Stable isotopes extracted from two hominins and a range of animals from the original Neanderthal site shows these Middle Palaeolithic people to have been hunters predominately on a meat diet. Comparison with other specimens further south suggests this diet – deer, but no fish or plants – to be something of a behavioural norm, whatever the latitude and plant cover.

So much interest was aroused by my recent paper on ‘Prehistoric Agriculture’ in vol. I of ANTIQUITYth, at it may be worth while to expand and add to what was there said on the subject of flint sickles. The most comprehensive study of the subject comes from the pen of M. André Vayson de Pradenne whose paper must first be reviewed.

The author sets out by describing an almost perfect example of a flint sickle, consisting of five carefully worked flakes set in an L-shaped wooden mount, discovered some years ago in a peat-bog at the foot of the hill of Solferino, near the Lago di Garda in North Italy (fig. I). After describing its characteristics and discussing its purpose, he reviews all the other known specimens from Europe and Africa, and finally discusses their types and distribution.

Did Neanderthal hunters drive mammoth herds over cliffs in mass kills? Excavations at La Cotte de St Brelade in the 1960s and 1970s uncovered heaps of mammoth bones, interpreted as evidence of intentional hunting drives. New study of this Middle Palaeolithic coastal site, however, indicates a very different landscape to the featureless coastal plain that was previously envisaged. Reconsideration of the bone heaps themselves further undermines the ‘mass kill’ hypothesis, suggesting that these were simply the final accumulations of bone at the site, undisturbed and preserved in situ when the return to a cold climate blanketed them in wind-blown loess.

The term 'catastrophe' in my title is not chosen idly, but reflects the now well-established fact that Earth is experiencing (anthropogenic) climate change at a rate and scale unparalleled in human history (IPCC 2007a). Dramatic events such as the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 are so unexpected that one retains a clear memory of precisely when and where one learned of them. Regrettably, climate change is subtler, its effects slower, its consequences less immediately obvious. Yet something of the same is true. In my own case, I vividly recall the moment when I first grasped what it might mean. At the 1993 Kimberley meeting of the Southern African Society for Quaternary Research (SASQUA), a presenter commented that her palaeoenvironmental research, which reached back through the Holocene, might, perhaps, be relevant to modelling future climatic change. Back came the comment from another participant that the Holocene climatic 'optimum' was far from relevant; a bestcase analogue might instead be the conditions prevailing during the Pliocene, 5.3-1.8 million years ago.

The postmodern, or ‘postprocessual’, tendency in contemporary archaeology pays much attention in its rhetoric to that wider public, that wider constituency whose views of the past may not match much or at all with the academics. What happens when the realities of archaeology in the real world meet with those of postmodern theory?

The authors summarise the latest evidence for the introduction of rice cultivation into northern China, and show that it most probably began there in the early seventh millennium BC as a result of influence or migration from the Yangtze Valley.

It all began in a railway carriage. Two businessmen, travelling to the Kingston Assizes in Surrey, nodded to each other as strangers do, but did not strike up a conversation. They were expert witnesses appearing for different sides in the Croydon Water Question; a legal test case that boiled down to who owned the undergroundwaters of London (Mather 2008: 83–4). Joseph Prestwich (Figure 1a), the older by 11 years, represented the water suppliers. As the train rattled along under full steam he would have seen landmarks from his pioneering geology of the London Basin. But water was not his business. His family ran a profitable wine importers. Geology, however, was his passion.

A knowledge of pyrotechnology - the skills of creating and working with high temperatures - attested for later prehistoric Europe first by refined ceramics in the Neolithic, then by copper and bronze metallurgy. But what about the third aspect of pyrotechnology – faience, glass and other vitreous materials? New work reported in this survey shows a place for glass in the European Bronze Age.

The authors present the discovery of a Han period farming site sealed beneath 5m of flood deposits, where courtyard houses have been excavated belonging to the Western Han Dynasty and Wang Mang period (c. 140 BC–AD 23). Preservation is exceptional, both at the village of Sanyangzhuang itself and, by dint of satellite reconnaissance, over a vast landscape contemporarily covered by the flood. Deep profiles show that here land surfaces of the Neolithic and Warring States periods also lie buried. The potential for the study of the early agricultural sequence and a deeper knowledge of Han society is truly outstanding. The discoveries also offer a vivid account of the way a settlement was overwhelmed by flooding.

During the ongoing excavations in the palace of the famous Qatna complex, the excavators noted patches of brown staining on the floor of a high status tomb. Chemical extraction revealed the presence of brominated derivatives of indigo and indirubin, and more detailed characterisation showed that it likely came from Hexaplex trunculus. In short, this was none other than the renowned Tyrian or Royal Purple mentioned by Pliny, which was to have such an influential career colouring the clothing of the powerful. Furthermore, it was associated in the tomb with ghosts of high quality textiles preserved in gypsum.

Since 1980 intensive archaeological investigations have been carried out at several early sites, occupied from late preceramic through early ceramic times (4150–2950b.p.), in the Casma Valley, Peru. Preliminary results document increasing societal complexity over time as reflected in the exponential growth of monumental architecture, the acquisition of irrigation agriculture, the rise of two complex polities within the valley and the separation of religious and secular power within the ruling élite.

You never know until you look. The authors deconstruct a kurgan burial mound in the Great Hungarian Plain designated to the Yamnaya culture, to find it was actually shared by a number of different peoples. The Yamnaya were an influential immigrant group of the Late Copper Age/Early Bronze Age transition. The burials, already characterised by their grave goods, were radiocarbon dated and further examined using stable isotope analysis on the human teeth. The revealing sequence began with a young person of likely local origin buried around or even before the late fourth millennium BC—a few centuries before the arrival of the Yamnaya. It ended around 500 years later with a group of different immigrants, apparently from the eastern mountains. These are explained as contacts built up between the mountains and the plain through the practice of transhumance.

The existence of low-level food producers, neither wholly hunter-gatherers nor wholly agriculturalists, is predicted but hard to prove. Here the authors use lithics, the one ubiquitous common indicator, to show how the detection of missing flakes can indicate degrees of mobility, while mobility in turn shows how people coped with the unpredictable appearance of food resources. In Australia, they were opportunists, armed with a ready cutting edge. In the Fayum, they had less far to go, but still roamed.

New dating of several key sites in eastern Central Europe refines our view of human presence there around the Last Glacial Maximum. The author shows that, with the advancing Ice Age, this part of Europe was abandoned later than the west, and a critical environmental factor was increasing aridity rather than the dropping temperatures.

Two pure and opposing models exist to give historical account of the structure in modern cultural patterns. A phylogenetic account explores divergence from some shared commonality (the word ‘phylogenetic’ is from the Greek words for ‘tribal origins’). A reticulate account concentrates on a network of interactions (the word ‘reticulate’ comes via French from the Latin for ‘small net’). It follows that neither model may tell all the story. These continuing issues are explored with particular attention to the relations between histories as they are inferred from archaeological and from linguistic patterns.