Comparing the source of a commodity with the social levels of the people amongst whom it is found can reveal important aspects of social structure. This case study of a Maya community, using archaeological and ethnographic data, shows that pine and pine charcoal was procured at a distance and distributed unevenly in settlements. The researchers deduce that this commodity was not freely available in the market place, but was subject to political control.

Dr Webb, as a physical anthropologist working in Australia, is one of the professionals whose work would most directly be affected by reburial of human skeletal remains. He gives here, at the invitation of the editor, his impressions of reburial issues in Australia; the opinions expressed here are strictly his own and may not reflect those of his colleagues.

Surface collection, exposed sections and the use of irrigation wells and channels enabled the authors to map the settlement pattern of the elusive Dian kingdom before it became a subsidiary of the Han empire. The pattern showed that the Dian were already hierarchical, with settlements of different sizes and a political centre in which ritual bronzes featured. The empire redrew the landscape, with settlement migrating away from the wetlands into the hills where it could oversee the routes of communication into Southeast Asia.

Great Zimbabwe is one of the most iconic sites in southern Africa and indeed the world, but like so many famous monuments it has suffered from the attention of early excavators who have destroyed key categories of evidence. Chronology is crucial to understanding the development of the various elements of Great Zimbabwe and its relationship to other important regional centres such as Mapungubwe. A number of radiocarbon dates are available, however, and in this study they have been combined with the limited stratigraphic information and with datable imports to provide a Bayesian chronology of the site and its structures. Construction of the stone walls probably began at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century AD, reaching its peak in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although occupation continued up to at least the sixteenth and probably into the seventeenth century AD. These results indicate that occupation at Great Zimbabwe must have overlapped with that at Mapungubwe, and argue for a polycentric model of sociopolitical complexity in this region of southern Africa during that crucial formative period.

The popular image of metalworking sites in desert settings envisages armies of slaves engaged in back-breaking labour. This is in conflict with ethnographic evidence indicating that skilled specialist metalworkers are often accorded high social status. This study approaches that contradiction directly by studying the remains of domesticated food animals from domestic and industrial contexts at Timna in southern Israel. The authors demonstrate that the higher-value meat cuts come from industrial contexts, where they were associated with the specialist metalworkers, rather than the ‘domestic’ contexts occupied by lower status workers engaged in support roles. It is suggested that the pattern documented here could also have been a feature of early metalworking sites in other times and places.

The island has a fine series of surviving megalithic monuments with passage graves such as La Varde and outstanding examples of ornate statue-menhirs as at Câtel (Kinnes, 1981). There are distinctive local variants, as in the cellular elaboration of the Déhus tomb and the regional style of cist-in-circle monument. In terms of islands as laboratories of prehistory it is instructive to note that these structures survive only where protected from the ravages of agriculture, here on the sterile sand-drift of the north and the rocky promontories of the west coast. Sporadic records and the place-name evidence studied in detail by de Guérin (1921) indicate the extent and unevenness of destruction. Of some 70 monuments thus recorded only 12 survive in any recognizable state, and earlier density at about 1 per sq. km is an important corrective to attempts at territorial analysis based on extant distribution.

The authors provide the first report of a Middle Palaeolithic assemblage from Romania. The data suggest short-lived occupation and intriguing evidence of the use of ochre.

In February's edition of Antiquity Koji Mizoguchi launched our new feature, ‘Archaeological Futures’, with his thoughts on the regional traditions of archaeology in a globalised world. In this issue, Innocent Pikirayi, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pretoria, continues the series with his reflections on archaeology in Africa. In particular, he focuses on the barriers that must be broken down in order to secure a relevant and meaningful future for the practice and dissemination of archaeology in this continent that was the cradle of humanity.

This article is something both more and less than the lecture that it represents. The lecture was given in London last December to open the Conference on the Southern British Iron Age which is reported here below by Mr Frere (p. 183). But it had the disadvantage of all introductory lectures to conferences, that they cannot anticipate what the other speakers will be saying later. And in this case, what the others said later was sometimes so new and striking as to leave the introductory lecture rather far behind. Of course, that was the measure of the conference’s success; yet I was gratified to find that what had happened, by the end, was that the others had not so much contradicted as carried further, in their various special fields, much of what was suggested in my more general talk. This surely means—and I think we can be gratified all round—that in the dozen years since the Council for British Archaeology last caused a general survey to be put forward, or the twenty years since Childe was writing in Prehistoric Communities, we have taken our Iron Age studies through a process of expansion, and of revaluation, and yet have emerged still pretty well together.

These milestones in their history are worth remembering. Horae Ferales, in which Kemble and Franks first brought our Iron Age metalwork to recognition, appeared in 1863, and John Evans’s Coins of the Ancient Britons in 1864; Arthur Evans’s monograph on the Aylesford cemetery, with both metalwork and pottery shown for the first time in their European setting, in 1890; Canon Greenwell’s on the Yorkshire chariot-burials in 1906.

A central issue in the regional prehistory over the Transition — and therefore of this whole set of papers — is the different life-ways that came to be followed in Papua New Guinea and in Australia itself; the one became agricultural, the other hunter-gatherer. There is more to the story than that divide; this is a story of a human and created world, rather than a simple response to directing environment.

The authors describe rock art dating research in Australia using the oxalate method. While the array of dates obtained (which range from c. 1200 to c. 25 000 BP) show a satisfactory correlation with other archaeological data, there are mismatches which suggest that some motifs were often imitated by later artists, and/or that the mineral accretions continued to form periodically, perhaps continuously, as a regional phenomenon over a long period of time.

Recent archaeological and pedological research on South Scandinavian Bronze Age barrows reveals that the remarkable conditions of preservation in a number of mounds are the result of particular construction techniques or special activities during construction. Augerings indicate that the phenomenon is concentrated within specific groups of barrows with central positions in a hypothetical Bronze Age communication system.

Archaeologists have long been aware that whales were extensively utilized by dwellers on the Atlantic sea-board of prehistoric Europe (1). The frequent discovery of cetacean bones in ancient middens and, in regions such as the extreme north of Scotland and the Orkneys, of implements and other objects fabricated from them prompts one to inquire into the source of the whales. Were some of them hunted, or did prehistoric man confine himself to stranded specimens? Again, it is interesting to speculate on the various ways in which whales, whether hunted or stranded, contributed to the economy of early man.

The rock-art of the Pecos River region, on the Texas-Mexico border, is deservedly celebrated for its very large and inspiring human depictions, convincingly interpreted as images of shamanism. Study of plant remains in associated middens gives a new aspect to understanding of the images.

Periodical reference to the ‘Mysterious Ruined Cities of Somaliland’, citing them as an ‘unsolved riddle of Africa’, have appeared in books and articles from time to time. The majority of these ruined towns lie in the west of British Somaliland, within the present administrative district of Borama, or across the frontier in the adjacent areas of Ethiopia, roughly half way between the ancient port of Zeila and the walled town of Harar. The Somalis of today can throw no light on their history.

A series of investigations were carried out by Captain R. H. R. Taylor and myself during the week-ends available in 1934. The sites of ten ruined towns were already more or less vaguely known, while eleven new sites, off the beaten track and overgrown with bush, in both Ethiopia and British Somaliland, were one by one traced and visited as leave permitted. Circumstances did not permit of excavation beyond the clearing out of two houses and the sinking of a trial trench across a refuse heap, but notes were made and a careful record kept of all surface finds. The representative collection of relics brought home and presented to the Department of Ethnology of the British Museum amounted to several thousand items, mostly fragmentary. The numerous types of objects were classified and made it possible to assign the period of occupation of the towns to the 15th and 16th centuries.

Linguistic, ethnographic, archaeological and technical evidence demonstrates the mythological and ceremonial importance of the swordfish in Chumash culture. From at least the 1st century AD, there existed among the Chumash of the Santa Barbara region, California, a productive fishery for swordfish (Xiphias gladius) by harpoon. The probability is that a shamanistic cult was intended to bring this great ‘master of the sea’ within reach of fishermen and to persuade it occasionally to drive whales ashore, making their meat available. Evidence from a number of world-wide sources shows that this Chumash belief was, indeed, founded in fact.