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About 3000 years ago, a major vegetation change occurred in Central Africa, when rainforest trees were abruptly replaced by savannas. Up to this point, the consensus of the scientific community has been that the forest disturbance was caused by climate change. We show here. that chemical weathering in Central Africa, reconstructed from geochemical analyses of a marine sediment core, intensified abruptly at the same period, departing substantially from the long-term weathering fluctuations related to the Late Quaternary climate. Evidence that this weathering event was also contemporaneous with the migration of Bantu-speaking farmers across Central Africa suggests that human land-use intensification at that time had already made a major impact on the rainforest.

Southeast Asia is one major region where applications of sociopolitical frameworks emphasizing progressive development and increasing degrees of social hierarchy have been argued as inadequate for understanding past societies. Settlement systems in Thailand that existed throughout the period of technological change incorporating the bronze and iron ages have not yet been investigated from a heterarchical viewpoint. While reconnaissance and systematic surveys conducted over the past few decades in Thailand have discovered hundreds of prehistoric sites, a recent survey stressing intensive methodologies to test heterarchical and hierarchical frameworks for best fit with settlement patterns in the region of Kok Samrong-Takhli Undulating Terrain (KSTUT) in the eastern side of the Upper Chao Phraya River Valley has revealed unexpected patterns of land use and settlement systems. This article discusses the methodology and results of the KSTUT Survey in central Thailand. A two-stage survey, a reconnaissance survey followed by a 58 km² intensive survey, was conducted in order to locate sites across different landscapes, to identify subregional ceramic variation and possibly geographic shifts in ceramic subregions over time, and to determine evidence for economic specialization among sites of varying sizes. The 25 sites dating between 2000 B.C. and A.D. 1000 provide evidence for a prehistoric settlement system emphasizing long-lived, often large, but heterarchically related occupations. Sharp changes including the appearance of site hierarchy occurred rapidly just prior to the protohistoric period c. A.D. 400, about 1000 years later than previously thought.

This paper employs data from selected sample survey areas in the northern Fertile Crescent to demonstrate how initial urbanization developed along several pathways. The first, during the Late Chalcolithic period, was within a dense pattern of rural settlement. There followed a profound shift in settlement pattern that resulted in the formation of large walled or ramparted sites ('citadel cities') associated with a more dynamic phase of urbanization exemplified by short cycles of growth and collapse. By the later third millennium BC, the distribution of larger centres had expanded to include the drier agropastoral zone of northern and central Syria, termed here the 'zone of uncertainty'. This configuration, in turn, formed the context for Middle Bronze Age settlement, and the pattern of political rivalries and alliances that typified the second millennium BC. Evidence is marshalled from archaeological surveys and landscape analyses to examine these multiple paths to urbanization from the perspectives of (a) staple production within major agricultural lowlands; (b) the shift towards higher risk animal husbandry within climatically marginal regions; (c) changes in local and inter-regional networks (connectivity); and (d) ties and rights to the land. Textile production forms the core of the proposed model, which emphasizes how the demand for wool and associated pasture lands opened up new landscapes for agro-pastoral production and settlement. The resultant landscapes of settlement are then compared with the picture in the southern Levant where a more restricted zone of uncertainty may have limited the opportunities for agro-pastoral production.

This paper rewrites the early history of Britain, showing that while the cultivation of cereals arrived there in about 4000 cal BC, it did not last. Between 3300 and 1500 BC Britons became largely pastoral, reverting only with a major upsurge of agricultural activity in the Middle Bronze Age. This loss of interest in arable farming was accompanied by a decline in population, seen by the authors as having a climatic impetus. But they also point to this period as the time of construction of the great megalithic monuments, including Stonehenge. We are left wondering whether pastoralism was all that bad, and whether it was one intrusion after another that set the agenda on the island.

Before 3000 BC, societies of western Asia were cultivating wheat and societies of China were cultivating broomcorn millet; these are early nodes of the world's agriculture. The authors are searching for early cereals in the vast lands that separate the two, and report a breakthrough at Begash in south-east Kazakhstan. Here, high precision recovery and dating have revealed the presence of both wheat and millet in the later third millennium BC. Moreover the context, a cremation burial, raises the suggestion that these grains might signal a ritual rather than a subsistence commodity.

The World Archaeology volume 'The Cultural Biography of Objects' (Marshall and Gosden 1999 ) retains its currency ten years after its publication and the ideas highlighted in it continue to be developed. However, the relative success of biographical studies which rely on anthropological or historical information compared with biographical studies of prehistoric objects is evident. Through the example of a British Iron Age mirror this paper explores ways of redressing the difficulties of applying a biographical approach to prehistoric objects.

Precise and direct dating of the Minoan eruption of Santorini (Thera) in Greece, a global Bronze Age time marker, has been made possible by the unique find of an olive tree, buried alive in life position by the tephra (pumice and ashes) on Santorini. We applied so-called radiocarbon wiggle-matching to a carbon-14 sequence of tree-ring segments to constrain the eruption date to the range 1627-1600 B.C. with 95.4% probability. Our result is in the range of previous, less precise, and less direct results of several scientific dating methods, but it is a century earlier than the date derived from traditional Egyptian chronologies.

The date of the Late Bronze Age Minoan eruption of the Thera volcano has provoked much debate among archaeologists, not least in a recent issue of Antiquity (‘Bronze Age catastrophe and modern controversy: dating the Santorini eruption’, March 2014). Here, the authors respond to those recent contributions, citing evidence that closes the gap between the conclusions offered by previous typological, stratigraphic and radiometric dating techniques. They reject the need to choose between alternative approaches to the problem and make a case for the synchronisation of eastern Mediterranean and Egyptian chronologies with agreement on a ‘high’ date in the late seventeenth century BC for the Thera eruption.

This paper presents a preview of the research being carried out in the framework of a doctoral thesis. It presents the methods employed for the documentation and recording of the petroglyphs at the archaeological site of Khatm Al Melaha, located in Kalba (Emirate of Sharjah) on the east coast of the United Arab Emirates, during successive campaigns in 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019. Due to their characteristics, these petroglyphs have been dated to successive late pre-History periods, and it is proposed that they were made for specific ritual purposes in a natural monument which is undoubtedly significant in terms of its landscape, description and scenery. The study has been carried out respecting the conservation of the petroglyphs, without direct intervention on them, using available technologies (aerial, terrestrial and digital photogrammetry of close-range objects) and applying the theoretical perspective of landscape archaeology to rock art research.

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of glass ornaments excavated from the Liziwei site in southwestern Taiwan (the 1 st to the 8 th century CE) to explore the dynamics of local and trans-regional exchange network during the Metal Age. Using Laser Ablation - Inductively Coupled Plasma - Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS), we identified three principal chemical groups: mineral soda high alumina glass, soda plant ash glass and potash glass. The chemical compositions of these glass groups demonstrate Liziwei's integration into a broad maritime exchange network that connected Taiwan with Southeast Asia, South Asia and West Asia. However, our findings also reveal the existence of a localised exchange network within southwestern Taiwan, characterised by distinct regional preferences in glass ornament styles and chemical compositions. Comparison with Daoye, Daoye South and Wujiancuo reveals continuity in glass chemical groups and cultural practices, suggesting sustained regional interactions distinct from those in other parts of Taiwan. The findings indicate that glass exchange likely intensified during the Middle Metal Age, coinciding with increased settlement activity and higher concentrations of glass beads in burials. These results highlight the interplay between long-distance exchange and localised circulation, providing new insights into the evolution of exchange activities in prehistoric Taiwan.