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The fifth-century BC site of Casas del Turunuelo in south-western Spain provides unique information on the production and ritual consumption of textiles in Iron Age Iberia. Casas del Turunuelo was a rural estate centre that was intentionally burned following a banquet and the sacrifice of over 50 domestic animals. Among the offerings are the earliest-known wool textiles and twill weaves on the Iberian Peninsula. This assemblage represents the most diverse textile collection found in the region to date, and provides the first glimpse of the role of textiles in the sacrificial economy of Iberia, and in prehistoric Europe more widely. Keywords: Iberia, Casas del Turufiuelo, textiles, textile production, sacrificial economy, Introduction Casas del Turunuelo is located in the High Guadiana Meadows in Badajoz, south-western Spain. The site is an Iron Age rural estate centre comprising a large, two-storey building with [...]

In a 2017 article, Holen and colleagues reported evidence for a 130 000-year-old archaeological site in California. Acceptance of the site would overturn current understanding of global human migrations. The authors here consider Holen et al.'s conclusions through critical evaluation of their replicative experiments. Drawing on best practice in experimental archaeology, and paying particular attention to the authors' chain of inference, Magnani et al. suggest that to argue convincingly for an early human presence at the Cerutti Mastodon site, Holen et al. must improve their analogical foundations, test alternative hypotheses, increase experimental control and quantify their results. Keywords: North America, Cerutti Mastodon, experimental archaeology, human migration, Introduction Current archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that Indigenous peoples in the Americas are descended from those of ancient Siberia, with founding populations separating from ancient North Asians c. 25 [...]

The Must Farm pile-dwelling site is an extraordinarily well-preserved Late Bronze Age settlement in Cambridgeshire, UK. The authors present the site's contextual setting, from its construction, occupation and subsequent destruction by fire in relatively quick succession. A slow-flowing watercourse beneath the pile-dwellings provided a benign burial environment for preserving the debris of construction, use and collapse, while the catastrophic manner of destruction introduced a definitive timeframe. The scale of its occupation speaks to the site's exceptional nature, enabling the authors to deduce the everyday flow and use of things in a prehistoric domestic setting. Keywords: Britain, Bronze Age, pile-dwelling, material intensity, temporality, Introduction Recent excavations near Whittlesey in eastern England have uncovered a Late Bronze Age (1100-800 cal BC) occupation site, comprising wooden structures built over a freshwater palaeochannel--the Must Farm pile-dwelling [...]

Prehistoric copper and bronze objects are found throughout Island Southeast Asia, many of which were manufactured in Mainland Southeast Asia and exchanged over vast distances. The contexts of initial metal [...]

Prehistoric population decline is often associated with social collapse, migration and environmental change. Many scholars have assumed that the abandonment of the fortified tell sites of the Great Hungarian Plain [...]

The long-distance transport of the Stonehenge bluestones from the Mynydd Preseli area of north Pembrokeshire was first proposed by geologist H.H. Thomas in 1923. For over 80 years, his work on the provenancing of the Stonehenge bluestones from locations in Mynydd Preseli in south Wales has been accepted at face value. New analytical techniques, alongside transmitted and reflected light microscopy, have recently prompted renewed scrutiny of Thomas's work. While respectable for its time, the results of these new analyses, combined with a thorough checking of the archived samples consulted by Thomas, reveal that key locations long believed to be sources for the Stonehenge bluestones can be discounted in favour of newly identified locations at Craig-Rhos-yfelin and Carn Goedog. Keywords: Britain, Wales, Mynydd Preseli, Stonehenge, bluestones, H.H. Thomas, provenancing, Introduction Stonehenge is one of Europe's finest and most iconic prehistoric monuments. It stands on Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire, some 15km north of Salisbury, and forms part of a complex [...]

The 'Birka dragon' symbol is synonymous with the famous Viking Age town of that name, an association born from the 1887 discovery of a casting mould depicting a dragonhead. Recent excavations in Black Earth Harbour at Birka have yielded a dress pin that can, almost 150 years later, be directly linked to this mould. This artefact introduces a unique 'Birka style' to the small corpus of known Viking Age dragonhead dress pins. The authors discuss and explore the artefact's manufacture, function and chronology, and its connections to ship figureheads. Keywords: Birka, Viking Age, dragonheads, dress pins, figureheads, Introduction Birka in Lake Malaren, in eastern Middle Sweden, is one of the very few Viking Age Scandinavian sites (AD 750-1050) to be recognised as proto-urban, or as a 'Viking [...]

Archaeological evidence for a Sasanian presence in the 'Uman region of Eastern Arabia is sparse. Recent excavations at the site of Fulayj in Oman have, however, revealed it to be a Late Sasanian fort, the only securely dated example in Arabia, or indeed on the western shores of the Indian Ocean more generally. AMS dating supports the ceramic chronology proposed for the site, demonstrating occupation until the Islamisation of South-eastern Arabia in the early seventh century AD, and also briefly into the very Early Islamic period. Fulayj fort provides new insights into Sasanian military activities during this crucial period of Arabian history. Keywords: Arabia, Sasanian period, military architecture, Islamisation, Introduction By comparison with the Roman Empire, knowledge of Sasanian military expansion is still very limited. This is partly due to the relative paucity of historical sources, but also to [...]

The deeply engrained stereotype of opposing 'steppe' and 'sown' societies has strongly influenced interpretation of Bronze Age Central Asia. This has led to the idea that the agricultural Oxus civilisation and non-Oxus mobile pastoralists formed two distinct cultural-economic groups in this region that are easily distinguishable through archaeological remains. Recent excavations of campsites in southern Turkmenistan, however, provide new evidence of variability in exchange between sites, suggesting adaptation by pastoralist groups in their interactions with settled Oxus farming groups. Rather than wholly reiterating or dissolving the distinctions between them, such practices dynamically reshaped the boundaries of these social and economic groups. These findings challenge us to move away from notions of centre-periphery, dependency and diffusion in discussions of intercultural contact in Eurasian prehistory. Keywords: Central Asia, Bronze Age, Murghab alluvial fan, mobile pastoralism, nomadic-sedentary interaction, Introduction Polarisation of 'the steppe' and 'the sown' is prominent in Eurasian scholarship, and fits intellectually alongside other dualistic categories that have deep roots in Western social science, such as [...]

The identification of parasites in ancient human remains can address questions of past health, disease, mobility and mortuary customs. Archaeoparasitological evidence from Russia is, however, almost absent. This study presents the first such evidence in the form of a helminth infection in a mummified individual from the southern Siberian site of Doge-Bary II, the burial ground of a nomadic Iron Age community. Despite the removal of the intestines as part of the mummification procedure, the residual eggs of Trichuris trichiura, a non-indigenous species of whipworm, were detected. This evidence provides the first confirmation of prehistoric contact between southern Siberian nomads and distant agricultural areas, such as China and Central Asia. Keywords: Siberia, Iron Age, Uyuk-saglynsk, parasitology, Trichuris trichura, Introduction Mummies and mummified remains have been found all around the world, and are a Aufderheide 2003; Reinhard & Urban 2003; Sianto et al. 2005). Natural mummies are quite rare, [...]

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. Keywords: England, later prehistory, Uffington White Horse, sun-horse, landscape, Introduction The Uffington White Horse is Europe's only confirmed prehistoric hill-figure or geoglyph, and is among the oldest anywhere in the wodd. Created in the later second or first millennium [...]

We thank our colleagues for their insightful comments. The weight of modern evidence is against the notion that contemporary human cultures can be tracked backwards into the Pleistocene (e.g. Lee [...]

Many of the components of this argument can be seen as a matter of debate; for example, the occurrence at sites in north-east Thailand of indisputably Bronze Age flexed burials [...]

The timing and nature of Southeast Asia's Neolithic and Bronze Ages have been the source of global archaeological intrigue, scepticism (on occasion) and even notoriety for some five decades (e.g. [...]

Bones and artefacts suggest that kids laboured at skilled tasks thousands of years ago.Bones and artefacts suggest that kids laboured at skilled tasks thousands of years ago., Author(s): Traci WatsonAuthor Affiliations:Prehistoric children as young as eight worked as brickmakers and miners Some Bronze Age children toiled away in salt mines in what is now Austria. [see PDF [...]

In essence, Pargeter et al. argue that claims for the antiquity of modern San cultures' involve a misuse of analogical reasoning. In general, I agree. But, let me take issue [...]

This is an excellent and tightly written argument against the indiscriminate and essentialist extension of invented anthropological typologies, such as 'the San', back into the Pleistocene. While analogical arguments that [...]