This Editor's Peak highlights three recent studies spanning diverse cultural and environmental contexts. Stewart et al. examine settlement and land use in Arctic Canada, Politis et al. explore the mat...

Anthropic Activity Markers (AAMs) were formalized over 10 years ago as a toolkit to infer human activities from biological and geochemical signatures preserved in sediments. This paper presents AAMs 2.0, a revised analytical framework that integrates compositional data analysis (CoDA) and geostatistics, as the appropriate statistical foundations for this approach. We first outline the theoretical motivation of this framework, demonstrating that treating geochemical concentrations as absolute values generates statistical artefacts that limit analytical reliability. Using the ethnoarchaeological dataset of Rondelli et al. (2014) as a test case, we illustrate how CoDA principles can be applied to revisit established interpretations. With this approach, we can identify meaningful compositional relationships without relying exclusively on heuristic element combinations, yielding results that are more statistically robust. Ultimately, AAMs 2.0 reframes activity markers as relational, ratio-based signals in space, providing a more rigorous foundation for archaeological inference.

One ERC-Funded PhD position on (Re)Constructing the Archaeology of Mobile Pastoralism (CAMP) Bringing the site level into long-term pastoral narratives

The Northern Highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea (NHE) were a centre for food production in Africa, hosting one of the earliest agriculture-based complex societies on the continent. The NHE’s geographic...

A recent study published in the journal PNAS is overturning traditional wisdom regarding the origins and inevitability of wealth inequality

The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure commonly used to characterize distributions of socioeconomic quantities. Archaeologists and social sc...

Archaeological discoveries from Malta suggest that humans were present on the Maltese islands from around 8,500 years ago, providing evidence that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers made sea crossings as lon...

Since the 1950s, radiocarbon measurements have anchored archaeological chronologies dating back to 50,000 years, with bone collagen being a commonly dated material. Despite advances in collagen extrac...

Yohannes Haile-Selassie wants to shift the trajectory of palaeoanthropology in fossil-rich Ethiopia away from its long colonial heritage.

Scientific Reports - Environmental constraints and diffusion shaped the global transition to food production

Roughly 6,000 readers answered our poll, with many declaring that Bluesky was nicer, kinder and less antagonistic to science than X.

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