireland and Britain.

Occupied from around 1600 BC and linked to the Cherkaskul and Alekseevka-Sargary cultures, Semiyarka is a newly identified 140ha Late Bronze Age settlement in north-eastern Kazakhstan. The site represents a unique settlement with planned architecture—including a central monumental structure—low-density pottery scatter and evidence for organised tin-bronze production.

Tell Abraq (United Arab Emirates) is a key site in south-east Arabian archaeology, evidencing over three millennia of continuous human occupation. Recent discoveries highlight its inclusion in trade networks across the Persian Gulf and beyond and illustrate how the nature of the site changed through time.

Residue analysis of small ceramic bottles from around Tyre in Lebanon reveals chemical traces of wine, resins, pitch and palm oil, indicating their multifunctional use. The authors state that these results enhance understanding of Phoenician container use, trade and production across diverse archaeological contexts.

Excavations at Aketala reveal traces of human activity at the oases of the western Tarim Basin, north-western China, by at least 2200 BC. The recovered artefacts indicate that, by 1800 BC, the Andronovo culture had reached this region, bringing agropastoralism and developing the earliest regional evidence of bronze manufacturing techniques.

Tarkhan is a cemetery in Egypt’s Nile Valley, best known for its pivotal late Predynastic and Early Dynastic remains. Despite its importance for understanding state formation in Egypt, the site saw limited modern investigation until 2024, when a new Egyptian-Polish archaeological project was launched to provide a reassessment of Tarkhan.

Pre-construction archaeology in West Africa presents new avenues for understanding historic urban development. Excavation of two building plots for the Museum of West African Art, Benin City, Nigeria, provides new perspectives on the Kingdom of Benin, a significant polity in the West African forest zone during the second millennium AD.