Stratigraphic and palynological evidence from trenches at Wollaston, Northamptonshire, suggest viticulture was extensively practised at this Roman site. It is argued that the apparent lack of viticultural tools and wine presses in the archaeological record in Britain is not reliable evidence for the absence of viticulture at that time.

Intensive agriculture played a pivotal role in the development of archaic states, but there is considerable debate concerning its relationship to population growth, climatic variability, and centralization.

As archaeologists we look to the past, but where might archaeology be going in the future? In this issue of Antiquity we begin a new feature where we invite archaeologists from different parts of the world to consider how the subject may or should develop in the coming years. For the first of these, Koji Mizoguchi, President of the World Archaeological Congress and Professor at Kyushu University in Japan, offers a perspective on the regional traditions of archaeology within an increasingly globalised world.

The repertoire of site-types for later English prehistory has not changed for a generation. Now, from East Chisenbury on Salisbury Plain, a new type is defined, a midden of refuse so large and strange it re-defines the concept of ‘rubbish’ and its ‘disposal’.

Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza's ‘wave of advance’ model figured in the Indo-European Special Section in the September ANTIQUITY. One of its architects here comments on how his model was presented there, and makes some wider proposals.

A new review of the geoglyphs of the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile has allowed the author to define a vocabulary of forms and show how these relate to particular groups of people crossing the desert from the mountains to the sea in the prehispanic period. Geometric, zoomorphic and anthropomorphic symbols mark routes, destinations and usage by particular llama caravans. The travellers were key players in society and were winning prominence in their region from AD 800.

Using plasma chemistry, carbon was extracted from charcoal paint samples collected from megalithic monuments in north-west Iberia. Nine accelerator mass spectrometric radiocarbon dates on these paints establish their age to be within 1000 14C years of each other, centred at approximately 5000 BP. These radiocarbon ages for megalithic paintings fall within the proposed time period for north-west Iberian megalithic culture. Multiple layers of paint on some stones show that more than one painting episode occurred.

In recent years much emphasis has been placed upon the effects of literacy in the transformation of the Mediterranean World between 800 and 400 BC. Alphabetic scripts have been seen by many, archaeologists and classicists alike, as one of the key factors that made many of the achievements of Mediterranean, particularly Greek, thought and culture possible. Alphabetic scripts encouraged widespread literacy, and widespread literacy was the necessary condition for what remains distinctive in Ancient Greek culture, namely the development of History, Philosophy and speculative Natural Science. Murray (1980: 96) is typical in his view that ‘Archaic Greece was a literate society in the modern sense.’ The work of Goody & Watt (1963) has done much to advance the view that many of the achievements of Mediterranean Society can be ascribed to, if not entirely explained by, this ‘technology of the intellect’. Their ‘autonomous model’ however, as Cartledge (1978: 37) has observed, comes dangerously close to technological determinism.

Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) maps landscape with particular reference to its historic character and development. Executed using sources including satellite imagery and aerial photography and presented in a Geographic Information System (GIS), this offers a powerful insight into a landscape story. Here two leading advocates of the approach apply HLC for the first time to historic landscapes in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Cape York peninsula, in tropical Queensland, shows distinct regional pattern in its recent rock art. And there is regional pattern also in the exchange networks of ethnohistorical times. Do these patterns bear a relationship?

Owing to a thick blanket of loess and other later geological disruptions, the earliest hominins to reach Europe are hard to find. To a handful of possible sites, our authors add a new assemblage of lithics with a clear local context and corroborated OSL ages. Ancient humans were present in what is now Romania between 300 000 and 400 000 years ago.

The subject of this article, ‘Rattus rattus’ (Linnaeus, 1758), or the black rat, has, in Mr Rackham's estimation, considerable archaeological importance, especially in view of recent discussions on plague and the end of Roman Britain, and subsequent plagues of the Anglo-Saxon period. We learn that some recent finds suggest a Roman date for the introduction of the black rat into Britain. Mr Rackham is a Senior Research Assistant in the Biological Laboratory, Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, with a research interest in late Pleistocene vertebrate fauna. Current work in the Department involves the environmental analysis, particularly zoological, of archaeological sites of all periods in the northern five counties of England.

A petroglyph showing a human face found in East Timor is dated to the late Pleistocene. It recalls ancient Australian forms and raises the possibility of connecting early cave art with the better known painted figures of Lapita/Austronesian art ten millennia later. This new discovery at a known cave shows what precious evidence still lies in store even in well-trodden places.

Excavation at the site of Picareiro Cave in Portugal provides an important and rare sample of animal remains. Preliminary study shows that late Pleistocene hunter–gatherers hunted rabbits, deer and a wide variety of fauna, perhaps during seasonal occupation of the cave.

Nick Humphrey, of King’s College, Cambridge, in a recent broadcast on Human Evolution, made the following comments (slightly paraphrased from my notes of the radio broadcast): ‘Man, in comparison to the chimp is a forgetful ape. Chimps in experiments have a remarkable visual memory, recalling for example 25 complex patterns. Some humans can do the same, but rarely, and often where there is a brain malfunction as with epilepsy or damage to the parietal lobes. In effect it is characteristically pathological. Why was this facility suppressed? In order to replace this means of storing knowledge with a new way of thought. Not one of counting objects or observations as particular, but instead ordering such data into general models of things and situations, as with the Platonic Ideal forms. This was the birth of symbolic thought.’

An excavated sequence from Burkina Faso shows that the Asian jungle fowl Gallus gallus, also known as the chicken, had made its way into West Africa by the mid first millennium AD. Using high precision recovery from a well-stratified site, the author shows how the increasing use of chickens could be chronicled and distinguished from indigenous fowl by both bones and eggshell. Their arrival was highly significant, bringing much more than an additional source of food: it put a sacrificial creature, essential for numerous social and economic transactions, in reach of everyone.