Using the behaviour of related primates to provide analogies for early humans has a long tradition in archaeology. But these primates too have a past, and experienced particular contexts for the adoption of tool-using. In this pioneering review, the author explores distinctions among chimpanzees in ecology, diet and innovation, sets a wider agenda for a prehistory of primates and explains how archaeology could serve it.

Marc Azéma a Palaeolithic researcher and film maker has been exploring the representation of animal movement in cave art for more than 20 years, and here shares with us his latest examples, culled from the parietal art in the Chauvet Cave (Ardèche) and La Baume Latrone (Gard). Here he has shown that Palaeolithic artists have invented systems of breaking down movement and graphic narrative. His co-author, Florent Rivère, discovered that animal movement was also represented in more dynamic ways—with the use of animals drawn on a spinning disc. In these flickering images created by Palaeolithic people, the authors suggest, lie the origins of cinema.

Carbonised textiles were found in a burnt down building inside a cave 30km from the far eastern coast of Russia. The textiles were made from untwisted or hand-twisted blades of sedge grass to form ropes, nets and woven mats. Dated by AMS to c. 9400–8400 cal BP these are the earliest textiles so far known from East Asia.

Using excavation and radiocarbon dating, the authors show that construction of megalithic pillar sites begins in eastern Africa by the fifth millennium BP, and is contemporary with the earliest herding in the region. Mobile herders and/or hunter-gatherers built and used these sites in a dynamic context of economic and social change. We are more familiar with monumentality as an adjunct of cereal cultivators—but this study demonstrates a relationship between early herding and monuments, with clear relevance to pre-cultivation monumentality of very much earlier periods elsewhere.

Surface collection, exposed sections and the use of irrigation wells and channels enabled the authors to map the settlement pattern of the elusive Dian kingdom before it became a subsidiary of the Han empire. The pattern showed that the Dian were already hierarchical, with settlements of different sizes and a political centre in which ritual bronzes featured. The empire redrew the landscape, with settlement migrating away from the wetlands into the hills where it could oversee the routes of communication into Southeast Asia.

Textiles are powerful indicators of technology and contact, as the authors show for the peoples of the Bronze Age central Asian steppes. In this case the textiles are mainly missing, but have left their imprints on the surface of the inside of pots, captured when otherwise redundant cloths were used to paddle or jacket the clay before hardening and firing. A good supply of old cloths seems to have been part of a potters' equipment and some were used several times. The authors analyse and date the fibres and weaves to give an indication of changing cultural context through the Bronze Age.

This is the first description of the prehistory of the coastal Congo, won by the author and his colleagues against considerable odds: war, exploitation by big business and, above all, by the entrenched assumption that this part of the world had no history to save. Here is a first glimpse of that history: 3300 years of prehistoric settlement, movement and change chronicled by radiocarbon dating and a new ceramic typology.

The World Heritage Site of Wanar in Senegal features 21 stone circles, remarkable not least because they were erected in the twelfth and thirteenth century AD, when Islam ruled the Indian Ocean and Europe was in its Middle Ages. The state of preservation has benefited the exemplary investigation currently carried out by a French-Senegalese team, which we are pleased to report here. The site began as a burial ground to which monumental stones were added, perhaps echoing the form of original funerary houses. Found in a neighbouring field were scoops left from the cutting out of the cylindrical monoliths from surface rock. While the origins of Wanar lie in a period of state formation, the monuments are shown to have had a long ritual use. The investigation not only provides a new context for one of the most important sites in West Africa but the precise determination of the sequence and techniques used at Wanar offers key pointers for the understanding of megalithic structures everywhere.

The popular notion of social collapse consequent on natural catastrophe is here elegantly disentangled in a study of the dark summer of AD 536. Leaving aside the question of its cause, the authors show there is good scientific evidence for a climatic downturn, contemporary with good archaeological evidence for widespread disruption of settlement and population displacement in the northern latitudes. They then navigate through the shifting shadows of myth, and emerge with a welcome prize: strong circumstantial reasons for recognising that this widespread horror, like so many others, did leave its imprint on Scandinavian poetry and sculpture.

The cumulative power of botanical and chemical analysis is demonstrated here by our authors, who succeed in opening a window on Europe's most obscure period, in the south as in the north, the time after the Roman and then the Byzantine empire lost its hold. The emphasis here is on the rise in production and trade of cash crops in the eighth century as detected by survey, pollen, charcoal and residues. Taken together, the new data show a community well on the road to economic recovery after two centuries of recession and monetary failure.

The author explores responses to political violence through the materiality of three aspects of the Civil War in Spain: military lines in the battle for Madrid, a concentration camp in Extremadura and a remote settlement of forced labourers and their families. He shows how archaeology's revelations reflect, qualify and enrich the story of human survival under the pall cast by a dictatorship. Sharing the inquiry with the public of today also revealed some of the disquieting mechanisms by which history is composed and how archaeology can be used to deconstruct it.

Aerial photography is so fundamental an instrument of modern archaeology that we often take it for granted. But its methods are surprisingly specific and its most important experimental theatre was probably the territory of the Levant—and especially the rocky terrain of Jordan. The author, a prominent aerial archaeologist of our own day, takes time off to review the achievements of the pioneers, serving officers who established routes over the desert to deliver mail between Egypt and Iraq. The fabulous ancient landscape they discovered could only be appreciated through the low-level window provided by these slow-moving rickety machines and their intrepid pilots. In these days of jet travel, the precious basalt landscape is in danger of slipping off the agenda again—both for researchers and conservers.

Finds distributions plotted over landscapes and continents, once the mainstay of archaeological cultural mapping, went into a lengthy period of decline when it was realised that many were artefacts of modern recovery rather than patterns of their own day. What price then, the rich harvest of finds being collected by modern routine procedures of rescue work and by metal-detectorists? The author shows how distribution patterns can be validated, and sample bias minimised, through comparison with maps of known populations and by presenting the distributions more sharply by risk surface analysis. This not only endorses the routine recording of surface finds currently undertaken in every country, but opens the door to new social and economic interpretations through methods of singular power.

The authors use a social network analysis to map the changing patterns of obsidian supply among the Maya during the period of Classic to Postclassic transition. The quantity of obsidian received from different sources was calculated for 121 sites and the network analysis showed how the relative abundance of material from different sources shifted over time. A shift from inland to coastal supply routes appears to have contributed to the collapse of inland Maya urban centres. The methods employed clearly have a high potential to reveal changing economic networks in cases of major societal transitions elsewhere in the world.

The familiar term “pseudoarchaeology” allows us to categorise and comfortingly dismiss a diverse group of alternative presentations of the past, and reinforce our own professionalism as scholars and scientists. Glyn Daniel regularly denounced the ideas of a “lunatic fringe” in Antiquity editorials, and contributors to a recent unforgiving book analyse “how pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past” (Fagan 2006). Other terms like “alternative” or “cult” archaeologies describe the same phenomena, and it is appropriate to consider elements of pseudohistory in the same argument. The conventional image is of a clear gap between the knowledge gained through our scholarly and scientific research and thinking, and the illusory pasts and falsehoods created by others. But such a binary division does present problems.

In the summer of 2006 author Margaret Elphinstone, embarking on a novel set in the prehistoric period (Elphinstone 2009), sought out archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones to discover more about Mesolithic Scotland. The resulting process proved to be more than a simple question and answer session: over three years, the two of us, novelist and archaeologist, each renegotiated the boundaries of our perceptual frameworks. This paper is intended to examine the learning process that most students of archaeology unconsciously experience, and it goes on to champion a respected role for fiction. As the status of history is reduced in the school syllabus, the number of people learning about their past from fiction will increase. Very few people learn much about the Mesolithic through formal education; indeed we are both astonished at how many well-educated people have no idea when or what the Mesolithic was. As representatives of our professions, we here demonstrate the special and timely benefits of what we term the informed novel.

The many centuries of Argentinian archaeology have been studied by a number of scholars (e.g. Fern´andez 1982;Crivelli 1990; Politis 1995, 2003, 2007; Nastri 1999, 2004; Ramundo 2007a, 2008a, 2008c; Borrazzo et al. 2009). Although the analysis of current topics in the discipline and a tentative view on its future will be the aim of this critical appraisal, it does not pretend to be exhaustive, but the starting point for enriching the discussion. Amongst the topics briefly addressed are the plurality of theoretical frameworks, the variety of areas of specialisation, the protection of archaeological heritage, ethical aspects of the discipline, an analysis of academic training and the relationship between archaeology and local and/or aboriginal communities.

Christopher Hawkes, foundation Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford, was once asked whether he knew a young archaeologist called Vincent Megaw. He responded: “Megaw? Megaw? There’s a whole tribe of Megaws!” This was a slight exaggeration. I was born in Stanmore, Middlesex, in 1934 to a Dutch Jewish mother, Th´erèse, a talented pianist and mezzo-soprano whose parents were taken to Auschwitz in 1942 and an Ulster Protestant father, Eric, a pioneer of ultra short-wave propagation who died at the age of 48 (Figure 1). One uncle, A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw was a distinguished Byzantinist and great singer of contemporary Greek songs. He was the last Director of Antiquities of the former Colony of Cyprus and then Director of the British School at Athens. His younger brother, Basil, read Archaeology at Peterhouse where he met (and subsequently married) Eleanor Hardy—family mythology has it that they got engaged while studying Early Bronze Age decorated axes (Megaw & Hardy 1938).

The cave paintings in France and Spain are the Magdalenian’s most famous feature. The exhibition, Mille et une femmes de la fin des temps glaciaires (“1001 women from the end of the Ice Age”) explored the proposition that, more than just an archaeological culture, the Magdalenian was inspired, through most of its history, by common symbolism across the Great European Plain all the way from the Pyrenees to Poland; and that, although the landscape varied, this vast region was integrated by common techniques and imagery from 20 000 to 15 000 years ago. The “Lalinde-G¨onnersdorf style” figurines of women, was the suggestion, were particularly characteristic. Assembled from some 20 collections in France, Switzerland, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, the exhibition was shown at the Museum of Prehistory in Les Eyzies from June to September last year. The compact presentation was in two parts.