Urban expansion in the 1970s drove an explosion of archaeological investigations in historic city centres – but with scant resources for publication, reports did not always keep up. Our cover feature highlights a project working to redress this, with a focus on Exeter. We explore some of the insights into this city’s Roman and medieval past that have been revealed.

From bustling city life to the ways in which we treat our dead, our next feature looks over almost 1,000 years of changing burial traditions in Ireland, spanning the late Iron Age to the dawn of the Viking Age.

We then turn to matters maritime, sharing the latest thinking on Tudor flagship the Mary Rose, whose wreck was recovered from the Solent in 1982. After almost 40 years of specialist research, what has been learned about the ship’s appearance and her crew?

The Mary Rose’s 16th-century gunners could have only dreamed of the technology available since the onset of aviation. But should airfields be thought of as archaeology? We consider these sites as relics of landscape, social, and architectural history, as well as their military significance.

Finally, we visit the Anglo-Saxon barrow cemetery of Sutton Hoo. This site is indivisibly associated with the splendid ship burial discovered beneath Mound 1, and its ‘princely’ male occupant, but there are also fascinating female stories to be found. Following on from our review of Netflix’s film about the 1939 excavation, The Dig, in CA 373, we meet four women who made vital contributions to the investigation, as well as a nameless 7th-century ‘queen’ who was laid to rest in the royal burial ground.