Estimations of population density, which consider regional variability, are an important key variable in archaeology as they have consequences not only for the environmental but also for the economical and social domains. In this paper, a ten-step procedure of a consistent group of methods is described which deals with the data required for estimations of population density at different scale levels (from excavation to large-scale distribution maps). For distribution maps, a method is presented by which densities of sites are displayed using optimal isolines. These demarcate so called ‘settlement areas’ at scales of between 1:25,000 and 1:2.5 million. Our knowledge of the density of households from key areas with the most complete archaeological records is upscaled for the regions within these isolines. The results of this procedure are estimations of population density for the early Neolithic (Bandkeramik, 51st century BC) and the Roman period (2nd century AD) for regions with some 10,000 km2.

A simple statistical/graphical method is developed to analyse the relationship between settlement areas, soils, and precipitation. Taking into account the aspects of preservation of sites and the intensity of archaeological observations, an analysis of patterns of land use shows that in prehistory not all areas suitable for use were in fact incorporated into settlement areas. For prehistory, the idea of a most optimised use of land up to its carrying capacity (as it has been proposed for at least 50 years) can be falsified for specific areas. A large number of empty regions with good ecological conditions but lacking in settlement activity can be discussed as resulting from culture historical processes. As an example, the separation of areas inhabited by groups of different identities is discussed. The amount of used space (in terms of ‘settlement area’) however, increases from the early Neolithic to the 4th century BC from 5% to more than 40%. The increase between the Neolithic and the Iron Age is understood in terms of technological developments in farming systems. The percentage of areas with suitable conditions actually utilised between the Bandkeramik and Iron Age increases from 31.1% to 67.5% in the area covered by the Geschichtlicher Atlas der Rheinlande, and is much higher still in the Roman period (84.3%). State societies seem to use the land more efficiently compared to non-state systems. This is becoming even clearer on consideration of the intensity of human impact.

Large-scale distribution maps dividing the Neolithic in five periods were analysed. In each of the periods large settlement areas seem to be characterised either by the development of specific cultural innovations or by exchange of a specific raw material. In the course of time, the size of settlement areas in a specific region fluctuates markedly. It is most plausible to assume that this is due to a remarkable mobility of seemingly sedentary populations. Individual families recombine to new socio-cultural units every few hundred years.

The relationship between size of settlement areas and the number of households can be used to develop ideas relating to the flow of exchange goods. An example for the Bandkeramik considering the Rijckholt-Flint is presented. The combination of the number of households and the percentage of this raw material in the specific settlement areas visualises the amount needed and the amount transferred to other settlement areas in the neighbourhood. A future economical archaeology could use this information to develop ideas relating to the importance of the economic sector, ie, ‘procurement of flint’ in relation to the ‘production of foodstuffs’ according to the time required for each group of activities.

In the last section, the relationship between settlement areas and human impact is discussed. For the periods of subsistence economy, it is argued that the size of the population and its farming system are the two most important factors. For example, in Bandkeramik settlement areas, approximately 2% of the forest covering the landscape was cut down; in Roman times, and depending on the intensity of farming, this reaches magnitudes of between 20% and 50%. Although some of the methods and arguments used in this paper may be exchanged for better ones in the future, it is already apparent that a consistent system of methods is essential to transfer results of analyses on a lower scale level as input on a higher level and vice versa.

This paper seeks to re-examine the long-held view that the Celtic language developed somewhere in west central Europe and was carried westwards to the Atlantic zone, eventually reaching Ireland. An overview of the archaeological evidence for Atlantic connectivity illustrates the longue durée of community interactions along the seaways, beginning around 9000 BC, to the second quarter of the 3rd millennium. At this time mobility increased dramatically and it has been shown clearly that the Maritime Bell Beaker package spread eastwards to impact on and interact with the Battle Axe/Corded Ware tradition. Connectivity was at its most intense during the subsequent Atlantic Bronze Age until, from the 8th century BC, what had been a unified zone began to fragment into a series of regional systems. This broad archaeological scenario, with its firm chronological framework, receives more support from recent DNA studies than does the previous view, which drew heavily on ancient and (now) antiquarian views of Celticness and invasion hypotheses. It is posited that the Celtic language could in fact have emerged in the Atlantic zone and spread eastwards.

The Broom Lower Palaeolithic locality, on the river Axe at the Devon/Dorset border in south-western Britain, yielded an assemblage of at least 1800 Acheulean artefacts between the 1870s and 1940s through gravel quarrying and antiquarian collection. The bifacial material, predominantly produced in chert but including a small flint component, is characterised by considerable typological diversity and a distinctive asymmetrical element. While aspects of the assemblage have been reported before, this paper presents new work on the artefacts of the C.E. Bean collection and the sample from Exeter Museum. The Bean archive indicates that the artefact patterning is not due to fluvial mixing of separate, typologically-discrete, assemblages. Analysis of the artefacts suggests that hominin knapping strategies were not notably constrained by variations in raw material granular quality, but that the typological variability strongly reflects blank form and shape. However, while the influences of blank form and resharpening, including the use of tranchet flaking, partially explain the assemblage's asymmetrical component, a significant proportion of those artefacts cannot be understood in these terms. The existence of local, short-lived manufacturing traditions, perhaps reflecting the idiosyncratic approaches of individual knappers, is argued to best explain the distinctive asymmetrical element of the Broom assemblage. This interpretation is further supported by (i) the geoarchaeological model of assemblage formation, which assigns the majority of the artefacts to a single phase of occupation, and (ii) the OSL ages of the Broom fluvial deposits (predominantly MIS-9 and 8) and the atypical character of the assemblage in relation to other British late Lower Palaeolithic material, which oppose the notion of longer-lived, locally, or regionally-maintained, traditions.

Mount Sandel has long been an iconic site for the Irish Mesolithic, having produced evidence for a sequence of occupation huts and pits and the earliest radiocarbon dates for the Mesolithic on the island. This paper presents details of a recent programme of redating whereby the application of Bayesian modelling has confirmed the early date for the site but also helped to refine its internal chronology. The major phase of hut building at Mount Sandel took place within a much shorter period of time than had previously been thought, perhaps only a generation or two. The dating of pits of differing sizes suggests that many of them were created during other slightly later visits to the area. The implications of the dating programme for the place of Mount Sandel in the Irish Mesolithic, and for the chronology of the period and its relations with that on the British mainland, are discussed.

The excavation of the Wattendorf-Motzenstein Corded Ware settlement in Franconia (Germany) has yielded new information with regard to the architecture, economy, and ritual activities, as well as the social organisation of Final Neolithic groups in Central Europe. The settlement is dated to 2660–2470 cal BC and was an agrarian community. Detailed analyses of the material culture combined with biological and pedological parameters allowed new interpretations regarding Corded Ware economies as well as domestic and ritual spheres. The settlement contained about 35 individuals at most, who were organised in fewer than eight households. The exceptional results obtained call for further research strategies to be developed.

‘Esoteric knowledge is knowledge of the unusual, the exceptional, the extraordinary; knowledge of things that in some way lie beyond the familiar everyday world’ (Helms 1988, 13)

This paper explores the ways in which Bronze Age bronze artefacts may, on occasions, have been used in the commemoration of place during the southern British Iron Age. The chronologically-based typological systems adopted by archaeologists indicate that these artefacts occur out of their time as they were already several centuries old when they were buried, but it should not be supposed that Iron Age societies necessarily viewed these items entirely in terms of a linear sequence of time. While broadly similar in form and material to items in the cultural repertoire of contemporary society, the bronzes were also quite distinct in the particular forms that they adopted. That these items often appear to have been deposited at sites with a pre-existing monumentality may suggest that objects and places were felt to share ‘otherworldliness’. These items and places may have been used to construct esoteric knowledge through reference to spirits but it is also likely that particular acts of curation and deposition created genealogical associations, incorporating ideas of the mythical past into the context of the present. Drawing on the evidence for the form and contexts of depositions of these objects, this paper addresses the connected topics of what Iron Age society did to objects and sites derived from its own past and what we, in turn, do to (and can do with) the information derived from the Iron Age.

This paper presents the results of excavations at an Upper Palaeolithic site that was discovered at Rookery Farm, Great Wilbraham, Cambridgeshire in 2002. Diagnostic lithic material – three penknife points – indicates that the site was probably occupied between 12,000 and 11,000 BP, a time of deteriorating climatic conditions. Excavations discovered a small task site, located to take advantage of water and a lithic raw material source. The paper discusses Rookery Farm in relation to other sites of this date and patterns of mobility and settlement across north-west Europe.

Recent excavations at a small Chalcolithic site in central Cyprus show that it was occupied about 2880–2670 cal BC. Fallow deer form the major component of the substantial faunal sample: both these and other animals were hunted. The chipped stone, too, fits with a model of intensive meat exploitation. The lack of formal architecture supports the general model of a seasonally or intermittently used hunters' village. Plant remains and a limited array of ground stone tools, however, indicate that domesticated plants were processed and consumed, although probably not harvested at the site, while large quantities of pottery also show a wider range of activities. These data and observations can be explained by several models, which emphasise either broad processes and historical developments or more local patterns of varied site-types and activities in different parts of the island or in different ecological zones, providing an important insight into the diversity and complexity of cultural systems in the early 3rd millennium BC.

A programme of archaeological assessment, funded through the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, was undertaken at the Valdoe Quarry in West Sussex ahead of a renewed and final stage of gravel extraction at the site. This paper gives an account of the evidence for human activity recovered in the course of this work. The analysis demonstrates that the Valdoe Quarry contained archaeology relating to the transport and modification of bifaces. These signatures formed part of wider patterns of land-use operated by the same hominin groups found at Boxgrove, within a single, developing palaeolandscape. It is concluded that further activity sites remain to be discovered within the general environs of the Valdoe and the parish of East Lavant where historically there have been surface finds of bifaces.

An open-area excavation conducted in advance of development at Marne Barracks, Catterick, in 2004 identified a relatively rare Late Neolithic ‘palisaded’ enclosure and other features. Approximately 55% of the enclosure was exposed. It consisted of two concentric sub-circular palisades with diameters up to 175 m and 200 m respectively. Each palisade consisted of a double circuit of posts, with the posts being c. 1 m apart from centre to centre. Many of the posts on the western side of the monument had been sufficiently carbonised for the remains of individual posts to be identifiable. Twenty-one radiocarbon ages were determined and Bayesian modelling has produced a date estimate of 2530–2310 cal BC for the start of construction of the monument. This date matches well with new dates for the construction of Silbury Hill, the appearance of Beaker pottery in graves, the Amesbury Archer, and the timber circles at Durrington Walls, for example.

The Marne Barracks monument exhibits significant differences to other known examples of this type, and is in some respects unique. In particular the ‘paired post’ arrangement of a double circuit of posts in each palisade is unparalleled in any other known example. The apparent width of the entrances to the Marne enclosure is also at variance with other known sites, though this may in part be an artefact of post-depositional survival. The monument sits in a ritual landscape and, like a few others of its type, is close to water and a hill or large mound from where the activities taking place within the enclosure might have been observed. Do the nearby hill, the entrances, and the arrangement of the uprights all relate to control of physical and visual access into, or out of, the monument?

A number of broadly contemporary monuments, all within 5 km of Marne Barracks, contribute to a significant Neolithic ritual focus on the River Swale gravels. The complex of cursus and henge monuments at Thornborough and the henges at Nunwick, Hutton Moor, and Cana Barn all lie less than 25 km to the south, in the Swale-Ure interfluve.

The paper presents the excavations of a Late Mesolithic settlement and the dwelling depressions at Pyhtää Susikopinharju (1), Finland, in 1998. The excavations revealed the first Mesolithic house remains unearthed to date. A rich finds assemblage was also recovered, including unusual amounts of organic material such as refuse fauna and bone tools, and a chert microlith. Parallels for the Stone Age house/hut are found in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. The evidence suggests that the people were in interaction with a world that lay hundreds of kilometres outside their territory.

This paper deals with the V-bored buttons that were in use in Great Britain and Ireland during the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC. It presents a corpus and typology; reviews their distribution, dating, contexts, and artefactual associations; examines their possible functions and their associations by sex; and looks at their Continental origins and connections.