When the Normans arrived in England in AD 1066 they found a kingdom divided into a distinctive and complicated administrative geography. In compiling Domesday Book, the great survey of holdings and liabilities over much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086, the assessors grouped information firstly into ‘shires’—districts that are in many cases the precursors of modern counties—and then into smaller divisions such as hundreds, wapentakes and vills (estates), with additional groupings such as multiple hundreds and regional ealdormanries also discernible in the source. These administrative entities clearly had a territorial composition. Using the boundaries of estates, parishes and hundreds mapped at later dates, numerous scholars have sought to reconstruct the administrative geography described in Domesday Book. The resulting maps have, in turn, been interpreted as the product of several centuries of developing territoriality and of continual social and political change. The shires of Norfolk and Suffolk (the ‘north’ and ‘south folk’), for example, appear to fossilise the extents of the kingdom of the East Anglians as it existed 300 or 400 years before Domesday survey; in other cases, clusters of hundreds have been argued to represent post-Roman tribal groupings.

In December 2018, the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium, reopened its doors after a renovation project that started nearly 20 years ago. Founded by the infamous King Leopold II, the RMCA contains cultural and natural history collections from Belgium's former colonies of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi, as well as other parts of Africa and beyond. Today, a new ‘Welcome pavilion’ leads the visitor through a monumental subterranean corridor to the historic building's basement and to an introduction to the history of the collections. The exhibition halls on the ground level have been refurbished, including the old colonial maps painted on the walls, while in the Crocodile Room, the original display has been retained as a reminder of the museum's own history. The largest halls now present displays linked to the scientific disciplines and themes within the museum's research remit (Figure 1): ‘Rituals and Ceremonies’ (anthropology), ‘Languages and Music’ (linguistics and ethnomusicology), ‘Unrivalled art’, ‘Natural History’ (biology), ‘Natural resources’ (biology, geology) and ‘Colonial History and Independence’ (history, political science). Eye-catching developments include: a room featuring some of the statues of a racist style and subject matter, which were formerly exhibited throughout the museum, and are now collected together in a kind of ‘graveyard’ (although this symbolic rejection is not properly explained); a new Afropea room focusing on diaspora history; a section on ‘Propaganda and representation’ (Imagery), a Rumba studio and a Taxolab. In place of racist statues, and occupying a central position in the Rotunda, is a new sculpture by Aimé Mpane named ‘New breath, or burgeoning Congo’. The accompanying label states that this piece “provides a firm answer” to the remaining allegorical colonial sculptures in the Rotunda by “looking at a prosperous future”. Alas, this answer is not as clear as is claimed and its message may be lost on many visitors.

Located in the Fertile Crescent and at the head of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, the city of Basra is steeped in history. Close to the heart of ancient Mesopotamia, the territory of modern Iraq was occupied variously by Achaemenids and Seleucids, Parthians, Romans and Sassanids, before the arrival of Islam in the early middle ages. In more recent history, the city's strategic position near the Gulf coast has made Basra a site of contestation and conflict. This exposure to so many different cultures and civilisations has contributed to the rich identity of Basra, a wealth of history that demands a cultural museum able to present all of the historical periods together in one place. The original Basra Museum was looted and destroyed in 1991, during the first Gulf War. The destruction and loss of so much of Iraq's history and material culture prompted official collaboration to build a new museum that would represent the city of Basrah and showcase its significance in the history of Iraq. The culmination of an eight-year collaborative project between the Iraq Ministry of Culture, the State Board of Antiquities and the Friends of Basrah Museum, the new museum was opened initially in September 2016. Already established as a cultural landmark in the city, with up to 200 visitors a day and rising, the museum was officially opened on 20 March 2019. The author was fortunate to be present for this event and able to explore the new galleries (Figure 1).

Both volumes considered here represent these changes and offer lively insights into Neolithic societies in Greece, the Balkans and West Anatolia. At the same time, they demonstrate the growing developments in Greek Neolithic studies, the explosion of new data and the emergence of new research questions. Each volume has a distinctive focus, but they complement each other in more ways than one, e.g. in geographic, temporal, thematic and theoretical coverage. They both derive from international conferences held in Greece, one (Communities, landscapes and interaction) in Rethymnon, Crete in 2015, the other (Communities in transition) in Athens in 2013, and several authors have chapters in both volumes.

The last two decades have seen an exponential rise in scholarly interest and research into childhood, and children, in the past (e.g. Scheuer & Black 2000; Baxter 2005; Lewis 2007; Finlay 2013; Halcrow et al. 2018). Multiple publications have explored the scholarly origins of the field, detailing its complex and multidisciplinary development (Prout 2005; Halcrow & Tayles 2008; Lillehammer 2015; Mays et al. 2017). Several authors (e.g. Lillehammer 2015; Mays et al. 2017) have also, very successfully, synthesised extant research themes and investigations, and proposed future research directions. Consequently, although this field is in its relative infancy, its voice is louder than ever as the importance of studies of childhood and children in the past is realised.

In his 2017 masterful film Happy End, the European auteur Michael Haneke returns to some of his favourite themes by portraying the life of a contemporary dysfunctional, white bourgeoisie family in Calais, France, struggling to deal with the skeletons in their cupboard. They are also mostly oblivious to the thousands of migrants from the Global South attempting to negotiate yet another borderland and cross into Britain. In the final scene, a group of them bursts uninvited into the family's engagement party. This classic Hanekean tense moment reminds us that contemporary global migration, rather than being a novel and unexpected ‘crisis’, amounts to an unavoidable return, a return of the oppressed and the colonised; it is a moment in the unfinished histories of white European global domination. In that sense, rather than being a ‘migration crisis’, it can be better described as a reception crisis (cf. Christopoulos 2016), a crisis of the contemporary nation states in the Global North who find it impossible to come to terms with their own histories.