This exhibition showcases the results of archaeological research at three coastal sites in the southern Cape of South Africa: Blombos Cave, Klipdrift Shelter and Klasies River main sites. Part of a long-term programme aiming to make palaeosciences accessible to the public, the exhibition befittingly started more locally, first at Stellenbosch and then at the Iziko South African Museums in Cape Town, before moving to Johannesburg. The exhibition opened at the Origins Centre of the University of the Witwatersrand on 25 November 2021. To those of us who attended the opening, it provided an opportunity to hear from the archaeologists, curators and designers behind the exhibition. The exhibition opened to the public on 27 November.

Many things that we now call ‘archaeological archives’ are actually personal collections of documentation made and amassed by archaeologists, some of which have found their way into institutions. This is indeed the case for the collections of Harald Ingholt (1896–1985), a Danish archaeologist and philologist who worked at Palmyra in the 1920s and 1930s and had a long career that was spent mostly in the USA at Yale University, studying Syrian and Gandharan sites. Ingholt's field diaries, published in the volumes under review, make up part of a collection which he donated, following his retirement, to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen in the early 1980s; that collection also includes his personal reference material, known as ‘The Ingholt Archive’. Comprising sheets with Palmyrene images glued to them, the Archive is planned for separate publication by Brepols in the near future.

The World of Stonehenge is the latest in a series of impressive exhibitions at the British Museum devoted to European prehistory: a worthy successor to Ice Age Art in 2012 and Celts: art and identity in 2015. Like them, it has already attracted significant public attention, with a raft of positive reviews in the press. Indeed, given the quality and range of material on display, it could hardly fail to be a success. Not only does it gather together key objects from a series of British and Irish museums, but also a range of striking artefacts from continental Europe. Among these, first place must surely go to the Nebra ‘sky disc’; but there are also major finds from France, Switzerland, Denmark and northern Italy that will not previously have been seen in Britain.

This review considers two books outlining the results of a major big-data project in England that sought to make sense of the growing amount of information from developer-funded archaeology, the reporting of finds to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and from a wide range of other databases. The result is fascinating and thought-provoking discussions of how we could interpret regional variation in archaeological data, although methodological issues present an interesting case study of the challenges that big-data projects face. The publication strategy—of two separate volumes—also raises questions about how we should disseminate the results of large-scale research programmes.

The archaeology of food has increasingly attracted scholarly attention, encompassing a diverse set of data and approaches with immense potential to speak of the collective—often untold—stories of everyday choices, sustaining not only the physical, but also the social individual through time. While the two books under review are both part of this ever-expanding field, investigating food and foodways of the past, they are quite distinct in their scope.

As the fifth and final volume in a series of publications dedicated to the description and study of the pre-Columbian collection at Dumbarton Oaks (beginning with Andean art at Dumbarton Oaks in 1996; Hill Boone 1996), Pre-Columbian art from Central America and Colombia at Dumbarton Oaks and its companion volume, Pre-Columbian Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador: toward an integrated approach, lend new meaning to the phrase ‘going out with a bang’, with a combined 1262 pages and over 30 separate essays. Clearly an enormous undertaking, these books are the outcome of countless collaborations, technical analyses and workshops over many years, gathering the participation of an impressive number of scholars from all over the Americas. The sheer amount of data and detail presented in these volumes, as well as updated topics for discussion and interpretation, make them an absolutely fundamental resource for any scholar of the region.