The area of Ounjougou consists of a series of gullies cut through Upper Pleistocene and Holocene formations on the Dogon Plateau in the Sahel at the south edge of the Sahara Desert. Here the authors have chronicled a stratified sequence of human occupation from the tenth to the second millennium BC, recording natural and anthropogenic strata containing artefacts and micro- and macro- palaeoecological remains, mostly in an excellent state of preservation. They present a first synthesis of the archaeological and environmental sequence for the Holocene period, define five main occupation phases for Ounjougou, and attempt to place them within the context of West African prehistory.

Palaeoecologists using pollen to map vegetation since the last ice age have noted numerous changes – which they feel increasingly obliged to blame on humans. These changes, such as deforestation or the dominance of certain plants, may happen suddenly or take place over thousands of years. The authors study the pollen record in Colombia, identify plants diagnostic of cultivation or disturbed ground (“degraded vegetation”) and use them to map human activities by proxy. They show how the people move and the landscape changes between 5000 BP and the present day, from the coast inland, and from the lowlands up into the Andes.

The rock art of Kupgal, south India, represents an archive of images amassed over five millennia. The author works out a first sequence and shows how the Neolithic petroglyph site may have functioned in its landscape – as a ritual locality at which not only images but sound, performance and social relationships were all prominent.

Combining history and ethnography with a survey on the ground, the author shows how the megalithic monuments of Cameroon were the remains of many different kinds of site. Some were house platforms, others places for washing dishes. Others are certainly ceremonial, for family and kin-group meetings. The memory and opinion of current residents adds a fascinating aside to the function of these monuments, probably introduced four centuries ago, and their subsequent rôles in society.

Investigations in the El Multaga area, located in Upper Nubia, brought to light Neolithic burials differing from other known local and contemporary burial sites. The skeletons lay under moundS in a very contracted positions inside pits just large enough to contain them. Grave goods are not regular and rather poor. The authors feel that such practices probably relate to local nomadic groups. The cemetery which had not been picked up by research surveys was discovered in a salvage project.

The magnificent tomb of King Cuo now published throws a bright light on a kingdom of the Warring States period. Here the author shows how the bronze vessels in the tomb, blessed with dated inscriptions, can chronicle the political fortunes and alliances of King Cuo’s reign.

The Byzantine period in Jordan represents a dramatic change in landscape from the Roman period that preceded it. In this case study the author shows how a sixth century Byzantine church was surrounded by three cemeteries which reflected and maintained the social ranks of the congregation and their different roles in agricultural production.

This review of the evidence for early agriculture in New Guinea supported by new data from Kuk Swamp demonstrates that cultivation had begun there by at least 6950–6440 cal BP and probably much earlier. Contrary to previous ideas, the first farming in New Guinea was not owed to SouthEast Asia, but emerged independently in the Highlands. Indeed plants such as the banana were probably first domesticated in New Guinea and later diffused into the Asian continent.

The authors report an unusual denture, fashioned from elephant ivory and designed for someone who had probably lost their teeth. It was found in a latrine pit together with pottery and tobacco pipes, indicating that it had belonged to a wealthy tea-drinker of the early eighteenth century.

Did the Slavs invade eastern Europe and settle there? The traditional verdict of placename and historical studies is “yes – in the sixth century”, and the archaeological evidence once seemed to fit this model too. Now Sebastian Brather presents some new archaeological thinking about the area: the cultural zones represented by pottery and burial practice are different from each other and must have other causes than invasion by homogeneous cultural groups; while new dating of the hillforts places them in the late eighth to the tenth century. Welcome to an exciting new world of local cultural diversity …

Toolmakers in Queensland Australia used ingenious knapping techniques to produce an implement with a large bulb of percussion and a gouge-shaped cutting edge: the “gull-wing tula adze”. The author concludes that the tool results from a unique compromise between an inefficient knapping technique and a peculiar – but in this case desirable – phenomenon of fracture mechanics

The discovery of twenty game boards – including some in a dedicated den or gaming room – in the late Roman fort at Abu Sha’ar, on the Red Sea coast of Egypt, conjures up images of daily life at a well established, but remote Roman military station. Here, during the long hot days and cool nights, soldiers no doubt played board games and gambled incessantly. This paper describes the boards, the likely games played on them and the areas of the fort where they were played.

An international team of researchers show how high-precision radiocarbon dating is liberating us from chronological assumptions based on Biblical research. Surface and topographic mapping at the large copper-working site of Khirbat en-Nahas was followed by stratigraphic excavations at an ancient fortress and two metal processing facilities located on the site surface. The results were spectacular. Occupation begins here in the eleventh century BC and the monumental fortress is built in the tenth. If this site can be equated with the rise of the Biblical kingdom of Edom it can now be seen to: have its roots in local Iron Age societies; is considerably earlier than previous scholars assumed; and proves that complex societies existed in Edom long before the influence of Assyrian imperialism was felt in the region from the eighth – sixth centuries BC.

The Rose theatre – the place in Elizabethan London where one could see Shakespeare and Marlowe performed – may have started life as a bear-baiting arena. This is one of the deductions drawn from this new study of the archive from the excavations of 1989. The authors also present a new model for the theatre’s evolution, offer a fresh reconstruction of the building in its heyday and put in a powerful plea for more archaeological investigation on the ground.

Standardisation is not simply an indicator of economic factors, such as mass-production or craft specialization but can have roots which may be technical, social or political. Here the fabric, forming technique and dimensions of conical cups in the Bronze Age Aegean are studied by comparing products from the islands of Kea and Melos. While the fabric and forming technique on both islands are standardised and emulate Cretan models, the degree of standardisation of the pottery shapes varies between the two sites. This is explained by their having different social contexts of production.

When did the market economy come to Europe? Fish might seem an unlikely commodity to throw light on the matter, but the authors use fish bones from English sites to offer a vivid account of the rise and rise of the market as a factor in European development from the late tenth century.

Remote mapping is painting in the context and filling the gaps of some of the best known archaeological places. Here Helen Fenwick shows what can be done to understand the ‘blank’ part of the great site at Tell el-Amarna using a differential GPS.

In the eighteenth to nineteenth century West Africa was the scene of the infamous Atlantic trade in ivory and slaves. The authors' researches show a different situation in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, when the people of Ghana were engaged in the indigenous procurement, manufacture and trade in ivory with neighbours across the Sahara

The development of geophysical survey remains a spearhead-priority for new research and cultural resource management alike – since geophysics can find and map sites without destroying them. However, there are current weaknesses of sensitivity and resolution – the instruments cannot easily “see” small features like graves and post-holes of which so many ancient sites are principally composed. Great hopes have been invested in caesium vapour magnetometers, which the Centre for Archaeology has been promoting in England – perhaps nowhere with such dramatic success as at Stanton Drew, Somerset. Here, geophysical techniques have brought to light the lines of broad circles belonging to a previously unrecognised henge monument, and the caesium magnetometer showed these circles to be composed of individual pits about 1.4 m in diameter. The fine focus achieved for these buried features augers well for the discovery and preservation of similar sites and monuments in the future.

Two curiously marked bones from a Medieval deposit in Tarragona are seen to have functioned as anvils, on which iron sickles were anchored while they were being given saw teeth. The interpretation drew on the knowledge of a modern blacksmith working in a village near the town, and the practice turns out to have been widespread in Spain Portugal and Morocco from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries.