The recently concluded ‘People of the British Isles’ project (hereafter PoBI) combined large-scale, local DNA sampling with innovative data analysis to generate a survey of the genetic structure of Britain in unprecedented detail; the results were presented by Leslie and colleagues in 2015. Comparing clusters of genetic variation within Britain with DNA samples from Continental Europe, the study elucidated past immigration events via the identification and dating of historic admixture episodes (the interbreeding of two or more different population groups). Among its results, the study found “no clear genetic evidence of the Danish Viking occupation and control of a large part of England, either in separate UK clusters in that region, or in estimated ancestry profiles”, therefore positing “a relatively limited input of DNA from the Danish Vikings”, with ‘Danish Vikings’ defined in the study, and thus in this article, as peoples migrating from Denmark to eastern England in the late ninth and early tenth centuries (Leslie et al.2015: 313). Here, we consider the details of certain assumptions that were made in the study, and offer an alternative interpretation to the above conclusion. We also comment on the substantial archaeological and linguistic evidence for a large-scale Danish Viking presence in England.

Heracleion and Canopus were towns recorded in Classical sources about the Nile delta. Surveys near Alexandria in 1996 found ruins poking through the sands under four or five fathoms of murky water. Revealing complexes of temples, excavation then confirmed that these were the remains of Heracleion and the eastern part of Canopus, dating from the Late Dynastic era. The discoveries show how Greek traders had settled, and how the towns then thrived, after Alexander the Great's conquest (332 BC), during the Hellenistic or Ptolemaic period. Following a somewhat smaller display in Paris in 2015–2016, many of the finds can now be admired at the British Museum until 27 November 2016 in the exhibition ‘Sunken cities: Egypt's lost worlds’.

Perhaps the most obvious point about the Anthropocene debate is the one that gets lost most frequently, precisely because it is the most obvious. Paul Crutzen's now famous outburst in 2000 (see Crutzen & Stoermer 2000) stating that we do not live in the Holocene anymore was made in part because he was grappling with the question of the enormity of the anthropogenic transformations of the Earth system. It matters that he formulated the term to indicate the scale of transformation in geological language.

The Council of Europe declared 1992 to be the ‘Year of the Ancient Celts’, yet books dealing with the Celts—Celts in the past, Celts today, Celts who never existed—continue to appear unabated. The titles reviewed here are characteristic of three of the main categories of such fare: exhibition catalogues, general introductions and just nice books to look at.

Christopher Witmore (2014: 215) recently observed that “things go on perturbing one another when humans cease to be part of the picture. A former house may be transformed through relations with bacteria, hedgehogs, water, compaction”; and if the materials that archaeologists confront are material memories (cf. Olivier 2011) from which a past is to be recalled in the future, then

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 with a few of the specifics they discuss, and argue instead that things may be more complicated than they seem.

Travelling Europe at present is an exhibition about archaeological finds from the seas around Sicily. The island's most striking recent discovery (2004–2005) is the site of the Battle of the Egadi Islands, where Rome wrested control of the Tyrrhenian Sea from Carthage in 241 BC. Several of the exhibits are from that site.

As archaeologists we try hard to communicate our insights to a wider public, whether through lucid writing, as exemplified by Brian Fagan's many books, or increasingly through technology such as a 60-second YouTube video. But our subject runs away from us, and our audience, as it gets ever more technical. A century ago, discussion of the chronology of Stonehenge relied on everyday language to describe the order in which the stones were put up; now it depends on Bayesian statistics applied to calibrated radiocarbon dates (Parker Pearson et al.2007). How many practising archaeologists understand that well enough to explain it lucidly in 60 seconds? Or really understand it at all?

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 relate similarities in excavated tools, poisons and so on to the repertoire of items used by extant peoples in order to interpret their function is a common approach in archaeology, as the authors rightly point out, the extension of these analogies to include particular cultural and linguistic forms is ‘a theoretically flawed exercise’.

The Anthropocene is here, but do we need the Anthropocene, and if so, when do we want it to start? My responses are ‘no’ and ‘never’ if the answers to those questions require a discrete definition of the Anthropocene and a specific start date. In that regard, I agree generally with Braje's arguments. Particularly unsettling in Anthropocene discourse (in archaeology or geology) has been the search for discernable origins in the form of golden spikes, and I am suspicious of even setting the Holocene as an Anthropocene equivalent. That stated, archaeology can and should continue to contribute to interdisciplinary Anthropocene dialogues.

These two edited volumes reflect the continuing surge of interest in the archaeology of religious practice and belief. Over the past 20 years, archaeologists have turned their focus on the study of ritual and religion, challenging what Hawkes (1954: 162) considered the highest and most difficult to reach rung on his ladder of inference: “religious institutions and spiritual life”. Renewed interest in the archaeology of religion and ritual was largely inspired by Renfrew's (1985) work on the Bronze Age Phylakopi sanctuary on Melos, Greece, a seminal study that continues to guide archaeological interpretation based on the material correlates linked with ritual practice. Renfrew's focus on ritual (or ‘cult’) exposed the widespread perception that religion is archaeologically inaccessible. The recognition that a Durkheimian division between the sacred and the profane is less distinct in reality, particularly in small-scale rituals and domestic contexts, complicates the difficulty archaeologists face in the hazy area between quotidian life and religious praxis. Since Renfrew's publication of Phylakopi, these problems have been recognised and confronted in a variety of different volumes and synthetic articles.

I thank all the authors for their thoughtful responses to my paper. I believe they effectively highlight some of the diverse opinions about the concept of the Anthropocene and underscore the challenges faced by the ICS subcommission.

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 & DeVore 1976; Kuper 1988; Wilmsen 1989; Solway & Lee 1990; MacEachern 2000). Modern-day hunter-gatherers are not our Stone Age ancestors. Current protestations notwithstanding, the provocative title that d'Errico and colleagues (2012) chose for their paper, ‘Early evidence of San material culture represented by organic artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa’, unambiguously asserts the opposite. Our critique of that paper's content does not question the robusticity of the methods employed at Border Cave (for this, see Evans 2012). Rather, our comments focus on the theoretically flawed search for a specifically ‘San’ “cultural adaptation” (d'Errico et al. 2012: 13214) at any Pleistocene archaeological site.

Characterising the Neolithic in Britain and Ireland has always been a lively pursuit. Following the referendums on Scottish independence and Brexit, and the consequent shifts in modern cultural and political identities, research into the first farming communities of these islands and their tangled traditions assumes particular resonance. The two volumes under review explore Neolithic identities in Scotland: the first, a festschrift for Gordon Barclay, focused around the theme of mainland Scotland; the second, a monograph pulling together more than two decades of fieldwork led by Colin Richards and colleagues around the Bay of Firth in Orkney.