Hoards have played a significant role in our narratives of the European Bronze Age, but their purpose and meaning have been the source of much debate. These debates have been positively impacted by studies that investigate the ways in which hoards are connected to specific landscape contexts. In this paper, we discuss the outcome of one such in-depth field study of 62 Bronze Age metalwork deposition locations from the Swedish province of Halland. By systematically analysing digital sources such as museum archives, church records and historical maps, we were able to establish the locations of a number of previously unlocated finds, which were then visited in the field. Through this combined archival work and fieldwork, we distinguished several patterns that allude to a connection between metalwork deposits, object types and specific places in the landscape. These patterns shed light on the landscape context of hoards in this region and illuminate how deposition patterns changed over time; we consider some factors that may help to explain these changes. The results emphasize the importance of landscape studies for understanding the role of selective deposition in European Bronze Age societies, and more broadly, the social implications of hoards in their context.

The waterscape, including the sea, rivers, and lakes, was highly important to communities living during the Nordic Early Bronze Age (1800/1700–1100 bc). Waterways acted as highways that facilitated journeys, trade, and warfare, enabling maritime warriors and others to distinguish themselves. This is reflected in the maritime location of rock art and important Early Bronze Age burials, which have been used to reconstruct the Nordic Bronze Age cosmology. This centres on the journey of the sun across the sky during the day, and the underworld during night. This article analyses the use of water-related resources, such as seaweed, petrified organics, beach pebbles, and molluscs, in the construction of burials, which has received little attention despite renewed interest in the maritime seascape. The data demonstrate that local communities used different resources, indicating that a common belief system was realised in local differences. These marine materials were collected from the beach, which can be conceptualised as the liminal zone between the land of the living and the sea of the dead. It is suggested that these materials, in line with other funerary practices, helped to guide the recently deceased into the afterlife in the sea.

The sicklefin devil ray (Mobula tarapacana) is a large, pelagic ray which is listed as Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Mobula tarapacana is thought to have a circumglobal, yet patchy distribution, and has not been verified extant off the eastern USA. Here, we report 180 sightings of M. tarapacana with a total of 361 individuals, collated across five datasets from aerial survey operations and incidental sightings in the waters off the US East Coast and Gulf of Mexico, between 1996 and 2022. This study extends the northern range of M. tarapacana in the Gulf of Mexico to 29°N, and in the Atlantic to 40°N. Seasonal trends were observed off the north-eastern coast of the USA, with M. tarapacana only present in the summer months. Measurements from high resolution digital aerial imagery found M. tarapacana off the New York coast to be adults and subadults with an average disc width of 268 cm (±25, range 232–316 cm). This study provides important spatial and temporal data for management, as well as informing areas for future research on M. tarapacana in the western Atlantic.

In the Bronze Age, warriors are probably the best-known social class. Evidence for warfare and other violent encounters links them to aggression and bloodshed that could be translated into social status. This made warriors a potential two-fold threat to the social cohesion of their communities: not only did they risk threatening the integrity of communities as agents of death but also they could challenge local authority and cause internal conflict. Here, the author presents evidence that suggests that internal conflict was a major concern for Nordic Bronze Age societies, in that warriors constituted an internal social challenge, and proposes that local communities may have mitigated this threat in rituals such as the sacrifice of weapons and the construction of social narratives through rock art.

Human representations are one of the most important groups of depictions in rock art in southern Scandinavia. These humans have long been discussed as complete, stable, and temporally-fixed images. The results of a new survey challenge this view. Recording rock art with Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) enabled us to discern a possible sequence of production of individual human representations, their bodily features, and associated objects. Figures from a rock art site in Finntorp (Tanum, Sweden) will be used as an example. Differences in the dimensions of the engraved lines, the chronology of the depicted objects, and the placement of body parts suggest that several individuals may have been involved in making human representations on the rocks, and that their appearance as complete figures is the result of repeated transformations. The results presented demonstrate that Scandinavian rock art is not stable in time. We suggest that rock art is best understood as the creation of communities over time, which enables them to engage with the past by transforming the rocks.

Current evidence suggests that regenerative v. degenerative endothelial responses can be integrated in a clinical endothelial phenotype, reflecting the net result between damage from risk factors and endogenous repair capacity. We have previously shown that a cocoa flavanol (CF) intervention can improve endothelial function and increase the regenerative capacity of the endothelium by mobilising circulating angiogenic cells in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether CF can lower the levels of circulating endothelial microparticles (EMP), markers of endothelial integrity, along with improvements in endothelial function. The levels of EMP in the frozen plasma samples of CAD patients were measured along with endothelial function (flow-mediated vasodilation, FMD); n 16, FMD data published previously), and these data were compared with those of young (n 12) and age-matched (n 12) healthy control subjects. The CAD patients exhibited significantly increased levels of EMP along with impaired FMD when compared with the healthy control subjects. The levels of CD144+ and CD31+/41− EMP were inversely correlated with FMD (r − 0·67, P= 0·01 and r − 0·59, P= 0·01, respectively). In these CAD patients, the levels of EMP were measured after they had consumed a drink containing 375 mg of CF (high-CF intervention, HiFI) or 9 mg of CF (macro- and micronutrient-matched low-CF control, LoFl) twice daily over a 30-d period in a randomised, double-blind, cross-over study. After 1 month of HiFI, the levels of CD31+/41− and CD144+ EMP decreased ( − 25 and − 23 %, respectively), but not after LoFl. Our data show that flavanols lower the levels of EMP along with higher endothelial function, lending evidence to the novel concept that flavanols may improve endothelial integrity.