The discovery of a small portable grinding stone at Rach Nui in southern Vietnam provides significant new insights into regional Neolithic trade networks and ground stone technologies. Previous research held that the manufacture of stone tools took place near stone sources in the interior, along the Dong Nai and Be River basins, but the Rach Nui grinding stone comes from a Neolithic site in the Mekong Delta, approximately 80km to the south-east. This suggests that some manufacturing occurred away from raw material sources. Technological analysis indicates that the artefact was a portable tool for the polishing, maintenance and repair of ground stone adzes. Its discovery at Rach Nui may indicate the presence of specialist tool makers or itinerant traders. This research illustrates the complexity of Neolithic trading networks, and highlights the technological expertise that circulated alongside finished and incomplete objects.

The Emptyscapes project is an interdisciplinary programme designed to stimulate new developments in Italian landscape archaeology. It achieves this through the integration of traditional approaches with multidisciplinary studies, to which are added the relatively new techniques of large-scale geophysical survey, airborne laser scanning and geo-environmental analysis. The effectiveness of such an approach has been borne out by results from central Italy. These show that the underlying ‘archaeological continuum’ can be detected even in an area where archaeological evidence was previously thought to be absent.

Recent archaeological investigations and technological applications have increased our appreciation of the intricacies of pre-Angkorian societal development. The results reveal a transformative period characterised by increasing socio-political complexity, exchange and technological transfer, differences in burial wealth, growing levels of conflict and variation in site morphology. Among the excavated Iron Age sites in Cambodia, Lovea, near the heart of Angkor, is well placed to provide a greater understanding of these changes in this region. Excavation and remote sensing confirm that the two moats surrounding Lovea are testimony to the early adoption of water-management strategies. These strategies grew in complexity, culminating in the vast network of canals, reservoirs and tanks that are the hallmarks of the hydraulic society of Angkor.

The development of several key technologies in China—bronze and iron metallurgy and horse-drawn chariots—arose out of the relations of central China, of the Erlitou period (c. 1700–1500 BC), the Shang (c. 1500–1046 BC) and the Zhou (1046–771 BC) dynasties, with their neighbours in the steppe. Intermediaries in these exchanges were disparate groups in a broad border area of relatively high land around the heart of China, the Central Plains. The societies of central China were already so advanced that, when these foreign innovations were adopted, they were transformed within highly organised social and cultural systems.

The difficulty in identifying acts of intentional injury in the past has limited the extent to which archaeologists have been able to discuss the nature of interpersonal violence in prehistory. Experimental replication of cranial trauma has proved particularly problematic due to the lack of test analogues that are sufficiently comparable to the human skull. A new material now overcomes this issue, and for the first time allows accurate insight into the effects of different weapons and different blows in inflicting cranial injury; in this case, blunt force trauma caused using a replica of the ‘Thames Beater’ Neolithic wooden club.

The trade networks of the Roman Empire are among the most intensively researched large-scale market systems in antiquity, yet there is no consensus on the economic structure behind this vast network. The difficulty arises from data fragmentation and the lack of formal analytical methods. Here, the authors present a Bayesian analysis quantifying the extent to which four previously proposed hypotheses match the evidence for the market system in Roman olive oil. Results suggest that the size of economic agents involved in this network followed a power-law distribution, strongly indicating the presence of free market structures supplying olive oil to Rome. This new analysis offers an important tool to researchers exploring the impact of trade on the dynamics of past societies.

The Shang (c. 1500–1045 BC) and Zhou dynasties (c. 1045–771 BC) of China are famous for their sophisticated ritual bronze vessels. Sourcing the leaded tin-bronze has, however, proved to be a challenge. A new systematic approach to metal chemistry uses trace elements and isotopes to characterise the underlying circulation pattern. It reveals the complexity of the copper sources on which the late Shang capital at Anyang depended for its bronzes, suggesting the transport of copper from distant regions in the south, on the Yangtze, and from north-east China. The new interpretational system furthers our understanding of the network on which successive Chinese dynasties depended for copper, lead and tin, and attempts to give equal weight to the archaeological and chemical data.

A richly furnished grave of an elite woman from the Hallstatt period was discovered close to the Heuneburg, the earliest proto-urban settlement north of the Alps. Dendrochronological analysis of timbers from the grave chamber dates the burial to 583 BC, the earliest of a series of such burials north of the Alps and a key anchor in the absolute chronology of the Early Iron Age in Europe. The woman was adorned with gold, bronze, jet and amber jewellery; gold filigree objects, amber fibulae and items of horse-head armour suggest close connections south of the Alps. An infant female burial close to the main grave included gold jewellery made for a child but similar to that of the woman.

Despite decades of research into the Terracotta Army of the First Emperor of China, many questions remain about how, where and by whom the figures were made. This new study compares the results of microscopic analysis of the life-sized clay statues to other ceramic artefacts recovered from the mausoleum. By focusing on their original raw materials and clay paste recipes, it proves that the terracotta warriors were made near the site. Compositional, technological and spatial links between different artefacts suggest that clay was processed centrally before being distributed to different local workshops in a highly organised system of labour and craft specialisation that laid the foundation for imperial China.

The technique of depletion gilding is well evidenced in pre-Columbian Andean gold work. Artefacts from the Nahuange period in Colombia (c. AD 100–1000) were subject to metallographic, chemical and microscopic analyses to provide regional comparative data on metalworking traditions. Results suggest that depletion gilding may have been an accidental discovery and, contrary to widespread assumptions, not always a desirable feature. This research illustrates how technological innovation may not always be immediately adopted, and considers how the life-history of gold artefacts may affect their appearance and microstructure. It also offers directions for future studies of depletion gilding elsewhere.

The protohistoric graveyards of north-western Pakistan were first excavated in the 1960s, but their chronology is still debated, along with their relationship to broader regional issues of ethnic and cultural change. Recent excavation of two graveyards in the Swat Valley has provided new dating evidence and a much better understanding both of grave structure and treatment of the dead. Secondary burial was documented at Udegram, along with the use of perishable containers and other objects as grave goods. The complexity of the funerary practices reveal the prolonged interaction between the living and the dead in protohistoric Swat.

The Early Bronze Age Únětice Culture in central Germany was a highly stratified society with a ruling class of ‘princes’, as evidenced by the famous burials at Leubingen and Helmsdorf, and the newly excavated burial mound Bornhöck near Dieskau. To investigate the notion of Únětice military organisation, this article presents a new interpretation of the numerous weapons hoards recovered from the region. Hoard deposition and composition from central Germany strongly suggests a shift from a Late Neolithic culture of ‘warrior heroes’ to the creation of organised standing armies of professional soldiers under the control of ruling elites.

Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America first developed in the Andes, and Peru has long been considered to be the initial point of origin. The recent discovery of an anthropomorphic copper mask in north-west Argentina, however, draws new attention to the southern Andes as a centre of early metalworking. Found in a funerary context c. 3000 BP, at a time of transition from mobile hunter-gatherer bands to agro-pastoral villages, the mask from Bordo Marcial shows that the Cajón Valley and its surrounding region was an important locus for copper metallurgy. To date, the mask is the oldest intentionally shaped copper object discovered in the Andes, and suggests that more than one region was involved in the origin of this technology.

Objects imported over long distances often have rich biographies, not least a collection of bronze objects found in a peat bog in Estonia that included an elaborate lamp of Roman origin. Combining new scientific approaches with earlier observations and traditional archaeological analysis, the authors reconstruct the provenance, possible itinerary and changing use of the lamp over half a millennium, and across thousands of kilometres. They highlight its variable roles, from luxurious illumination to valuable raw material. The results demonstrate the importance of looking beyond the original time and place of manufacture, and beyond the primary function when constructing the biographies of imported objects.

The Classic Maya village of Joya de Cerén is extraordinary in that it was preserved by volcanic ash following the Loma Caldera volcanic eruption. The excellent preservation conditions offer a unique opportunity to understand plants in their primary use contexts, and to examine geospatial relationships between plants—both living and curated—in gardens, fields and households. The geospatial analysis of ‘plantscapes’ at Cerén presented here provides a template for interpreting botanical resource use and management at other contemporaneous Maya sites, and can contribute to a broader understanding of the use of space, plants and agriculture in the past.

The Uffington White Horse is a unique later prehistoric geoglyph worked onto the chalk hillside of the Berkshire Downs in southern England. This large figure has seen little new interpretation since the early twentieth century. Unable to explain the form satisfactorily, archaeologists have shied away from acknowledging the distinct nature of the horse and its probable importance to previous occupants of the land. By reviewing the image's context within the broader archaeological landscape, the argument can now be made that the Uffington carving is a representation of the sun-horse found in iconography throughout later prehistoric Europe.

Excavations at Ceibal in Guatemala have recovered numerous polished celts from contexts dating throughout the Preclassic Maya occupation of the site. The celts are made of different types of greenstone, and most were deposited in caches in public areas close to ceremonial structures. Recent study shows how deposition practices changed over time. Furthermore, microwear analysis suggests that the majority of celts did not have a practical function. It is argued, instead, that the caches of greenstone celts represent public rituals relating to the establishment of early Preclassic elites.

New investigations at the coastal settlement of Unguja Ukuu in Zanzibar have demonstrated the effectiveness of magnetometry as a survey method. The early occupation of this Swahili port, from the sixth century AD, presents a unique opportunity to develop our understanding of the growth and development in settlement and trade along the East African coast. The geophysical survey has allowed the size of this important site to be reassessed and an industrial component to be identified. It also offers an insight into the role that early Islamicisation may have played in helping to establish the settlement as a key port during the growth of the Indian Ocean trade network.

Colour was a key feature of Greek and Roman sculpture, but due to the current bare-marble appearance of many such statues, it is now frequently overlooked. This is illustrated here by the first study of polychromy in Roman statues from the province of Africa Proconsularis. Five sculptural fragments dating to the second and third centuries AD were examined using techniques including XRF analysis, and a variety of pigments were detected. The differing colour schemes presented by each of the pieces are here assessed, and consideration is given to the technical process by which they were coloured, the significance of their decoration and the potential for applying similar approaches in future studies of ancient statuary.

Recent excavation at Ucheliungs Cave in Palau has provided new evidence in the debate concerning the colonisation of the Palauan archipelago. An abundance of faunal material and the presence of transported artefacts contradict a previous interpretation that the site represents an early burial cave containing purported small-bodied humans. New radiocarbon dates suggest long-term use of the cave for both mortuary activity and small-scale marine foraging that may slightly precede the accepted date for the earliest human occupation of Palau. The results of this research here discount earlier claims for insular dwarfism among the earliest inhabitants of these islands.