Across prehistoric Europe several techniques were used to produce salt, including solar evaporation and the briquetage method. Here, the authors focus on a third technique used in Romania and western Ukraine. Building on excavations at Băile Figa and a series of wooden troughs found there, the authors conduct experiments to elucidate how these objects may have been used in salt production: to drip water onto rock salt surfaces to break them up; or to filter and/or concentrate brine by decanting and/or heating. The results demonstrate the troughs are ineffective at concentrating brine, but highly efficient at breaking up rock salt and cleaning the brine of insoluble impurities.

In August 1998 the German archaeological world was stunned when two amateur archaeologists found decorated gold-sheet ornaments on a hill in Bavaria north of Munich, near a farm named Bernstorf, in the commune of Kranzberg. A Bronze Age fortified enclosure was known there, local amateurs having excavated it earlier in the 1990s; later, permission was granted for gravel extraction, trees were cleared and it was in this disturbed area that the gold appeared. The authorities were quickly alerted. Both the Staatssammlung in Munich (Bavarian State Archaeological Museum) and the Bayerisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege (BLfD, Bavarian State Office for Monument Care) took part in inspections and, subsequently, excavations. More gold, including a ‘diadem’, appeared and, in late September 1998, perforated lumps of amber. Then in November 2000, on the edge of an area under excavation by the BLfD, came the sensational discovery of two incised pieces of amber hailed as Mycenaean.

Connectivity in the ancient world has become a subject of such consuming interest in recent years that new publications on various aspects of the issue, pertaining to some area or period, appear with great regularity. Just in later European prehistory we have Continental connections: exploring cross-channel relationships (Anderson-Whymark et al.2015), Exchange networks and local transformations (Alberti & Sabatini 2013) and Enclosed space—open society (Jaeger et al.2012), to name but a few. One can hardly believe otherwise than that every part of the later prehistoric world was intimately involved, not only with its immediate neighbours but also with other areas near and far. Allied to this is the matter of colonialism and ‘post-colonial’ archaeology, with questions of hybridity, importation, local imitation and acculturation or adaptation; all these are things that loom large in these volumes and many others (e.g. Stockhammer 2012). The question of ‘-isations’, such as ‘Romanisation’, has been a concern of archaeologists for many years; here it is ‘-isations’ of the prehistoric Aegean world that are the focus of attention.

The above paper by Ling and Stos-Gale raises interesting questions about the extent and effects of trans-continental trade and travel in the Bronze Age. Of course, there is nothing new in the suggestion that Scandinavia was closely linked to the eastern Mediterranean in this period: Kristian Kristiansen, and before him Jan Bouzek, Klavs Randsborg and Peter Schauer have been saying just that for many years (e.g. Bouzek 1966; Randsborg 1967; Schauer 1985; Kristiansen 1994). What is new is the two-fold suggestion that metal was travelling from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, as shown by metal analysis, and that this is reflected in the rock art by what are presented here as depictions of oxhide ingots.

The paper reviews the rise and utility of World Systems Theory in archaeology, with particular reference to Europe and the Bronze Age. After a consideration of its origins in the 1970s and 1980s, the main aspects of the theory are discussed. The evidence that shows that the Bronze Age world was highly interconnected is presented, and the implications of a World Systems view of the period considered. In an attempt to work towards a new narrative of the European Bronze Age, a brief discussion of network methods is introduced, since these offer an alternative, ‘bottom-up’, approach to the period which, it is argued, is more appropriate to the data than the World Systems approach.

A massive Late Bronze Age fortified settlement in Central Europe has been the subject of a new and exemplary investigation by excavation and site survey. This prehistoric enclosure, nearly 6km across, had a complex development, dense occupation and signs of destruction by fire. It can hardly be other than a capital city playing a role in the determinant struggles of its day — weighty and far reaching events of the European continent now being chronicled by archaeology.

This paper describes a group of wooden objects (a trough, ladder, mallet and other pieces) found in 1817 in a salt mine in north-eastern Austria-Hungary, now Ukraine, which have recently come to light in the Hungarian Central Mining Museum in Sopron. It presents new radiocarbon dates indicating that the objects date to the Bronze Age, except for one that belongs to the early medieval period. Their function is briefly considered in the context of recent excavation and survey work in Romania, and specifically the remarkable discoveries from Băile Figa near Beclean, northern Transylvania, where several similar troughs and other objects have been found. Taken together, the finds shed light on the scale of salt exploitation in central and eastern Europe in prehistoric times.