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• No evidence is supportable for domesticated dogs at three important Pavlovian sites. • The high frequency of wolf remains at Pavlovian sites argues against the presence of dogs. • There is also no evidence of domesticated dog even in succeeding Late Gravettian sites. In the current volume of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Germonpré et al. comment on our article "Friend or foe? Large canid remains from Pavlovian sites and their archaeozoological context" (Wilczyński et al. 2020). The authors say there are inaccuracies or errors in our paper, in an attempt to refute our rejection of the hypothesis of wolf domestication at the Předmostí site and, in broader sense, by the Pavlovian community. Here we counter allegations and in so doing clarify our arguments against wolf domestication during mid-Upper Paleolithic in Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Gini index is used to measure differentiation in house size as a proxy to interpret inequality across a large environmental lidar dataset that documented a palimpsest of Maya archaeological settlement and landscapes. • We identify consistent patterns and Gini coefficients across the Maya lowlands, with notably lower values in peripheral areas, including coastal zones and the Western lowlands. • Despite the narrow lidar transects, the results of this study align with regional and site-based approaches across the Maya area. The emergence and expansion of inequality have been topics of household archaeology for decades. Traditionally, this question has been informed by ethnographic, ethnohistoric and/or comparative studies. Within sites and regions, comparative physical, spatial, and architectural studies of households offer an important baseline of information about status, wealth, and well-being, especially in the Maya lowlands where households are accessible in the archaeological record. Between sites, more research is necessary to assess how these physical measurements of household remains compare. This paper investigates the intersection of landscape, household, and community based on a multi-scalar analysis of households using the Gini index across southeastern Mexico, in the context of a broader study of land use, land management, and settlement patterns. Notably, this paper represents a region-wide analysis of nearly continuous LiDAR data within and outside of previously documented prehispanic Maya settlements. While we conclude that the Gini index is useful for establishing a comparative understanding of settlement, we also recognize that the index is a starting point to identify other ways to study how household to community-level social and economic variability intersects with diverse ecological patterns. Highlighting the opportunities and limitations with applying measures like the Gini index across culturally, temporally, and geographically heterogeneous areas, we illustrate how systematic studies of settlement can be coupled to broader studies of landscape archaeology to interpret changing patterns of land management and settlement across the Maya lowlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper uses a 'braided knowledge' approach to explore Aboriginal ancestral narratives, geomorphological interpretations and archaeological evidence relating to the Murray River (Rinta) in South Australia's Riverland region. • Commonalities between Aboriginal and Western knowledge systems are outlined through a number of key threads relating to the geographic directionality of peopling in the region, river dynamism (particularly in relation to the deglacial transformations from 15 ka) and more. • Differences between knowledge systems are also explored and include descriptions of 'Indigenous frameworks' which embed multiple levels of meaning, as well as Aboriginal interpretations of the subsurface. This paper uses a 'braided knowledge' approach to explore Aboriginal ancestral narratives, geomorphological interpretations and archaeological evidence relating to the Murray River (Rinta) in South Australia's Riverland region. The 'knowledge carriers' of ancestral narratives are honoured and complexities regarding the ways in which their wisdom was recorded by Europeans are considered. Commonalities between Aboriginal and Western knowledge systems are outlined through a number of key threads relating to the geographic directionality of peopling in the region, river dynamism (particularly in relation to the deglacial transformations from 15 ka) and more. Differences between knowledge systems are also explored and include descriptions of 'Indigenous frameworks' which embed multiple levels of meaning, as well as Aboriginal interpretations of the subsurface. The paper shows that through a collaborative exchange of ideas, together with the conscious positioning of Aboriginal knowledges, normally disparate systems may be explored to amplify our understandings of Indigenous riverscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the nature of copying errors in the cultural transmission of material culture is highly relevant for students of cultural evolution, especially in the field of evolutionary archaeology. In this paper, we set up a classic transmission chain experiment, which involves making clay anthropomorphic figurines, to explore the nature of the copying error related to the production of 3D objects. The experiment consists of four independent transmission chains, each with 10 participants. Three chains are non-expert chains, as they consist of students of archaeology and psychology with no formal training in arts. The fourth is an expert chain consisting of art students. Our results show that the copying error predictably differs between the experts and the non-experts – it is lower in the expert chain. However, in both groups, the error is higher than predicted by the models that assume that the copying error is only due to imperfections in the perception of linear dimensions. Taken together, these two results suggest that, in addition to the error in perception, the error in the execution contributes significantly to the overall error, as predicted by the recently formulated object-mediated transmission model (Crema et al., 2023). The results of our experiment also show that the errors are often biased rather than random, suggesting that the transmission process involves the transformations anticipated by the cultural attraction theory. • Transmission chain experiment is carried out with clay anthropomorphic figurines. • Copying error of linear dimensions is higher than the Weber fraction (3%). • Art students make less error than other students in copying features of figurines. • Copying errors are often biased, as predicted by the cultural attraction theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Variability in and significance of hunter-gatherer aggregation sites are reviewed. • The Cadfael archaeological site is a Dorset aggregation in the Canadian Arctic. • The aggregation site contains stone longhouses as well as ritual features. • Change over time at the site results from interaction between Dorset and Inuit. Most hunter-gatherer lifeways revolve around periodic large gatherings – aggregations – that serve as social, ritual, and economic anchors for their annual cycles. However, in archaeological contexts they are often difficult to recognize. This paper describes and interprets a particularly large and well-preserved example of a warm season aggregation site dating to the Late Dorset period in the eastern North American Arctic. This site extends for over 750 m along coastal beach ridges and contains four boulder-outlined "longhouses" of up to 38 m in length as well as hundreds of other features used for storage, cooking, and ritual activities. In addition to interpreting the range of activities occurring on the site, this paper discusses the clear evidence for change over time in the ways its inhabitants interacted with the built environment, and with each other. Because these changes took place mainly during the 13th century CE, they likely represent a reaction to the arrival in this region of ancestral Inuit, who migrated from Alaska during this period and ultimately replaced Dorset populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Case study of war in the ancient Maya kingdom of Piedras Negras. • Settlement location, fortifications, weapons, human remains, and epigraphy. • Chronological changes in violence across the first millennium A.D. • War and processes of polity formation and collapse. • Evidence for total war and attacks on community. Through a case study of the Classic period (A.D. 350–900) kingdom of Piedras Negras, this paper addresses a number of debates in the archaeology of war among the ancient Maya. These findings have broader comparative use in ongoing attempts to understand war in the precolonial Americas, including the frequency of war, its role in processes of polity formation and collapse, the involvement of non-elites in combat, and the cause and effect of captive-taking. This paper provides the first synthesis of a number of datasets pertaining to war and violence in the region of Piedras Negras while presenting new settlement data gleaned from recent lidar survey of the area. Focus is especially on tracing the material, iconographic, and epigraphic evidence for war in diachronic perspective. Material evidence includes the spatial distribution of settlement, presence of fortifications, weaponry, and human skeletal remains demonstrating evidence of traumatic injury. Additional data are drawn from epigraphy and iconography. As with all archaeological contexts, there are crucial gaps in the record. Nevertheless, by combining these datasets it is possible to reconstruct a history of warfare within this precolonial indigenous polity of the first millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aboriginal people have lived in Australia, continuously, for tens of thousands of years. Over that time, they developed complex knowledge systems that were committed to memory and passed to successive generations through oral tradition. The length of time oral traditions can be passed down while maintaining vitality is a topic of ongoing debate in the social sciences. In recent years, scientists have weighed into the debate by studying traditions that describe natural events, such as volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts, which can be dated using scientific techniques. Here, we bring together a trans-disciplinary team of scholars to apply this approach to Tasmanian Aboriginal (palawa) oral traditions that were recorded in the early nineteenth century. These traditions describe the flooding of the Bassian Land Bridge connecting Tasmania to mainland Australia and the presence of a culturally significant "Great South Star", identified as Canopus (α Carinae). Utilising bathymetric and topographic data of the land and sea floor in the Bass Strait, we estimate the Bassian Land Bridge was finally submerged approximately 12,000 years ago. We then calculate the declination of the star Canopus over the last precessional cycle (26,000 years) to show that it was at a far southerly declination (δ < −75°) between 16,300 and 11,800 years ago, reaching its minimum declination approximately 14,000 years ago. These lines of evidence provide a terminus ante quem of the Tasmanian traditions to the end of the Late Pleistocene. This paper supports arguments that the longevity of orality can exceed ten millennia, providing critical information essential to the further development of theoretical frameworks regarding the archaeology of orality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Introduction to the special issue "alcohol, rituals, and politics in the ancient world". • Review of the intellectual history of alcohol studies in anthropology. • The impacts of alcoholic beverages in shaping the course of human history. • Recent advancements in archaeological methods for identifying prehistoric alcohol use. This special issue brings together recently developed theories and methodologies for understanding alcoholic beverages in the ancient world. While alcohol has continued to be a relatively overlooked research topic within anthropology/archaeology, the papers assembled for this special issue center the relationship between alcohol, rituals, and politics through novel archaeological fieldwork, analytical techniques, and theoretical concepts. In this introduction, we review established theoretical approaches to alcohol and drinking, explain the deep history of alcohol in human societies, and introduce papers in this special issue. We argue that alcohol production and consumption can be studied as a set of unique social phenomena that construct social identity, formulate political power, and precipitate historical transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lead (Pb) concentration and isotope analyses in human remains are powerful analytical tools used to examine differences in Pb exposure over time or between populations and to examine the movement of peoples and Pb-containing cultural materials. While there was a large increase in the use of dental tissues for measuring Pb in the last 30 years, there has yet to be a critical evaluation of how these analyses are conducted or the data are used to answer archaeological questions. This article reviews 55 papers published between 1979 and 2021 on Pb concentrations and isotope analyses of teeth from archaeological populations to examine how they were used, areas where they were misused or insufficient information given, current limitations of the approaches, and future studies needed. This was applied across three broad topics: sample choice, concentration interpretation, and isotopic ratio interpretation. While major limitations exist, largely related to missing information in methodological approaches, there are a few overarching themes of use that need to be considered. First is considering the biological/cultural age of the teeth and therefore of the individuals represented, and the variability introduced when comparing disparate tooth types. Second, is the need to consider archaeological, ethnographic, and historical documentation when evaluating natural versus anthropogenic exposures. Finally, we recommend that greater consideration of the contributions from both environmental and cultural sources, including those that could be imported into different cultural regions. The consideration of all these factors is integral to future studies involving Pb concentration and isotope analyses in bioarchaeology. • Sample choice, preparation, and analytical technique details are often missing • Roles of natural versus anthropogenic sources should be assessed using archaeological, ethnographic, and historical contexts • Both imported and locally produced cultural material sources must be considered when interpreting Pb exposure [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geospatial landscape connectivity modeling techniques are widely used in archaeological studies of past human movement patterns and landscape interactions. Recent advancements in the development of omnidirectional modeling approaches present new avenues for research design and require introduction into the field. In this paper, we present a novel adaptation of a point-based omnidirectional model design that we use to advance understandings of early colonial expansion (ca. 1600–1750 CE) into a social and ecological frontier landscape in the Northeastern United States, the Great Bay Estuary. We build case-specific resistance surfaces and use Circuitscape modeling to simulate the outward dispersal of settler colonists from the landscape's central water bodies while accounting for the influences of both water-based and overland travel, as well as the availability of specific natural resources. The outcome of the simulation performs well when tested statistically against the archaeological record and the value of multivariate model parameterization is highlighted both quantitatively and qualitatively. This case study offers a framework others could use to advance their own contextually-informed modeling of past human dispersal and landscape interactions. • Omnidirectional geospatial modeling methods are needed in archaeology. • We present a point-based circuitscape model of colonial dispersal in New England. • Input resistance surfaces consider navigable waters, overland travel, and wetlands. • Model performance is tested against the archaeological record with success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skeletal remains of two equid species, Equus caballus (horse) and Equus asinus (donkey), have been found in archaeological contexts throughout Iberia since the Palaeolithic and Chalcolithic periods, respectively. These two species play different economic and cultural roles, and therefore it is important to be able to distinguish between the two species to better understand their relative importance in the past human societies. The most reliable morphological features for distinguishing between the two domesticated equids are based on cranial measurements and tooth enamel folds, leading to only a small percentage of archaeological remains that can be identified to species. Ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis can be used to reliably distinguish the two equids, but it can be cost prohibitive to apply to large assemblages, and aDNA preservation of non-cranial elements is often low. Collagen peptide mass fingerprinting by matrix-assisted laser desorption time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry, also known as zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry (ZooMS), is a minimally destructive and cost-effective alternative to aDNA analysis for taxonomic determination. However, current ZooMS markers lack resolution below the genus level Equus. In this paper, we report a novel ZooMS peptide marker that reliably distinguishes between horses and donkeys using the enzyme chymotrypsin. We apply this peptide marker to taxonomically identify bones from the Iberian Peninsula ranging from the Iron Age to the Late Modern Period. The peptide biomarker has the potential to facilitate the collection of morphological data for zooarchaeological studies of equids in Iberia and throughout Eurasia and Africa. • Novel ZooMS biomarker discriminates between horses and donkeys. • Novel biomarker provided species level identification for archaeological samples identified only to Equus. • The enzyme, chymotrypsin, reliably provides unique peptide markers for ZooMS analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The archaeology of climate change must. • Improve chronological controls on archaeological and environmental data; • Downscale climate data to local and microlocal effects in high-resolution studies; • Generate multi-proxy archaeological data analyses, avoiding single variable reporting in favor of multiple sources of precisely dated archaeological evidence; • Engage with up-to-date high-quality theory on social vulnerability and human responses to climate and environmental change; • Specify the threats, magnitude, and predictability of climate impacts in the context of traditional environmental knowledge; and. • Look at change before, during and after the climate impact. In 2004, the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology published Julie Field's "Environmental and climatic considerations: a hypothesis for conflict and the emergence of social complexity in Fijian prehistory", where she combined climate and environmental data to investigate the relationship between social patterns of change in the context of variability. Field tackled a complex issue: how societies respond to climate and environmental change that could cause unpredictable impacts on subsistence and settlement systems. Much progress has been made towards the understanding of human adaptations or responses to climate change since that paper was published. Here I reflect on the issues put forth by Field and consider how archaeology can engage with other interdisciplinary sciences and contribute to the understanding of human responses to environmental change. Two topics are emphasized: climate and environmental change, and social behavior in the context of that change. When attempting to identify how climate change affects a society, it is necessary to downscale climate to the specific location in consideration (space) during the time-period during which the relevant society lived (time) and in the context of their past experiences of climate (traditional knowledge). We face an unprecedented climate crisis and archaeology can contribute to the identification of solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Marra Australian Aboriginal philosophies guide archaeological research. • Stone artefacts are embedded within Marra relational philosophies and politics. • Stone 'raw materials' are potent ancestral substances. • Access to powerful Marra ancestral quarries changed through time. • Lithic analyses of Marra stone artefacts reveal changing social worlds. In archaeology, investigations into the social and cultural contexts of stone artefacts have largely focused on their typological styles, manufacturing technologies, functions, geographic distributions and the significance of the quarries they come from. Yet what is oftentimes overlooked is the deeper contemporary understandings by Indigenous groups of the stone artefacts recovered from excavations. In this paper, we analyse an assemblage of 9,642 excavated stone artefacts from the rockshelter site of Walanjiwurru 1 in Marra Country in northern Australia, in light of the cosmological significance of regional stone sources to local Aboriginal groups. Each recovered stone artefact, and the quarries of their raw materials, is laden with meanings that help reveal how Marra Aboriginal people socially and cosmologically engaged with their landscape. By combining archaeological and Marra cultural perspectives, we argue that subtle variations in the range of stones and their relational characteristics signal changing political engagements with ancestral places over the past 2300 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The first detailed recording of a large rock art site from Australia's Kimberley region. • Harris Matrices following digital enhancement of a Kimberley rockshelter wall. • The incidence of superimpositions as re-engagements with rock art through time. • Targetted battering of rock art following the Gwion period. • Regional ethnographic evidence for the likely reasons why the rock art was battered. Patterns of superposition in rock art are often used to systematically construct style sequences. However, once on the rock, images can affect subsequent engagements with the art, the rock surface, the site, and its surrounding landscape, and this recursiveness can be studied through the superimpositions (significantly overlaid markings) on a rock face. This is an opportunity for archaeologists to investigate the culture of engagement not just at the moment of the art's initial creation, but subsequently also. In this paper we show how a long sequence of art styles that together span c. 17,000 years or more was not haphazardly arranged at the key site of Pundawar Manbur, in the Kimberley region of northwest Australia, but rather was constituted of many meaningful overlaps whose particularities reveal much about the culture of art and site engagement over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Boardgames pervasive in Iron Age southern Africa. • Boardgames played a vital role in education, skills development and relaxation. • Boardgames were played across class, age, and gender categories. • Meanings and names of boardgames in southern Africa different to that of other regions of the Indian Ocean. What games did the inhabitants of ancient southern Africa play to enrich their lives during the Iron Age (500–1900 CE)? We address this question by drawing from archaeological fingerprints of board games (tsoro / mufuvha) documented at farmer and forager sites in different parts of southern Africa. The typology of games and their spatial locations in the archaeology were compared with historical and contemporary gaming in selected African communities to map continuity and change in social significance temporally and spatially. Within limitations imposed by a lack of well-resolved chronologies for the material remains of board games, the comparison provided a platform to make inferences about how and why the games were played in the everyday life of Iron Age communities. Based on the strong correlation between the ethnographic and archaeological data, the conclusion of the paper is that board games were played for edutainment, skills development, gambling, and social engineering. However, this is tentative and opens possibilities for further research into the role of indigenous games in the development of ancient southern African communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Speth and Spielmann's 1983 article on protein metabolism was a seminal contribution. • The article has influenced archaeological interpretations of hunter-gatherer behavior. • We have new insights into the evolution of diet, land use, and human health. John Speth and Katherine Spielmann's 1983 article "Energy Source, Protein Metabolism, and Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence Strategies" has provoked substantial research and debate during the past four decades. Their study has led to new insights concerning hunting and fishing, plant foraging and management, land tenure, and human health. In so doing, it has helped us challenge a number of orthodoxies in anthropological archaeology. In this paper I re-introduce the original article and then follow with a discussion of archaeological cases that reflect some of its wider impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Refitting and conjoinable pieces have long been used in archaeology to assess the consistency of discrete spatial units, such as layers, and to evaluate disturbance and post-depositional processes. The majority of current methods, despite their differences, rely on the count and proportion of refits within and between spatial units. Little attention is paid to the distribution and topology of the relationships between fragments, although this is now known to have significant effects on archaeological interpretation. This paper presents a new methodological approach for refitting studies. The TSAR approach (Topological Study of Archaeological Refitting) draws on concepts and methods from graph theory to model the network of connections observed between refitting fragments. Measures of cohesion and admixture of spatial units are defined using the structural properties of the sets of refitting relationships. To ensure reproducibility and reusability, the TSAR method is implemented as an R package, which also includes a simulator generating refitting fragments scattered in two spatial units. The advantages of the topological approach are discussed by comparing it to: (1) the results of a survey in which archaeologists were asked to rank examples of stratigraphic admixture; and (2) other computational methods. The approach is applied to simulated data, and empirical data from the Liang Abu rock shelter (East Borneo) are presented. Finally, the use of the TSAR simulation approach to test different scenarios of site formation processes is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Maya archaeology has focused on small-scale analysis and description. • Advances in remote sensing enable quantitative modeling of settlement patterns. • Ancient settlement shows ranked landform preference. • Urbanization led to crowding of landforms that were otherwise avoided. Settlement research in the Maya lowlands has struggled to reconcile its goals to model a tropical forest civilization in ecological terms with the logistical constraints imposed by the forest itself. In this paper, we argue that the methodological challenges facing settlement research in this tropical lowland setting limited researchers' confidence in the representativeness of their data, nudging the discipline toward community-scale analysis and away from quantitative macro-scale settlement pattern research. As a result, many basic facts of human geography have remained unsettled. These challenges can now be overcome thanks to advances in remote sensing. Here, we use lidar-derived settlement and topographic data from the Corona-Achiotal region of northwestern Guatemala to develop a settlement suitability model that reveals patterns in the distribution of archaeological remains vis-à-vis landforms. Applying this model to a much larger published settlement dataset, we demonstrate how it is not only widely applicable in the interior Maya Lowlands, but also capable of identifying historical contingencies in the distribution of settlement, namely the crowding of less-suitable areas of the landscape, linked to urban densification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We review the state of research on human-environment interaction in Holocene China. • We demonstrate the benefits of a multidisciplinary, regionally focused approach. • We conclude datasets must be local and specific, and integrate data on multiple scales. • China is large, well-documented, and critical for understanding social-natural systems. This paper reviews recent archaeological research on human-environment interaction in the Holocene, taking continental China as its geographic focus. As China is large, geographically diverse, and exceptionally archaeologically and historically well-documented, research here provides critical insight into the functioning of social-natural systems. Based on a broad review of the field as well as recent advances and discoveries, the authors reflect on research themes including climate change and adaptive systems theory, spatial and temporal scale, anthropogenic environmental change, risk management and resilience, and integration of subdisciplines. These converge on three overarching conclusions. First, datasets relevant to climate change and ancient human-environment interaction must be as local and specific as possible, as the timing of environmental change differs locally, and the human response is highly dependent on local social and technological conditions. Second, the field still needs more robust theoretical frameworks for analyzing complex social-natural systems, and especially for integrating data on multiple scales. Third, for this work to contribute meaningfully to contemporary climate change research, effective communication of research findings to the public and to scientists in other disciplines should be incorporated into publication plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The concept of liminality has become ubiquitous in archaeology, with considerable interpretative consequences. • Applications of the concept are frequently inconsistent with theoretical definitions and archaeological evidence. • Liminality has encouraged the interpretation of the decomposing dead in Prepalatial Crete as dangerous and pollutant. • 'Losing liminality' affords the interpretative space for the consideration of new perspectives and osteological data. Over fifty years after the publication of Arnold van Gennep's (1909) Les Rites de passage , anthropologist Victor Turner (1967) adapted and expanded upon van Gennep's theory of transition, formulating the now ubiquitous concept of 'liminality'. From education to performance studies, geography to psychology, there are few disciplines which have yet to embrace the 'liminal' in interpretative discussion, defined by Turner as a precarious, interstructural position in social dynamics, frequently associated with pollution and taboo. Another fifty years since Turner's development of the concept, this paper argues that the popularity of liminality in archaeology has led to its interpretative depreciation, now so far removed from its theoretical origins that it has become an unhelpful synonym for all that is unfamiliar or anomalous, rather than the transitory process of becoming Turner proposed. Through the discussion of the Prepalatial tombs of Crete, it is illustrated that the uncritical invocation of the 'liminal' hinders the investigation of other interpretative lines of inquiry: questions of marginality, exceptionality, and the impact of our own unfamiliarity with bodily decomposition on our perception of the past. By highlighting the continued influence of the liminal – despite contradictory archaeological data – on our understanding of prehistoric practices and beliefs, it is argued that liminality cannot continue to be accepted either as a universally applicable concept or convenient metaphor, but must instead be recognised and critically evaluated as a fundamentally theoretical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 19th and early to mid-20th centuries, a rush to better understand the European Palaeolithic led to the substantive removal of deposits from limestone caves. In the 21st century the situation has changed. Many caves are now excavated, leaving behind a human-made environment of diminished cave sediments and large spoil heaps, with the latter now targeted by those searching for artefacts missed during the original excavations. In an age in which archaeologists are increasingly attempting to balance their roles as cultural heritage educators and destroyers, the question remains - how much do we know about the taphonomy of these features? In this paper we report results from the excavation of a large spoil heap outside Švédův Stůl Cave, in the Moravian Karst region of Czech Republic. Results show heterogeneous sediment formation (revealed primarily through their field characteristics and ED-XRF and Itrax geochemical analyses) and patterns in artefact distributions (evident through assessment of Iron Age, Neolithic and modern artefacts) and faunal remains. This allows partial context to be provided for some artefacts and a methodology to be developed for excavation of overburden. • Identify intact contexts within archaeological spoil. • Insight into hominin activity in Czech Republic during mid-late Palaeolithic. • Demonstrate how XRF (ED-XRF and Itrax) may unravel complex sediment histories. • Provide a new methodology for excavating overburden. • Flag urgent need to apply these methods before excavation destroys these features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]