The recovery of animal and plant remains from the site of Cahal Pech provides data on early diet and subsistence practices in the Belize Valley region of the Maya lowlands. Analysis of the material remains suggests that the Middle Preclassic Maya were practising a mixed subsistence economy relying on agricultural foodstuffs, local terrestrial game species, freshwater fish and shellfish and marine reef fishes. Isotopic analysis of human bone is used to aid in the reconstruction of actual food consumption.

Kadero, in the central Sudan, offers new discoveries pertinent to the old and valuable question of early domesticates - both plant and animal - in the Middle and Upper Nile region.

In 1989 ANTIQUITY published a special section of papers on the archaeology of the steppe zone, to notice the special role of that great sweep of land that links the northern fringes of early prehistoric agriculture in Europe and Asia. A new international team has now returned to Jeitun, the key early agricultural site in Turkmenistan, on the edge of the Kara Kum desert.

Intensive survey and initial excavations have succeeded in pushing back the Neolithic human occupation of Cyprus to the earlier ninth millennium cal BC. Contemporary with PPNA in the Levant, and with signs of belonging to the same intellectual community, these were not marginalised foragers, but participants in the developing Neolithic project, which was therefore effectively networked over the sea.

Recent excavations in Uttar Pradesh have turned up iron artefacts, furnaces, tuyeres and slag in layers radiocarbon dated between 1800 and 1000 BC. This raises again the question of whether iron working was brought to India during supposed immigrations in the second millennium BC, or developed independently

The commensal rats — notably the black rat Rattus rattus and the brown R. norvegicus — are among mankind's most destructive and dangerous enemies, and have spread relentlessly with humans across the globe. A decade after an important ratty meeting at the Natural History Museum, London, in 1981, this noxious rodent pest is again reviewed.

Women's issues are deservedly a growing concern in archaeology, with concerns that run from the power (im)balance between the sexes in the present practice of archaeology to the technical question of how gender-relations are, or are not, recoverable from archaeological context. The several aspects that lie within the phrase ‘women's archaeology’are explored.

The Heuneburg on the Upper Danube has been one of the best-known archaeological sites of Early Iron Age Europe since the first excavations of the 1950s. Fieldwork carried out during recent years, however, has radically changed our accepted understanding of what was clearly a central place of supra-regional importance. In addition to the three-hectare hilltop fortification with its famous mudbrick wall, an outer settlement some 100ha in extent has been discovered. Its investigation has given new insights into the centralisation process that took place from the end of the seventh century BC. Moreover, recent discoveries from the richly furnished burials in the surrounding area offer significant clues to issues of social hierarchy and status transmission within Late Hallstatt communities. The results provide an entirely new picture of the earliest stages of urbanisation north of the Alps.

The northern Northwest Coast supported some of the most socially complex hunting and gathering societies on the Pacific Coast. The Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian of this region share a rich ethnographic history that reveals hereditary social ranking, sedentary villages, intensive warfare, part-time craft specialization and dense populations. Models developed to explain the origins of social and political complexity among these groups have covered the gamut of theories presented for the rise of complexity in state level societies. As will be demonstrated, not only have archaeologists failed to present a theory that explains the rangeof variability in the data, but on the northern Northwest Coast, the actual timing of the origins of political complexity is suspect.

The authors describe the discovery of the first human burial of Magdalenian age to be found in the Iberian Peninsula—the partial skeleton of a young adult whose bones were stained with red ochre. The burial was well stratified in a sequence at the vestibule rear running from the Mousterian to the Mesolithic, and was adjacent to a large block that had fallen from the cave roof and been subsequently engraved. A preliminary AMS radiocarbon date on associated faunal remains from the ochre-stained, galena speckled burial layer yielded a date of 15700 BP, while a hearth directly above the burial is dated to 15 100 BP, placing the interment of this individual in the Lower Cantabrian Magdalenian, the period of most intensive human occupation of El Mirón Cave during the Upper Palaeolithic.

The author shows how technical studies of beads made of agate and carnelian are informative indicators of social conditions and contacts between regions. The beads in question throw new light on the relations between India and South-east Asia in the first millennium BC.

The research team of this new project has begun the precision radiocarbon dating of the super-important Copper Age cemetery at Varna. These first dates show the cemetery in use from 4560-4450 BC, with the possibility that the richer burials are earlier and the poor burials later in the sequence. The limited number of lavish graves at Varna, representing no more than a handful of paramount chiefs, buried over 50-60 years, suggests a stabilisation of the new social structure by the early part of the Late Copper Age.

The discovery of three bronze age cist burials at Ashgrove, Fife, was unusual in revealing highly decomposed macroscopic plant debris in cist I, which was excavated by Professor R. J. Adam, Mrs Mary Adam and Professor L. H. Butler. Miss A. Henshall (1964) states that the liberal clay luting of the side slabs and cover of cist I had been so effective as to keep the interior dry and free of soil. She also reports that 'Over the skeleton and cist floor there was a thin deposit of black crumbly matter which formed a deep deposit nearly I ft across in the area between the forearms and upper arms, i.e., in the vicinity of the chest' (p. 167) (PL. xva). Miss C. A. Lambert (now Mrs C. A. Dickson), in an appendix to Henshall's paper, found that 'The plant material consisted of abundant dicotyledonous leaf fragments, bark, twigs, wood charcoal (two tiny fragments), plant tissue with crystalline copper salts adhering to it and fairly abundant sphagnum moss. The leaf fragments were several layers thick but their poorly preserved condition prevented their separation and identification.

The Aurignacian, traditionally regarded as marking the beginnings of Sapiens in Europe, is notoriously hard to date, being almost out of reach of radiocarbon. Here the authors return to the stratified sequence in the Franchthi Cave, chronicle its lithic and shell ornament industries and, by dating humanly-modified material, show that Franchthi was occupied either side of the Campagnian Ignimbrite super-eruption around 40000 years ago. Along with other results, this means that groups of Early Upper Palaeolithic people were active outside the Danube corridor and Western Europe, and probably in contact with each other over long distances.

A recent series of accelerator mass spectrometry dates from the earliest excavated deposits at Çatalhöyük has allowed the origins of the site to be more precisely dated. These dates also provide a reliable basis for the construction of an overall intra-site chronological sequence.

A first rule of statistics is that the existence of a correlation does not itself prove a causal connection. This is the heart of the recurrent question in later European prehistory — whether in the Mediterranean or in the Atlantic northwest — about volcanic eruptions, their impact on climate, and then of the climatic impact on human populations. The burial under tephra of the Late Bronze Age settlement of Santorini is proof of a particular catastrophe: but is there the evidence to prove wider European calamity?

The archaeological exploration of a cave in the southern Caucasus revealed evidence for early social complexity, ritual burial and wine-making in the early fourth millennium. The marvellous preservation of wood, leather and plants offers a valuable contrast to the poorer assemblages on contemporary tell sites. The authors make the case that the Areni-1 cave complex indicates connections between the urbanisation of early Mesopotamia and the Maikop culture of south Russia.

Sandra Bowdler reported in the last issue of ANTIQUITY (62: 517–23) on the controversy surrounding the recent repainting of Wandjina figures on the rocks of the western Kimberley, northwest Australia. Here is an Aboriginal Australian's view of the repainting project and its significance, along with an explication and further discussion of implications.

As the great antiquity of human settlement in Australia becomes clear, so does the distinctive character of human adaptation in the continent. In particular, the Holocene transformation of the Australian climate led to patterns of human ecology with some characteristics of their own, and some common to regions where the Holocene changes led on to agricultural societies. Here is a case-study in that Australian history.