Connectivity in the ancient world has become a subject of such consuming interest in recent years that new publications on various aspects of the issue, pertaining to some area or period, appear with great regularity. Just in later European prehistory we have Continental connections: exploring cross-channel relationships (Anderson-Whymark et al.2015), Exchange networks and local transformations (Alberti & Sabatini 2013) and Enclosed space—open society (Jaeger et al.2012), to name but a few. One can hardly believe otherwise than that every part of the later prehistoric world was intimately involved, not only with its immediate neighbours but also with other areas near and far. Allied to this is the matter of colonialism and ‘post-colonial’ archaeology, with questions of hybridity, importation, local imitation and acculturation or adaptation; all these are things that loom large in these volumes and many others (e.g. Stockhammer 2012). The question of ‘-isations’, such as ‘Romanisation’, has been a concern of archaeologists for many years; here it is ‘-isations’ of the prehistoric Aegean world that are the focus of attention.

We thank Astrid Van Oyen for a highly constructive and important discussion piece that will improve our own future work, as well as that of others. We wish to elaborate on one issue: that formalist approaches do not necessarily have inherently modernist theoretical assumptions.

World's most famous archaeological replica, Lascaux II was replaced in December 2016 by Lascaux IV. IV deserves to inherit the reputation, but it is already struggling to cope as it seeks to outdo II's tally of visitors. The ironies are manifold.

Although new research suggests multi-directional trajectories in the development of the Zimbabwe Tradition (see Chirikure et al. 2016), regional population shifts need not be discounted, as some of these generated states (e.g. Vigneswaran & Quirk 2015). Oral-historical data from northern Zimbabwe counters persistent but often misleading views of pre-colonial states in south-central Africa as exercising power over static and stationary populations (Pikirayi 1993). Rather, human mobility shaped, among other things, the Zimbabwe Culture's spatial features, its strategies for accumulating power and managing resources, and the regional political, social and economic actors to which it was connected. This occurred with the demise of Great Zimbabwe from the second half of the fifteenth century and for much of the sixteenth. Ingombe Ilede attests to post mid fifteenth-century regional shifts in patterns of trade that would lure the Portuguese to south-central Africa from the early sixteenth century onwards. The Zambezi became the preferred inland route. Great Zimbabwe's expansionary thrusts to control this trade undermined its own political control over the southern Zimbabwe plateau, as this spawned new political formations like the Mwene Mutapa state and other polities, including Ingombe Ilede.

In the Mediterranean region there are relatively few integrated, specialist research teams enga- ged in long-term and ongoing field- work. One of these rare and productive scientific collaborations is the ASOME (Arqueoecología Social Mediterránea, or Mediterranean Social Archaeoecology) group from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain. The three volumes under review are authored by this team's lead researchers, and represent the first book-length publications from a long-term research project (2009–) on the Earlier Bronze Age El Argar culture (2200–1550 BC). They report the results of several excavations in the province of Murcia, Spain, supported by a combination of public and private funding. This ambitious initiative addresses ground-breaking research questions and offers solid and sustainable solutions for the conservation and preservation of these formerly neglected sites. Its aims, as summarised on the project's website, are: to create a systematic archive of information on the dispersed collections from earlier investigations; to undertake large-scale fieldwork on a series of key sites and to develop their public presentation; and to lay the foundations for an interdisciplinary research centre on prehistoric and Mediterranean archaeology (http://www.la-bastida.com).

We appreciate Michael Fradley and Nichole Sheldrick's response to our 2016 Antiquity paper. They claim that our results are “potentially misleading”, that there is an incorrect “emphasis on looting as the most significant problem facing Egypt's heritage” and that our prediction model is flawed. Our paper, however, clearly focuses on the major population centre of Egypt—the Nile Valley and Delta regions—where the bulk of the archaeological sites are located. This is a basic Egyptological fact.

Despite the fact that several books and a plethora of articles have been published in recent decades on the archaeology of the USSR and Russia, Soviet-Russian archaeology is still largely ignored in the West (e.g. Fagan 2003, but see Trigger 2006: 230–32, 326–44). For non-Russian scholars, the first acquaintance with it can be nightmarish; for example, Anthony (2007: 164) describes the periodisation of the Aeneolithic Cucuteni-Tripolye culture of Ukraine and Moldova (parts of the USSR before 1991), and Romania:

McIntosh and Fagan (above) write that “For 45 years, Ingombe Ilede has been viewed as a key nexus linking the Copperbelt and Great Zimbabwe”. Some regional specialists have not believed this since the publication of Swan's (2007) important review of the sizes and shapes of prehistoric copper ingots found in modern Zimbabwe. Swan noted that both of the ingot moulds found at Great Zimbabwe (which have a clear stylistic connection to the Copperbelt) are of the earlier HIH style (ninth to fourteenth centuries AD; de Maret 1995; Nikis & Livingstone Smith in press). But neither the later HXR-style copper ingots (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries)—some of which were excavated at Ingombe Ilede—nor the moulds to make them have been found on a Zimbabwe tradition site. The distribution of HXR ingots within the modern nation of Zimbabwe is almost exclusively in the north, within the former territory of the Mutapa state (Swan 2007: fig. 2). The clear implication is that the HXR ingot style—and thus the elite burials at Ingombe Ilede—post-date the breakup of the state ruled from Great Zimbabwe, which gave birth to the Mutapa (northern) and Torwa (southern) states. The new radiocarbon dates by McIntosh and Fagan provide welcome confirmation of this inference.

We thank Sarah Parcak et al. for their response to our paper, for engaging in this important debate and for clarifying a number of points regarding Parcak et al. (2016), and for raising some important questions concerning the methods and objectives of the EAMENA project. We can, however, only comment on what was presented in their original article and address, in these brief final remarks, a few of the points raised in their response.

Traditionally, reconstructions of social complexity in past societies have relied on a plethora of indicators including, but not limited to, ancient texts, monumental architectural and archaeological evidence for hierarchical leadership, surplus storage, craft specialisation and the density of populations. With the exception of mortuary patterns, particularly the quantity and quality of grave goods, bioarchaeological data have featured less prominently in archaeological interpretation. Over the past 40 years, however, the study of human skeletal remains has been more firmly integrated into theoretical explorations of the past, and the broader development of biocultural models has contributed more fully to archaeological research. The first of the two volumes reviewed here is exemplary of current bioarchaeological approaches that draw on human biology, cultural development and physical environments to understand the human experience.

Sheep and goat herding, the basis of pastoralism in the Near East, has been integral to the social organisation, diet, economy, religion and environment of the region since the beginnings of animal domestication. Interestingly, this omnipresent factor of life in the Near East has not been a popular topic of enquiry in its own right amongst archaeologists—of course, they deal with pastoralism in one way or another, but they mostly manage to keep the herder separate from the king. Instead, the study of pastoralism in this region has been largely the domain of archaeozoologists who study the sheep, goat and indeterminate ‘sheep/goat’ bones that dominate Near Eastern faunal assemblages from the Early Holocene onwards (the notorious difficulty of distinguishing sheep and goat bones led archaeozoologists to invent the sheep/goat, now an official taxon in the Encyclopedia of Life no less! http://eol.org).

When I first began my teaching career in 1976 at the University of California, Los Angeles, the subject of Roman topography was difficult to teach to English-speaking students. Most of the scholarship was written in Italian, and much of the rest was in French and German. Over the past 40 years the situation has changed significantly. We now have two useful introductory surveys in English: Coarelli's Rome and environs (2014) and Claridge's Rome: an Oxford archaeological guide (2010). We also have a host of monographic studies and, since 1988, innumerable articles and book reviews in the Journal of Roman Archaeology. Richardson's (1992) A new topographical dictionary of ancient Rome updated the one venerable but antiquated English reference work that we had long had: Platner and Ashby's (1926) A topographical dictionary of ancient Rome. Meanwhile, at least for polyglot scholars, the situation became even more favourable with the appearance of Steinby's (1992–2001) Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae (LTUR), a collaborative work by a distinguished international team writing in Italian, French, German and English, with around 2300 individual entries on specific sites and monuments of the ancient city.

The Crossrail Project is building railways through London between Essex and Kent in the east and Acton in the west: the Elizabeth Line. In anticipation of remains at the sites of new stations and ancillary structures, more than 200 archaeologists investigated the route between 2009 and 2016. Now London's Docklands Museum is showing about 500 of the many thousands of finds in ‘Tunnel’. At the same time, the exhibition describes how archaeological research and recording works.

The late fifteenth- to early seventeenth-century dates reported by Susan McIntosh and Brian Fagan (above) for the richest burials at Ingombe Ilede challenge well-known narratives concerning trade and politics in greater Zambezia. For example, as the authors indicate, Ingombe Ilede now seems more an outcome of the destabilised politics of Great Zimbabwe than a cause of its demise. The role that the inhabitants of Ingombe Ilede played in the shifting competitions and alliances that characterised political and economic life in sixteenth-century Zambezia must now be addressed.

The two volumes under review are the outcome of the ‘Focus on Fortifications Project’, or ‘FoFo’ as its many participants refer to it here. In their insightful introduction, the editors explain that this project is best characterised as a scholarly network intended to foster new knowledge of ancient fortifications in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East (Asia Minor, Syria and Jordan). The resulting two volumes, published in the monograph series of the Danish Institute at Athens, encompass theoretical and methodological considerations (Volume 1), and the results of new studies of specific fortifications (Volume 2).