Recent availability of declassified satellite images of landscapes and ancient cities in Turkey offer new and valuable material for archaeolgical research. Here David Kennedy explains the significance and use of some images in the Euphrates Valley.

When did a human presence reach Crete, largest of the Aegean islands, and invitingly joined to the mainland by intervening stepping-stones? Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, or only in the Neolithic, when the deep sequence of occupations under the site of the later palace at Knossos began. How many sailed to Crete? What did they bring with them?

The Bayesian model presented in this article is the first attempt to produce a chronological framework for the Iron Age in the Levant, using radiocarbon dating alone. The model derives from 339 determinations on 142 samples taken from 38 strata at 18 sites. The framework proposes six ceramic phases and six transitions which cover c. 400 years, between the late twelfth and mid eighth centuries BC. It furnishes us with a new scientific backbone for the history of Iron Age Levant.

The article is supported by an online supplement which can be found in at http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/finkelstein324

In recent years increasing attention has been focused on the economic aspects of the changes that took place in human groups in their evolution from 'Palaeolithic' to 'Neolithic' ways of life. Braidwood and Howe carried out valuable pioneer work in this field and it is appropriate to quote their view of the problem [I]. How are we to understand those great changes in mankind's way of life which attended the first appearance of the settled village-farming community? The appearance of the village-farming community marked a transition, in cultural history, of great import for what was to follow. Before it were some half million years of savagery during which small wandering bands of people . . . led an essentially 'natural' catch as catch can existence. This statement emphasizes the static nature of the original, supposed 'natural' way of life, and contrasts it with a relatively sudden development which led to sedentary village communities. It implies a number of assumptions: that before the changes took place 'natural' man lived quite a different life, a life of random nomadism, exploiting his environment haphazardly ; that the changes entailed

Chewing coca in South America began by at least 8000 cal BP: our authors found and identified coca leaves of that date in house floors in the Nanchoc Valley, Peru. There were also pieces of calcite — which is used by chewers to bring out the alkaloids from the leaves. Excavation and chemical analysis at a group of neighbouring sites suggests that specialists were beginning to extract and supply lime or calcite, and by association coca, as a community activity at about the same time as systematic farming was taking off in the region.

Absolute dating of rock paintings has always used an indirect means, generally by dating material in strata sealing or overlying the pictures. AMS dating of very small carbon samples now allows direct determination of the age of an organic portion in the matter of the picture itself.

How were stone tools hafted? Based on experimental evidence the author shows how hafting arrangements can be recognised from macro-and microwear traces on the stone objects.

Ancient Egyptians are thought to have been the only people in the Old World who were practising mummification in the Bronze Age (c. 2200-700 BC). But now a remarkable series of finds from a remote Scottish island indicates that Ancient Britons were performing similar, if less elaborate, practices of bodily preservation. Evidence of mummification is usually limited to a narrow range of arid or frozen environments which are conducive to soft tissue preservation. Mike Parker Pearson and his team show that a combination of microstructural, contextual and AMS 14C analysis of bone allows the identification of mummification in more temperate and wetter climates where soft tissues and fabrics do not normally survive. Skeletons from Cladh Hallan on South Uist, Western Isles, Scotland were buried several hundred years after death, and the skeletons provide evidence of post mortem manipulation of body parts. Perhaps these practices were widespread in mainland Britain during the Bronze Age.

The exploratory investigation of two sites in Kenya throws new light on the transition from a ‘stone age’ to an ‘iron age’. The model of widespread cultural replacement by Bantu-speaking iron producers is questioned and instead the authors propose a long interaction with regional variations. In matters of lithics, ceramics, hunting, gathering, husbandry and cooking, East African people created local and eclectic packages of change between 1500BC and AD500.

Meticulous survey of the banks, channels and reservoirs at Angkor shows them to have been part of a large scale water management network instigated in the ninth century AD. Water collected from the hills was stored and could have been distributed for a wide variety of purposes including flood control, agriculture and ritual while a system of overflows and bypasses carried surplus water away to the lake, the Tonle Sap, to the south. The network had a history of numerous additions and modifications. Earlier channels both distributed and disposed of water. From the twelfth century onwards the large new channels primarily disposed of water to the lake. The authors here present and document the latest definitive map of the water network of Angkor.

Shortly after his retirement from a distinguished career in the Department of Archaeology at Edinburgh, the author gave the Rhind Lectures for 2009, bringing together his thoughts about the Neolithic revolution, and comparing Childe's ideas with today's. These lectures, summarised here, announced the modern vision to a wide audience. It is a reversal of the old: Epipalaeolithic people came together in the first large, permanent communities, to form extensive settlements which only later needed to be fed by farming.

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.

Houses burnt down at the Neolithic site of Dikili Tash in northern Greece preserved the remains of wild grapes and figs. The charred shapes showed that there was a pile of grape pips with skins – clear evidence for the extraction of juice. The authors argue that the juice was probably used to make wine – towards the end of the fifth millennium BC the earliest so far from the Aegean. The occupants of the houses also had two-handled cups, providing another clue to consumption of a special kind.

Publication of a new volume on the beginnings of Old World farming (Harris 1996) has provided a compendium of current views on this critical inflection-point in human inhabitance of the world. Was it driven by climatic change, as Gordon Childe suggested? And what of the earlier emergence of modern human behaviour: were these two chapters in the same story?

Through integrated analysis of archaeobotanical and artefactual distributions across a settlement, the authors discover ‘neighbourhoods’ using different cultivation areas in the surrounding landscape. Differences between groups also emerge over the life of the settlement in the use of special plants, such as opium poppy and feathergrass. Spatial configurations of cultivation and plant use map out the shifting social geographies of a Neolithic community.

From examining the remains of charred cowpeas from rock shelters in Central Ghana, the authors throw light on the subsistence strategies of the Kintampo people of the second millennium BCE. Perhaps driven southwards from the Sahel by aridification, the Kintampo operated as both foragers and farmers, cultivating selected plants of the West African tropics, notably cowpea, pearl millet and oil palm.

What is the connection between storage and sedentism in hunter-gatherer societies? What is the pattern of ethnography? What other patterns show themselves in Late Palaeolithic Eurasia, in those late hunter-gatherer adaptations that are precursors of Holocene food production? And is material storage a necessary and a sufficient condition for hunter-gatherer sedentism?