Viking graves and grave-goods in Ireland is the longawaited outcome of the Irish Viking Graves Project, which ran from 1999–2005. The project originated at a conference held in Dublin in 1995, at which the limited understanding of Viking burials was identified as a significant shortcoming of the Irish archaeological record. Stephen Harrison was appointed as Research Assistant, and began the major task of making sense of the antiquarian records of the Royal Irish Academy. The primary aim of this work was the creation of the first accurate and comprehensive catalogue of all Viking graves and grave-goods in Ireland. With this volume, that aim has been handsomely achieved.

There are insights to be gained from comparing three very different books on the mounds, mound-builders and moundvilles of later pre-Columbian and early historic-period eastern North America. These insights stem from the range of perspectives embodied by the trio of hardbacks here, written by authors with diverse backgrounds using very different kinds of case material. In one book, historian Terry Barnhart gives us a rich reading of the historical relationship of American archaeology to ‘The Mound Builders’, identified by many Euro-Americans in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an actual lost race or civilisation that pre-dated the American Indian occupation of the continent. In another book, writer Jay Miller seeks a cosmological explanation of all eastern North American mounds, in some ways reaffirming the centrality of mound building to Native identities. In a third volume, editor-archaeologists C. Margaret Scarry and Vincas Steponaitis, and 12 other authors, present the latest archaeological synthesis on Moundville, a great town in Alabama often cited as the civic-ceremonial core of a stereotypical Mississippian-era chiefdom (c. AD 1120–1650). Tacking between the three texts, we might come to appreciate more clearly how we know, or might know, the mound-builder past by contextualising and theorising that past better than we are currently doing.

These two volumes result from extensive developer-funded fieldwork in north-western Northamptonshire, in the English midlands. Under the system introduced in 1990, local authority curatorial archaeologists assess the impact upon archaeological remains of planning applications, and make recommendations for any further investigative work. Developers are normally responsible for the costs of any archaeological evaluation or excavation work necessary, and they award the contracts to commercial field units who bid for this work in a competitive tendering process. Since 1990, there has been an enormous increase in the volume of such archaeological work in Britain and other European countries (Bradley et al. 2016), and these two volumes are representative of many of the best and worst aspects of this system.

Despite ongoing fieldwork focusing on the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods of the Aegean, the eastern part of this region, especially western Turkey, remains almost entirely unexplored in terms of early prehistory. There is virtually no evidence from this area that can contribute to broader research themes such as the dispersal of early hominins, the distribution of Early Holocene foragers and early forager-farmer interactions. The primary aim of the Karaburun Archaeological Survey Project is to address this situation by collecting data from the eastern side of the Aegean Sea, thereby contributing to the currently debated issues of Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean prehistory.

In southern Africa, Middle Stone Age sites with long sequences have been the focus of intense international and interdisciplinary research over the past decade (cf. Wadley 2015). Two techno-complexes of the Middle Stone Age—the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort—have been associated with many technological and behavioural innovations of Homo sapiens. The classic model argues that these two techno-complexes are temporally separated ‘horizons’ with homogenous material culture (Jacobs et al. 2008), reflecting demographic pulses and supporting large subcontinental networks. This model was developed on the basis of evidence from southern African sites regarded as centres of subcontinental developments.

The Zohreh Prehistoric Project (ZPP), a long-term archaeological research programme focused on the river valley south of the modern city of Behbahan in Khuzestan Province, was launched in April 2015 (Figure 1). The valley, which lies in close proximity to the northern coast of the Persian Gulf, was surveyed extensively during the early 1970s by Hans Nissen from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Nissen & Redman 1971; Dittmann 1984, 1986). The ZPP aims to develop full-coverage archaeological survey of the valley, focusing on the human landscape over time, mostly in relation to settlement hierarchy and dynamics, modes of production and the emergence of regional centres at the end of the fifth and beginning of the fourth millennia BC. The focal point for the project is the principal site of the Zohreh Valley, known as Tol-e Chega Sofla (39RN1Q22108; the site was previously registered as Chogha Sofla, BZ.71 (Dittmann 1984: 110). We have changed this to reflect its local name. The digital reference is the unique Iranian archaeology map registration number.

The narrative of socio-political development on the semi-arid island of Cyprus during the early first millennium BC (c. 1100–500) has focused largely on the institutions, practices and material culture of major centres and their interrelationships with growing maritime networks. Less studied are the landscapes surrounding these coastal and inland towns, which helped condition the increasing wealth and power of authorities through the management of agropastoral and metal goods, and through the creation of new mortuary, ritual and community spaces (Iacovou 2014). These regional contexts, whose settlements and land-use practices have now been recorded through several survey projects, provide a rich yet under-used source of material for investigating social transformations during this period. Ongoing interdisciplinary work in the Vasilikos and Maroni Valleys of south-central Cyprus has begun systematic analysis of these landscape changes and their long-term contexts. The project is focused on a 150km2 research area situated 20km east of the ancient polity of Amathus, extending from the central Troodos massif down to the coast (Figure 1).

Lessons from history on sustainability, collapse and resilience are the ultimate goal of the Byzantine Bio-Archaeology Research Program of the Negev (BYBAN) (Tepper et al. 2015). Addressing the unprecedented flourishing and collapse of the Byzantine Negev agricultural settlements (fourth–seventh centuries AD), the BYBAN project offers a unique and original approach. It focuses on ancient middens and domestic contexts, which provide an exceptional focus on the materiality of daily life. Archaeobotanical research is central to this project because the copious plant remains retrieved are a reflection of the region's agricultural economy and its environmental sustainability. This approach will enable us to answer important research questions about the Byzantine–Islamic transition in the Negev: what were the major cash and subsistence crops? Which were grown locally, and which, if any, were imported? How, if at all, did the agricultural economy change during the Byzantine–Islamic transition? Were there any major changes in climatic conditions, and, if so, can they be implicated as a cause for agricultural collapse?