The authors describe clay features dating from c. 34-23 000 years ago discovered in a stratified occupation sequence in a Greek cave. The clay was brought from outside the cave, puddled with water and shaped into shallow basins. Laboratory analyses have shown that these clay features were burnt. This together with the occurrence of fragments of wood ash and phytoliths lying on their surfaces suggest that these features were hearths used for cooking, including the roasting of wild grasses.

Why were infants buried beneath house-floors at the Mesolithic and early Neolithic site of Lepenski Vir? Undertaking a new analysis of the neonate remains at Vlasac and Lepenski Vir the authors reject the idea of sacrificial infanticide, and demonstrate a consistency of respect in these burials. They suggest that the deaths were mourned and the dead, like the living, were given protection by the houses they were buried in. The treatment of mothers and children suggests increasing social cohesion from the Mesolithic at Vlasac to the early Neolithic at Lepenski Vir.

Neanderthal diet is explored by examining stone tools found at the site of La Quina for residues and microwear. The Neanderthal people are found to be using their scrapers for working plants and woods as well as meat.

The authors report the discovery of a cemetery of richly furnished graves in the western desert of south Egypt. Artefacts, burial rites and radiocarbon dates relate the cemetery to pastoralists practising transhumance in the later Neolithic period. The first such cemetery to be investigated, its cultural affiliations offer a pre-echo of what would become the Egyptian civilisation.

The area of Ounjougou consists of a series of gullies cut through Upper Pleistocene and Holocene formations on the Dogon Plateau in the Sahel at the south edge of the Sahara Desert. Here the authors have chronicled a stratified sequence of human occupation from the tenth to the second millennium BC, recording natural and anthropogenic strata containing artefacts and micro- and macro- palaeoecological remains, mostly in an excellent state of preservation. They present a first synthesis of the archaeological and environmental sequence for the Holocene period, define five main occupation phases for Ounjougou, and attempt to place them within the context of West African prehistory.

The magnificent tomb of King Cuo now published throws a bright light on a kingdom of the Warring States period. Here the author shows how the bronze vessels in the tomb, blessed with dated inscriptions, can chronicle the political fortunes and alliances of King Cuo’s reign.

The discovery of twenty game boards – including some in a dedicated den or gaming room – in the late Roman fort at Abu Sha’ar, on the Red Sea coast of Egypt, conjures up images of daily life at a well established, but remote Roman military station. Here, during the long hot days and cool nights, soldiers no doubt played board games and gambled incessantly. This paper describes the boards, the likely games played on them and the areas of the fort where they were played.

When did the market economy come to Europe? Fish might seem an unlikely commodity to throw light on the matter, but the authors use fish bones from English sites to offer a vivid account of the rise and rise of the market as a factor in European development from the late tenth century.

Two curiously marked bones from a Medieval deposit in Tarragona are seen to have functioned as anvils, on which iron sickles were anchored while they were being given saw teeth. The interpretation drew on the knowledge of a modern blacksmith working in a village near the town, and the practice turns out to have been widespread in Spain Portugal and Morocco from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, is one of the most iconic archaeological sites in the world. The author relates its functions to that of other local prehistoric high places, and in tracing its history up to the present day draws a distinction between state-sponsored and popular shrines.

Ochre is well-known as a substance used in Stone Age symbolism, but it can be shown to have had practical functions too. The authors used microscopic examination of Middle Stone Age tools to show they had been hafted, making use of an adhesive compound which included ochre in its recipe.

The whipworm, Trichuris trichiura L., is one of the most common human intestinal parasites worldwide, yet little is known of its origin and global spread. Archaeological records for this nematode have all been of Neolithic or later date, suggesting a possible association between the spread of pastoral farming and human acquisition of whipworm. This paper reports the discovery of eggs of the genus Trichuris in late Mesolithic deposits from south Wales, indicating that whipworm was present in Europe before the arrival of agriculture. This raises the possibility that human infection by Trichuris arose through contact with wild animals in parts of the landscape frequented by both human and animal groups.

Discovering what was cooked in a pot by identifying lipids trapped in the potsherds has been a highly successful method developed in recent years. Here the authors identify a compound which shows the pots had been used to process maize – probably the most important foodstuff in later prehistoric North America. The uptake of maize is confirmed as coincident with the Mississippian fluorescence.

Ancient art cut into rock is difficult to research and manage off-site without precise three-dimensional records. Experiments with photographic modelling by the authors led to a relatively accessible and economical way of making them.

Until recently the UK was notorious for its illicit market in unlawfully removed art and antiquities from around the globe. Today the UK marketplace is operating in a very different climate. The UK has recently become a state party to the 1970 UNESCO Convention and is now introducing a package of measures designed to strengthen its treaty obligations, central to which is the creation of a new criminal offence of dishonestly dealing in cultural objects unlawfully removed anywhere in the world. These also include the development of effective tools to aid enforcement and due-diligence. Recent events in Iraq have also forced the UK Government to announce its intention to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention.

In volume 295 of Antiquity M. Gkiasta et al. (2003) discussed the results of two sets of analysis carried out on a “new” database of radiocarbon dates: one for the whole of Europe examining the spread of the Neolithic, and one regional approach looking at the relation between Mesolithic and Neolithic dates. Although we are convinced of the potential of both approaches, we do have some major comments on the methodology.

First of all the analyses were conducted on a highly incomplete database. As the authors state on their p. 48, the analysed database currently includes over 2600 samples. Many of them, however, had already been collated in Gob’s Atlas of 14C dates (1990). Although the authors have included new dates, we do not believe that this has been done very systematically. For the Belgian territory, for example, virtually all the dates used in the article were those published by Gob – 16 Mesolithic dates and 30 Neolithic dates. The authors justify this by referring to the bad state of publication and public availability of radiocarbon dates in Europe. This certainly does not hold for the Belgian territory. In the last decade over a hundred new Mesolithic and Neolithic dates have been produced, the majority published in journals available world-wide such as Radiocarbon (Van Strydonck et al. 1995; 2001a), Antiquity (Crombé et al. 2002), Archaeometry (Cauwe et al. 2002) proceedings of the international congresses such as 14C and archaeology (Crombé et al. 1999) and The Mesolithic in Europe (Crombé 1999), and the IRPA- datelists (Van Strydonck et al. 2001b; Van Strydonck et al. 2002). The authors assert that these “shortcomings” to the database probably do not affect their conclusions. This is a rash and provocative statement, which minimises all recent progress in absolute dating of the European Mesolithic and Neolithic. We believe that for the Belgian situation a hundred new dates can make a difference. In recent years, for example, these new dates have allowed a thorough revision of Mesolithic chronology (Crombé 1999; Van Strydonck et al. 2001a) and a refinement of the (early) Neolithic chronology (Jadin & Cahen 2003). This will certainly also be the case for the other study-areas in Europe.

We thank Crombé and Van Strydonck for their comments on our earlier paper (Gkiasta et al. 2003). They kindly draw attention to recent surveys of radiocarbon data from Belgium, most of which were published subsequent to our own work, which was carried out in 1999. Even at the time we were under no illusion that our compilation was complete: “It became clear in the course of the project that, despite the large sums of money which have been spent over the years on radiocarbon dating in Europe, the state of public availability of the dates, their context and associations and details which enable users to judge the reliability of dates is in general very poor. Thus, no claim is made that the database is in any sense complete” (Gkiasta et al. 2003: 48). It would probably also be as well to correct the impression that the dates we used were mainly derived from Gob (1990). Over half those finally included were extracted from the University of Lyon Banadora database; the remainder came from a wide range of other sources. The new dates from Belgium may well shed new light on the chronology of the transition in that region. New discoveries frequently do cause old interpretations to be modified or revised; we look forward to their analysis and demonstration of the implications of the new data to which they refer.