Spanning 760km2 and identifying 603 sites covering thousands of years of (pre)history, the Mariwan Archaeological Survey provides a comprehensive examination of settlement history in north-western Iran. By employing advanced survey methods and targeting previously unexplored regions, evidence and understanding of Mariwan’s cultural dynamics and historical interactions is substantially enhanced.

New excavations at Ormagi Ekhi in Georgia have revealed long-term hominin occupations during the Middle Palaeolithic (260–45 ka cal BP). Here, the authors present an overview of data from multidisciplinary analyses of the site, highlighting its potential for widening our understanding of hominin occupations in the South Caucasus.

The 2022–2023 Pleistocene and Early Holocene Archaeological Surface Survey in Mardin Province, south-eastern Türkiye, identified prehistoric settlements, including Şika Rika 5, that provide new insights into the early stages of settlement in the Northern Khabur Region.

Conservation of fragile and fragmented archaeological remains can be essential to their preservation and study. Here, the authors use the example of the approximately 75 000-year-old Shanidar Z Neanderthal to illustrate the importance of appropriate conservation from excavation to the laboratory, and of the detailed documentation of this process, for enabling anatomical and taphonomic research.

The discovery of cleavers and Levallois lithics around the Goab playa in eastern Iran suggests that this region holds significant potential for the study of early human societies and for investigating new hominin dispersal routes to other parts of the world, such as Eastern Asia.

The WEAR project is developing integrative methods to analyse and predict use-related shape transformation of Neolithic stone tools from Central Europe through experimental archaeology and computational modelling.

The Linear Pottery Culture site of Eilsleben, Germany, is the earliest potential fortified settlement in the borderland between the Early Neolithic world and Late Mesolithic populations. Building on extensive excavations and new fieldwork, an interdisciplinary programme investigates models of interaction between early farmers and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in this region.

Białowieża Forest in eastern Poland preserves a landscape largely unaffected by recent human activity. A multidisciplinary study combining airborne and surface surveys, excavations and palaeoenvironmental analysis confirms episodic human activity in the area over the past 10 000 years, providing a methodological foundation for future research and heritage conservation.

The authors present results of a recent project that challenges the perceived absence of Late Pleistocene human settlements in high-altitude areas of inland Spain. Despite the apparent geographic and bioclimatic constraints, these areas may contain archaeological material from diverse prehistoric periods.

Adapting to a global urban future requires diverse, long-term perspectives on urbanism. URBank supports this by bringing together global deep-time urban datasets in a modern open-science computing platform. Its design eschews checklist definitions of cities, representing the variability of past urbanism and enabling systematic comparative spatiotemporal research.

This article introduces an archaeological project in the Flinders Islands Group, Queensland, Australia. A collaboration between academics, the islands’ Traditional Owners and Cape Melville National Park, the project focuses on the islands’ important corpus of rock art.