The Fenscapes project investigates trajectories of landscape, habitat and species change in the Fens of eastern England from the Neolithic to the present, with the aim to build self-reflective understandings of land-use and wetland management. Yet underlying biases exist in data patterning linked to burial depth and archaeological practice.

Recent investigations in north-west Arabia have revealed that many major oases in the region were enclosed by a network of monumental walls. Confirmation of four newly identified walled oases demonstrates that this Walled Oases Complex had a substantial impact on long-term socioeconomic development in the region.

Despite repeated calls for action from various sources, peatland archaeological sites continue to deteriorate; the passive strategy of preservation in situ is failing. Here, the authors consider four challenges to peatland preservation—physical degradation, mapping and monitoring of sites, communication, and policy frameworks—with climate change ultimately causing further problems. Drawing on positive policy developments in England, they argue that advocacy for peatland archaeology needs to be louder and clearer: archaeology must become an integral consideration in all climate-change mitigation and land-use planning, rather than an afterthought, if the fragile heritage of European peatlands is to be preserved.

Global biodiversity is decreasing at an alarming rate, and Britain is now one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet. This matters to archaeologists as it places limitations on our personal experience of ‘nature’ and damages the collective archaeological imagination, diluting our capacity to envisage the richness and diversity of the past worlds we seek to understand. Here, the author argues that we must learn, from contemporary biodiversity projects, animate Indigenous worldviews and enmeshed human-nonhuman ecosystems, to rewild our minds—for the sake of the past worlds we study and the future worlds that our narratives help shape.

An archaeological survey of Kitsissut, a remote island cluster in the High Arctic of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), has revealed a human presence almost 4500 years ago, during the formation of a vital marine environment—Pikialasorsuaq polynya. Kitsissut is accessible only by a difficult open-water journey, and repeated occupation thus permits inferences on the sophistication of watercraft technology and navigational skill. Here, the authors argue that this demonstrable reach of Early Paleo-Inuit communities across marine and terrestrial ecosystems enhances our understanding of their lifeways and environmental legacy, raising critical new questions about Indigenous agency in shaping emerging Arctic ecosystems.

Changes in settlement patterns are often argued to reflect climatic change, which may make certain areas more or less hospitable depending on the adaptability of subsistence practices. This study models the impact of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events on phases of occupation and abandonment over the past 4500 years at Pashimbi in the Ecuadorian Amazon. While earlier occupations and abandonments seem to correlate with climatic events, associations post-3000 BP are less clear, potentially indicating that populations adapted to wetter conditions and, the authors argue, that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation was not the main determinant in the decision to abandon settlements.

Understanding how prehistoric human groups sustained themselves upon encountering novel island environments is crucial for modelling population movements in key world regions like Southeast Asia. Here, the authors present new radiocarbon dates and isotopic data for human and animal remains recovered from the Neolithic site of Xiying on Haitan Island, on the south-east China coast. The human remains are the earliest yet discovered on the island, their stable isotope ratios revealing a lifelong heavy reliance on marine foods despite the availability of a diversity of terrestrial resources, offering new insights into human adaptive flexibility in maritime environments.

Despite a long and dynamic history of coexistence with humans, the prehistory and domestication of the common pigeon (Columba livia) are not well understood. Here, the authors re-examine a large assemblage of avian bones excavated from Late Bronze Age contexts at Hala Sultan Tekke on Cyprus, aiming to contextualise the presence of pigeons within the settlement and their relationship with contemporaneous humans. The results of zooarchaeological and stable isotope analyses, they argue, suggest that these birds may have been semi-domesticated and may have held a symbolic/ritualistic role that challenges their common perception as mere urban dwellers.

The Romans were among the first societies to extensively exploit fish resources, establishing large-scale salting and preservation plants where small pelagic fish were fermented to produce sauces such as garum. Here, the authors demonstrate that, despite being crushed and exposed to acidic conditions, usable DNA can be recovered from ichthyological residues at the bottom of fish-salting vats. At third-century AD Adro Vello (O Grove), Galicia, they confirm the use of European sardines (Sardina pilchardus) and move beyond morphology to explore population range and admixture and reveal the potential of this overlooked archaeological resource.

Archaeology is not a solitary discipline concerned only with digging up the past; rather, its wide potential for transdisciplinary collaboration and unique deep-time perspective provide traction for real-world current and future impact. Here, the author proposes integration of systems thinking, small-wins psychology and a more creative interdisciplinary approach as ways for archaeologists to address the existential ‘polycrisis’. Using food security as an example, this article argues that, as archaeologists, we should focus far more attention on the polycrisis than we do at present, that we can make a difference in addressing it and that we have a responsibility to try.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the transition to food-producing economies in the Western Valleys of northern Chile led to a decline in foraging in highland areas around AD 650, yet colonial records from the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries attest to the continued existence of foraging groups. Taking the Camarones River Basin as a test case, this study identifies small-scale settlements and hunting installations in upland areas using remote-sensing data. In considering these new data alongside ethnohistorical accounts, the author proposes that foraging endured into the late colonial era, possibly coexisting with herder and agropastoral communities and precipitating tethered settlement patterns.