Large area excavation at Cuddie Springs has revealed that the Pleistocene sediments have remained undisturbed. This eliminates the possibility that stone artefacts found in association with megafauna may have been introduced by disturbance from higher levels and indicates an overlap of megafauna with humans of at least 10,000 years.

The earliest finds of copper objects in the Vinča group were made as early as the first half of this century, during the excavation of the eponymous site of Vinča-Belo Brdo, near Belgrade. Amongst other objects, a small group of oval beads was found at a depth of 6-6m, in a habitation level representing the beginning of the Vinča-Plocnik, or late, phase of this group (Vasić 1936, 43).

The cosmology of the Etruscans, like so much else Etruscan, hovers on the edge of historical visibility. By exploring Etruscan temple alignments measured in situ and with the helpful context of the Disciplina Etrusca, factors are found that might affect temple orientation, and connections with the Greek and Roman record are explored.

Beehives were discovered in a densley built area in the Iron Age city of Reḥov (tenth-ninth century BC). They consisted of hollow clay cylinders, each with a little hole at one end (for the bee) and a removable lid at the other (for the bee keeper). These beehives, the earliest found in the Near East, were identified by analogy with examples pictured on Egyptian tombs and in use by traditional peoples. The suggested identification was confirmed by chemical analysis.

Enclosed prehistoric spaces can have fine echoes. The Hypogeum, celebrated underground ossuary of Neolithic Malta, is the most resonant place to chant a rhythmic ‘Oum’. Are the acoustic features of structures like the megalithic chambers of northern Europe integral to their design? An expert description of their acoustic properties is the point to start.

Cave paintings and first-hand ethnographic accounts from living peoples have led to the notion that southern African spiritual experts routinely mediated with the other world through energetic dances leading to the trance state. The evidence for this idea has been challenged in recent years, and the importance of the trance dance diminished accordingly. The authors confront these criticisms and place the shamanistic dance back on centre stage—with important consequences not only for the study of San peoples, but for wider prehistoric interpretations.

Since the beginning, studies of Indo-European have seen it as a large phenomenon necessarily having a large, usually single cause. Yet apparent pattern can arise from chance causes that need have no great historical order. In a minimalist view, set out here as a theoretical hypothesis, the pattern of Indo-European can simply arise from a kind of social Brownian motion, in which a large pattern invents itself out of countless little perturbations between adjacent language communities

How do prehistoric settlement patterns relate to competition for resources? The distribution of fortified and open sites provides one indication, but using an example from Fiji, the author shows that land holding recorded in historic times may also provide a fossil of earlier competition. Comparing the land parcels and the fortified sites with the ecological zones showed that it was the richer – but less reliable – lower parts of the Sigatoka valley that were most fought over, leaving a patchwork of small defended claims, while the upper areas supported larger, co-operative land units.

The authors report the discovery of a cemetery of richly furnished graves in the western desert of south Egypt. Artefacts, burial rites and radiocarbon dates relate the cemetery to pastoralists practising transhumance in the later Neolithic period. The first such cemetery to be investigated, its cultural affiliations offer a pre-echo of what would become the Egyptian civilisation.

The author makes the case for cultural change during the period traditionally assigned to the Middle Palaeolithic in China (140–30 kya), challenging an earlier proposal (Antiquity 2002) that the period saw little change and the term should be abandoned.

The obscure and ugly language of theoretical archaeology conceals as well as reveals fundamentals that no real practice of archaeology can actually escape. In this paper, revised from a plenary address at the TAG conference at Bradford last year, one of the cannier of the old hands puts some of those fundamentals into proper place.

Following the development of pollen analysis in the earlier part of this century, much effort was devoted to unravelling the sequence of vegetational change during and after the retreat of the last European ice-sheets. The outlines established, questions of causation came to the fore, and the debate focused on factors such as climatic change, rate of species migration from glacial refuges, and natural vegetational succession. In more recent decades, a further factor has been widely investigated, namely the possible influence of humans on the landscape, principally as farmers and smiths. The development and modification of hypotheses is well illustrated by the Elm Decline of the Atlantic period, where climate (Iversen, 1941) or man (Troels-Smith, 1960) and occasionally disease (see refs in Simmons & Tooley, 1981, 134) have been held responsible for a widespread but by no means straightforward decline in elm pollen.

Eisele et al. in ANTIQUITY (1995) reported discouraging results from experiments to see if blood traces reliably survive on stone tools. Here, issue is taken with aspects of that study, and new research is reported from the celebrated buffalo-jump at Head-Smashed-In, southern Alberta. The great bone-bed there, consisting almost exclusively of bison bones, gives rare opportunity to study remains of a known single species under the genuine conditions of an archaeological site, rather than a supposing simulation.