A long section adjacent to a former obsidian quarry on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) reveals a sequence of agricultural strategies, beginning with the clearing of palm trees in the twelfth century AD, and the making of an open garden growing yams and taro, that continued through the fifteenth century. The later phases between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries include veneer and boulder gardens that reflect the broader strategy employed by the islanders to fight the increasingly arid soil.

The colonisation of the North Atlantic from the eighth century AD was the earliest expansion of European populations to the west. Norse and Celtic voyagers are recorded as reaching and settling in Iceland, Greenland and easternmost North America between c. AD 750 and 1000, but the date of these events and the homeland of the colonists are subjects of some debate. In this project, the birthplaces of 90 early burials from Iceland were sought using strontium isotope analysis. At least nine, and probably thirteen, of these individuals can be distinguished as migrants to Iceland from other places. In addition, there are clear differences to be seen in the diets of the local Icelandic peoples, ranging from largely terrestrial to largely marine consumption.

Sexual roles in deep prehistory are among the most intriguing puzzles still to solve. Here the author shows how men and women can be distinguished by scientific measurement in the prints and stencils of the human hand that occur widely in Upper Palaeolithic art. Six hand stencils from four French caves are attributed to four adult females, an adult male, and a sub-adult male. Here we take a step closer to showing that both sexes are engaged in cave art and whatever dreams and rituals it implies.

The author presents new radiocarbon dates for chariot burials found in the region between Europe and the Urals, showing them to belong to the twentieth-eighteenth centuries BCE. These early dates, which pre-empt the appearance of the war chariot in the Near East, are transforming the ancient history of Eurasia and the early Mediterranean civilisations, pointing to the Volga-Ural area as an important centre of innovation for early Europe.

The authors examine a sample of olive stones from Egyptian contexts and show that from the first millennium BC, if not before, some of them relate to cultivars originating from the Levant. But equally prominent and just as early is another variety, of unknown origin and currently peculiar to Egypt. The method used is geometrical morphometric analysis – essentially classifying the olive stones by their shape.

A new research project has revealed a fully specialised copper industry in south-west Iberia at the beginning of the third millennium BC. The settlement is rife with hierarchy: on the slopes of the hill copper-workers smelt and cast and have their own residential zone, while an incipient aristocracy occupies a small fortification at the summit and commands all the imports and means of transport. The author sees this social system as endemic to the new industry.

Amongst the numerous images found on the walls of Palaeolithic caves, fluted lines, made by fingers dragged through a skin of wet clay remain some of the most intriguing. In their study of images at Rouffignac, the authors undertook experiments with a range of modern subjects who replicated the flutings with their hands. Comparing the dimensions of the experimental flutings with the originals, they conclude that the patterns on the roof of Chamber A1 at Rouffignac were made by the fingers of children aged between 2 and 5 years old. Given the current height of the chamber, such children would have needed to be hoisted aloft by adults. Who knows what lessons in art or ritual were thereby imparted to the young persons…

With ever more inhibited programmes of excavation, new methods of site survey are always welcome. Here a soil geomorphologist joins forces with archaeologists to read the history of limestone blocks exposed on the surface at sites in southern Greece. Rillenkarren for example are vertical grooves caused by rainfall on stones that remained for long periods in the same place. These and other observations showed that what looked like clearance cairns had in fact been piled up in the Early Bronze Age and led in turn to the definition of a new type of settlement.

Using strontium isotope measurements on the teeth of fallow deer found at Fishbourne, the authors argue that these elegant creatures were first introduced into Britain as a gift to the Romanised aristocracy. Kept and bred in a special enclosure at the palace, they provided more than a status symbol and gastronomic treat: the fallow deer was an emblem of Empire.

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is currently producing a digital elevation model of most of the world's surface. Here the authors assess its value in mapping and sequencing the network of water channels that provided the arterial system for Mesopotamia before the petrol engine.

Ploughing is probably the greatest agent of attrition to archaeological sites world-wide. In every country, every year, a bit more is shaved off buried strata and a bit more of the past becomes unreadable. On the other hand, people must eat and crops must be planted. How can the fields be best managed to get the best of both worlds? Perhaps the most pressing need for resource managers is to know how quickly a particular field is eroding: negotiation and protection is then possible. Up to now that has been difficult to measure.

The new procedure presented here, which draws on the unexpected benefits of nuclear weapons testing, shows how variation in the concentration of the radioisotope 137Cs can be used to monitor soil movements over the last 40 years. The measurements allow a site's ‘life expectancy’ to be calculated, and there are some promising dividends for tracking site formation processes.

The First World War left its mark on the ground surface of Europe as perhaps no other human catastrophe before or since. The author applies modern digital mapping technology to the aerial photographs taken by the intrepid early pilots, and creates a landscape of military works that would not have been known in detail to either historians or generals at the time. The GIS inventory has great potential for historians of the war and is a vital instrument for the management of this increasingly important heritage.

Exploring parallels between the careers of Lt.-General Pitt Rivers and Verne's Captain Nemo, this essay is concerned with time and disciplinary flagships. It considers how their respective collection activities propelled their very personal projects of science and, in the case of the General, its interrelationship with the institutionalisation of archaeology in the later nineteenth century. In particular, the implications of his renowned excavation medallion will be discussed and compared to a celebrated time capsule of the period; it being argued that ‘deep time’ consciousness itself engendered notions of futuristic projection.

Excarnation – the exposure of a corpse for stripping and possible dispersal by birds and animals – is a burial rite known from ethnographic analogy. Detecting its occurrence in the past is another matter. Here the author proposes the marking of bones by dogs and other canids as evidence of excarnation, using a British Neolithic case study.

Professor John Mulvaney, pioneer and champion of Australian archaeology, offers us some reflections from the vantage point of his eightieth year. On his retirement 20 years ago Antiquity was glad to publish his Retrospect (Mulvaney 1986), in which he described his awakening interest in history at Melbourne, his first visit to the Rollright Stones and his fruitful encounters with Gordon Childe, Graham Clark, Glyn Daniel, Mortimer Wheeler and many other great figures of the 50s, 60s and 70s in classrooms at Cambridge and in the field in England and Australia. This paper remains a classic of archaeological history which readers will find in our electronic archive (at http://www.antiquity.ac.uk). It ended with his (victorious) battle for the archaeological heritage of the Franklin River heritage of Tasmania in the early 1980s.

Now he reflects on the subsequent decades in which much has changed. Of especial interest to our readers will be Professor Mulvaney's current assessment of the Aboriginal-European discourse and the management of the Australian heritage.

In 1996 ‘Internet Archaeology’, the first peer-reviewed e-journal for Archaeology, published its first edition (Heyworth et al. 1997). Later the same year the Archaeology Data Service, the first digital archive for archaeology, was established (Richards 1997). Ten years on, this paper examines the rapid changes which have taken place in electronic publication and looks forward to the next ten years. It examines the pressures on traditional journal publication, and discusses the potential impact on Archaeology of the next Internet revolution, the Semantic Web.

A well in the Jordan Valley shows that the Neolithic revolution included an understanding of underground water and how to access it. The excavation of the well in longtitudinal cross-section is also something of a revolution in fieldwork.

Social groupings create material cultures and material objects reflect and maintain group identities. The author explores the role of psychoanalysis in examining and explaining the origins and the need for these identities — and their material symbols — in the mind. He then shows that modern archaeology itself needs psychoanalysing: as a purveyor of culture, it is in the business of creating or reinforcing modern identities.