The temporary exhibition ‘Viking’ was on show at the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen from 22 June–17 November 2013, and will be on display in London from March–June 2014 and Berlin from September 2014–January 2015. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, titled Viking, edited by Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz & Matthias Wemhoff.

Scholarly interest has been growing in an episode of Old World globalisation of food resources significantly predating the ‘Silk Road’. This process was characteristic of crosscontinental translocations of starch-based crops mostly during the third and second millennia BC but which might have been initiated in an earlier period (Jones et al. 2011). Among these translocations we can include a range of crops originally from Southwest Asia, notably bread wheat and barley, and others originally from northern China, such as broomcorn and foxtail millet (Hunt et al. 2008; Motuzaite-Matuzeviciute et al. 2013). Parallel patterns of crop movement between North Africa and South Asia have been observed and discussed in some depth (Boivin & Fuller 2009; Fuller et al. 2011; Boivin et al. 2013). The impetus behind this growth of interest has been the expansion of archaeobotanical research in South and East Asia over the past decade (Fuller 2002; Crawford 2006; Lee et al. 2007; Liu et al. 2008; Zhao 2010). This paper considers the agents responsible for the food globalisation process during the third and second millennia BC. A key aspect of trans-Eurasian starch-crop movement was that it constituted an addition to agricultural systems, rather than movement to regions devoid of existing starch-based agriculture. Other economic plants, such as grapes, dates and peas, also moved considerable distances in the archaeological record, often to areas previously devoid of those plants. However, the novel starchy crops held a particular significance. In both cases, Southwest Asian wheat and barley and East Asian millets went on to become important staple foods in many of their new destinations.

Archaeoseismology, investigating the effects of earthquakes on archaeological remains, has developed in recent decades into a flourishing multidisciplinary effort bringing together archaeologists, historians, geologists, seismologists, architects and engineers. Initially focusing on historical archaeological contexts in theMediterranean (cf. Stiros & Jones 1996), archaeoseismology—also known as earthquake archaeology (see Sintubin forthcoming for terminology)—has nowadays extended its traditional scope to prehistoric and historical cultures worldwide (see contributions in Sintubin et al. 2010 and Silva et al. 2011 for recent examples).