Highly mobile people must have sheltered in structures of some kind; but these are notoriously difficult to find. The author uses nineteenth-century photographs of an occupied Apache settlement to show how such shelters may have been made, comparing them with their archaeological remains in the present day. This suggests a ‘signature’ for the temporary shelters used by mobile groups in any period.

In most periods of European prehistory population was organized into local segments which can be called communities irrespective of what meaning is ascribed to this concept. The reality of prehistoric communities is best born out by the discontinuous distribution of both cemeteries and habitation sites in the country. The fact that the archaeological records seem to suggest spatial continuity in some regions is mostly due to our inability to classify the finds in accordance with a sufficiently fine chronological scheme. In cases where fine chronology can be applied – and Bohemia is one of the possible examples – it becomes clear that the seeming spatial continuity of the record is a consequence of our projecting many discontinuous patterns into one plane – the landsc ipe of today as archaeologists perceive it.

The Greeks and Romans reproached the Phoenicians for the sacrifice of infants, and the excavation of cremated infants at ‘Tophets’ (named after the sacrificial site in Jerusalem mentioned in the Bible) seems to bear this out. However, the argument for infant sacrifice depends largely on a skewed age profile, and age is not easy to determine. The authors approach this problem with a battery of new techniques, showing that in the Tophet of Carthage the majority of the infants died between one and one and a half months. Sacrifice was thus very probable.

The high and low islands of Torres Strait, scattered between the tip of Queensland and the coast of Papua New Guinea, make a unique frontier in later world prehistory: between a continent of hunter-gatherers and the majority world of cultivators. Consideration of just what archaeology there is in the Torres Strait Islands, and of its date, improve on the conventional question: was the Strait a bridge or a barrier?

The significance of zebu, or humped. cattle as potential indicators of episodes of aridification in the Bronze Age of western Asia is explored through study of figurines and faunal remains from Mesopotamia, the Levant and Anatolia.

Research in the Altai region of central Asia is attempting to establish the development and expansion of the Aurignacian to Europe and the Caucasus. New sites and early dates provide important new data on this key question about the emergence of modern humans in Eurasia.

Introduction

Peat has been used as a fuel and as an additive to arable fields to aid fertility since prehistoric times in many parts of northern Europe (e.g. Fenton 1986; Whittle et al. 1986). The cutting of deep peat and the construction of peat stacks as part of the drying process has been documented from Medieval times, but the antiquity of such activities is unknown. Peat stacks are ephemeral structures whose purpose is to aid the drying of hard-won, wet peat in areas where other fuels such as wood and coal are expensive or unobtainable. They are typically cleared within a few months of construction and leave no traces of their former presence. Here we report the unprecedented discovery of a ‘fossil’ pyramidal peat stack dating to the 2nd millennium BC, from the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Individual turves contained finger and thumb impressions and pollen analysis reveals environmental conditions at around the time of cutting. The method of extracting and stacking the peat used some 3500 years ago may be similar to that used today.

The author offers us a first hand account of his extraordinary and unexpected duties during the second Iraq war. This is history, heritage, regulation and perhaps even legislation in the making.

Like the cultures of Neolithic Europe — ‘Glockenbecherkultur’, ‘Trichterbecherkultur’, ‘Linienbandkeramik’ — the ‘Lapita culture’ of the western Pacific is defined by its distinctive ceramics. What that ‘ceramic culture’ amounts to in human terms has been a key question in the region's archaeology — complete with a quest for a Lapita homeland. This fresh review focuses on the pottery, the defining stuff itself of the affair.

Japanese archaeology benefits from the large number of rescue excavations conducted during recent decades that have led to an unparalleled record of archaeological sites. That record is here put to use to interrogate changing settlement patterns in the north-eastern corner of Tokyo Bay during several millennia of the Jomon period (Early, Middle and Late Jomon: 7000–3220 cal BP). Jomon hunter-gatherer occupation is characterised by large numbers of settlements, some of them substantial in size, containing hundreds of individual pit-house residential units. Detailed analysis of the rank-size distribution of these settlements reveals a pattern in which periods of settlement clumping, with few large settlements, alternate with more dispersed settlement patterns on a regular cycle of approximately 600 years. The regularity of this cycle might suggest a correlation with cycles of climatic change, such as Bond events. Closer scrutiny shows, however, that such a correlation is unconvincing and suggests that cyclical change in Jomon settlement patterns may instead be due to other factors.

The editor’s question “who do human skeletons belong to?” (Antiquity 78: 5) can be answered positively, but it must be answered in context. The question was prompted by reports from the Working Group on Human Remains established by the British government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in 2001 to review the current legal status of human remains held in all publicly funded museums and galleries, and to consider and review submissions on the issue of the return of non-UK human remains to their descendent communities (DCMS 2003: 1-8). In effect, the report was primarily concerned with human remains from Indigenous communities, using a definition which follows the UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as “distinct cultural groups having a historical continuity with pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories” (DCMS 2003:7). Consequently, the report deals primarily with the Indigenous communities of Australia, New Zealand and North America.

The Amazon rain-forest we know today is quite a recent phenomenon. New research on climate and vegetation changes from a series of cores in Ecuador provide a chronology for early agriculture and forest clearance from early Holocene times.

A rare and important AMS sample provides an Aurignacian date for Britain. The artefact and its implications are discussed.

Pottery is so ubiquitous among the material we have surviving from later periods that it is easy to think that ancient people occupied a world which was as stuffed with broken sherds as the layers we excavate; and ceramics seem especially important when they are as handsome and archaeologically informative as classical vases. Starting with a single sherd from Populonia, David Gill takes a different view of pottery, and its commercial transport, in the classical Mediterranean.

Eating shellfish in the wrong season makes you ill. But early people of the Andes seem to have courted these effects to gain out-of-body experiences. It may have been these effects, as well as its distinctive colouring and appearance, that made Spondylus such a very special commodity.