Personal ornaments are a notable feature of the Early Upper Palaeolithic in Europe and an important expression of modern human identity. The tubular bone rod from Pod Hradem Cave in the Czech Republic is the first example of its kind from Central Europe. Laboratory examination reveals the techniques used in its manufacture and underlines the skill of its maker. AMS dates and Bayesian modelling suggest a cultural association with the Early Aurignacian period. It illustrates the cultural links across large areas of Europe at this time, although it is unique in its specific combination of size, raw material and decorative features.

Sander Van Der Leeuw, in his recent plenary address at the 1998 Society for American Archaeology Meetings, suggested that archaeology as a discipline has moved its emphasis from site to settlement pattern, and now to the landscape. Though a landscape focus is not new, especially for the social sciences (Coones 1994; Cosgrove 1984; Glacken 1967; Jackson 1994}, the landscape approach in archaeology (Wagstaff 1987) is still in its infancy.

The authenticity of the prehistoric paintings of the caves of Altamira has now been fully recognized for about thirty years, and with the many similar discoveries which have been made in France and Spain an entirely new light has been thrown on the mentality of prehistoric men. We must henceforth acknowledge that they possessed artistic tastes and a well developed aesthetic sense. No longer may we think of them as savages, solely concerned with the most material needs of daily life, but rather as men endowed with well-developed intellect and capable of considering things over and above the mere material side of the struggle for existence.

The discovery of skeletons, obviously buried with care, and surrounded with tools and ornaments, had already proved to us that respect was paid to the dead, and that there was a belief in an after-life. But with the discovery of works of art a fresh avenue of knowledge was opened up before us.

The wetter tropical zones of northern Australia are linked by their monsoonal climates. Their archaeology shows its own distinctive pattern as well, and rock-art is an important source of evidence and insight. This study focusses on a part of Queensland, setting this local sequence alongside Arnhem Land (reported by the paper of Taçon & Brockwell) and in the northern pattern as a whole.

The brochs, great stone towers of Iron Age Scotland, are famously puzzling. Who inhabited these strongholds (if habitations they were)? New fieldwork at the broch of Dun Vulan, on South Uist in the Western Isles, prompts reappraisal of the geographical and social context of the brochs, by developing untapped sources of social evidence.

The Szeletian represents the most original – and I would not hesitate to say the most aboriginal – Upper Palaeolithic culture in Central Europe. In fact, it is the only European Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) complex the local development of which is so evident that the attribution of some of its archaic inventories to the Middle or Upper Palaeolithic has often been a controversial issue. This is exactly the reason why the Szeletian is so interesting in current discussions about the origin of the Upper Palaeolithic civilization in Europe.

Stable isotope analysis is a new, not-so-secret weapon which promises much in mapping population movement on a regional and local scale. Lining up these movements with certain economic strategies, such as farming or foraging, with social strategies such as exogamy or with ethnicity and ranking constitutes forgivable temptation. Here our astute authors urge caution. Taking the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in south-west Germany as their example, they show that caution does not inhibit interpretation, but opens the door to more subtle, more human possibilities.

High altitude snowfields provide repositories of well-preserved organic remains of considerable antiquity, as spectacular discoveries such as the Similaun Iceman illustrate. In Scandinavia, melting snow patches have been systematically surveyed by volunteer groups for almost a century, and a growing collection of archaeological artefacts has been recovered. Only recently, however, has AMS dating confirmed that some of the finds go back as far as the Neolithic. Here fragments of five Neolithic arrowshafts and a Neolithic longbow discovered in 2010–11 in the Oppdal area of Norway are described. They throw light on Neolithic bow and arrow technology and tangentially on the hunting techniques which may have attracted hunters to these snow patches in search of game. The progressive and accelerated melting of the snow patches in recent years draws attention to processes of climate change and the urgency of discovering and recovering these fragile perishable artefacts.

In a recent paper a theory was put forward to account for the end of Mohenjo-daro and of other, smaller, Indus Civilization cities in Sind and along the Mekran Coast.

Excavations at the Camel Site, in the Negev, provide evidence of desert cottage industries making (and probably trading) beads and millstones in the Early Bronze Age. But these were people for whom nomadism was the ‘default lifestyle’.

Writing about the ‘Tophet’, a children's cemetery in Carthage, Smith et al. argued in these pages that the age distribution of the children peaks at 1–1.49 months, supplying “another link in the chain of evidence—funerary practices, texts, iconography—that supports the interpretation of the Phoenician Tophets as ritual sites set aside for infant sacrifice” (2011: 871). In this they had challenged Jeffrey Schwartz and colleagues, who previously argued (2010) that “skeletal remains from Punic Carthage do not support systematic sacrifice of infants”. Here Schwartz et al. restate their position for Antiquity readers, showing that the verdict on the Phoenician practice of child sacrifice is, at best, not proven.

The megalithic chamber tombs that are the most striking monuments of the Irish Neolithic have long been divided by the shape of their plans. With the shapes there goes a characteristic pattern of distribution and of spacing in the landscape, and from this arise some puzzling questions of sequence as to how ‘cemeteries’ grew up. A fresh view is taken of this old problem

In this study of the Murray River basin in south-eastern Australia, the author shows that Aboriginal burials are persistently attracted to specific kinds of landscape feature intermittently over long periods of time. Some attributes of burial, like body position, vary from site to site and over much shorter periods; others, like orientation, are even more local, relating only to a specific group of graves. Burial rites are thus sets of variables which may be independent of each other and change at different rates. Far from reflecting cultural arrivals and departures, in south-eastern Australia burial grounds were never formally founded and continually abandoned.

Next year will mark the twentieth birthday of the ‘New Archaeology’, whose founding texts – Binford & Binford's New perspectives in archaeology in the USA and Clarke's Analytical archaeologyin Britain – both appeared in 1968. Nearly two decades on, some fundamentals are not yet resolved, which may indicate – as Lester Embree argued in the last number of ANTIQUITY – that archaeology is a harder science than most.