Dactylopius coccus has been used in Mexico and Peru as a source of natural dyes since pre-Columbian times. A phylogenetic analysis of the genus Dactylopius, and the disjoint distribution of D. coccus, suggest that the origin of D. coccus is South America and was introduced into North America by sea routes.

Important new insights about long-term changes in human behaviour are gained when cultural landscapes rather than focal points or ‘sites’ are studied. The abundance of obsidian artefacts preserved on easily recognized, well-defined and short-lived ground surfaces makes Garua Island an excellent setting for monitoring the changing patterns of human behaviour through time and within cultural landscapes. The results raise questions about traditional interpretations of settlement and land use in Near Oceania, particularly during the time of Lapita pottery.

A multi-disciplinary study of settlement in north-east Greenland found that life in this High Arctic zone was actually favoured by the climate brought in by the Little Ice Age (fifteenth–nineteenth century). Extensive ice cover meant high mobility, and the rare polynyas — small patches of permanently open coastal water — provided destinations, like oases, where huge numbers of migrating marine mammals and birds congregated. One such place was Walrus Island on Sirius Water, a veritable processing plant for walrus, where every spring Thule people stocked up meat supplies that would get the rest of the region through the winter. It was a further drop in the temperature in the mid nineteenth century that led to the region being abandoned.

Alfred Russel Wallace visited southern Celebes in 18567. Captivated by its unique natural history, particularly its colourful butterflies, he concentrated upon collecting in the rugged limestone mountains around Bantimurung waterfall, east of Maros. Observing that the high, precipitous, cliffs were heavily vegetated, Wallace (1890, 181) wrote words of archaeological allurement—‘their surfaces are very irregular, broken into holes and fissures, with ledges overhanging the mouths of gloomy caverns’. He also made an incidental comment (1890, 165) of relevance a century later to Australian archaeologists, when he noted that his Makassarese servant had voyaged to the north Australian coast on several occasions to collect trepang (bêche-de-mer).

The author shows how pollen and oribatid mites recovered from the small lake of Marcacocha provide a detailed proxy record of agro-pastoralism over the last 4200 years in the central Andes. The introduction of highland maize and weeding practices 2700 years ago corresponds with major settlement development, as well as evidence for large herds of llamas not only facilitating trade but supplying abundant fertilizer and fuel in the form of excrement. Prolonged droughts and pre-Colombian epidemics probably influenced many of the social changes observed.

A fragment of equid tibia found with a Mousterian assemblage in a rockshelter in the Crimean peninsula is carefully examined. The authors show that it has been knapped like flint to produce a tool probably at a time when stone resources were becoming exhausted. This tool is thus the product of a Neanderthal response to a local need as well as proof that the technological properties of bone were known.

The World Heritage Site of Wanar in Senegal features 21 stone circles, remarkable not least because they were erected in the twelfth and thirteenth century AD, when Islam ruled the Indian Ocean and Europe was in its Middle Ages. The state of preservation has benefited the exemplary investigation currently carried out by a French-Senegalese team, which we are pleased to report here. The site began as a burial ground to which monumental stones were added, perhaps echoing the form of original funerary houses. Found in a neighbouring field were scoops left from the cutting out of the cylindrical monoliths from surface rock. While the origins of Wanar lie in a period of state formation, the monuments are shown to have had a long ritual use. The investigation not only provides a new context for one of the most important sites in West Africa but the precise determination of the sequence and techniques used at Wanar offers key pointers for the understanding of megalithic structures everywhere.

A new series of radiocarbon measurements on three sewn-plank boats from North Ferriby, Yorkshire, has provided consistent new dating for these craft, which suggests that the appearance of such boats may fall in the early Bronze Age.

The excavation at Platia Magoula Zarkou, a prehistoric settlement in Thessaly, 30 km west of Larisa, was undertaken to clarify the problem of the exact chronological and stratigraphic position of the black burnished pottery, characteristic of the Larisa culture, which has hitherto been accepted as dating to the end of the Late Neolithic. The author became involved with this problem when he found black pottery together with grey pottery of the Tsangli phase, of the beginning of the Late Neolithic, at the neolithic cremation cemetery of Platia Magoula Zarkou (Gallis, 1982, 109-11 ; English summary, 234). The problem of the exact stratigraphic position of this black ware has now been solved. The dating of the Larisa culture to the beginning of the Late Neolithic (to the Tsangli phase) has now been confirmed by this excavation, as well as another similar excavation at the prehistoric settlement of Makrychori 2, 13km north of Larisa. A report of the results of these two excavations is forthcoming in Praehistorische Zeitschrift.

The recent general accounts of Miss Kathleen Kenyon's brilliant series of campaigns at Tell es-Sultan, the mound in Jordan generally conceded to be that of ancient Jericho, will be well known to readers of Antiquity (cf. especially Wheeler, no. 119, 132–6; Kenyon, no. 120, 184—95). Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Miss Kenyon interpret the prehistoric archaeological assemblages of the two basal phases of Tell es-Sultan as evidence of civization (Miss Kenyon's italics), and the surprisingly early radiocarbon dates for the upper portion of the second basal phase of the site are accepted at face value. Miss Kenyon, in fact, believes (Ill. London News, no. 6,123 [13 October, 19561, 612) that Tell es-Sultan was already a ‘town’ at a date ‘which must approach the 8th millennium’ B.C.

The authors use their revised chronology for the Mariupol-type cemeteries (presented in Antiquity 76: 356-63 (2002)) to offer a new sequence for Neolithic settlement and economy in Ukraine. They find that the transition to the Neolithic began about 6500 cal BC, but co-existed with Mesolithic communities for a further millennium. In about 4500 cal BC early copper age cultures appeared, which in turn coexisted with the Neolithic in neighbouring areas. Co-existent cultures are defined in terms of their artefacts, subsistence strategies, burial practice and physical types. The Mariupol-type cemeteries seem to have had their origins in the late Mesolithic and endured into the Copper Age, a period of more than two thousand years (c. 6500–4000 cal BC).

The 1950s, era of the first radiocarbon revolution, saw famous clashes between confidence in the old chronologies and the new results from radiocarbon, which sometimes appeared ‘archaeologically unacceptable’. The same issues continue in respect of the radiocarbon dating of rock art, where the sheer technical difficulty of securing a dating number in which one can have confidence, remains a large real obstacle.

As well as being modes of supplying metal, cross-shaped copper ingots in Zimbabwe are shown to be emblems of currency and status. The author dates them to the first half of the second millennium AD and connects the appearance of ingots to increased social stratification.

T.J. Dunbabin's book The western Greeks was published 50 years ago. In it he modelled the development of the Greek cities of Italy on the British Empire of the 1930s. Here Franco De Angelis explores the problem of faulty and distorting analogies.

A growing quantity of data about the late Pleistocene sequence in Tasmania has not been matched by an equivalent clear understanding of just what are the patterns of its lithic record. A new model is developed.

A handful of finds of camel bones from Iberia now illuminate the faint story of camels in Roman and Muslim Europe–and hint at why the dromedary never became established as a domesticate in the peninsula.