The author attributes the claimed migrations of the Irish into Argyll to a set of élite origin myths, finding no support in archaeological evidence. He goes on to ask how the Iron Age populations of Argyll established and changed their personal and group identity.

A GIS intra-site application for the taphonomic interpretation of the Developed Oldowan site of Garba IV (Melka Kunture, Ethiopia) allowed the automatic data processing of more than 12,000 lithic artefacts and faunal remains lying on a 100-sq. m excavated palaeosurface dating to about 1,500,000 years ago.

The Fenland Research Committee, founded in 1932, guided research in the low wetlands north of Cambridge in east England. Its work marked a turning-point in the developing prehistory of Sir Grahame Clark, a change so profound it is here called a ‘new archaeology’. A leading approach now as ‘ecological archaeology’, it is here shown to have its conception in certain goals, definitions, concepts, and assumptions — and in the field circumstances which promoted a then-new approach to prehistoric materials.

The early farming culture of Southern Turkmenistan, widely known since the work of R. Pumpelly at Anau, has been systematically studied during the last decade by Soviet archaeologists. Excavation of the major settlement of this culture, Namazga Tepe, has made it possible to propose a new stratigraphy (Namazga periods I-VI). The Namazga III period fills the gap between Anau II and Anau III, and has its closest analogies on Iranian sites such as Sialk III, 4-7, and Hissar IB to IIA; it is now possible to revise the synchronization of sites in Turkmenia and Iran proposed by McCown. (See table on p. 212).

The authors explore the use of land in Neolithic south Italy, showing how the new territories combined arable farming with hunting and foraging wild resources from the hinterland.

A thematic or a period discipline?

Industrial archaeology has generally been defined as a thematic discipline, concerned with only one aspect of man’s past activity. Although the term ‘archaeology of industry’ was used in the 19th century, it was Michael Rix who used the phrase ‘industrial archaeology’ in print for the first time (Rix 1955). He later defined industrial archaeology as ‘recording, preserving in selected cases and interpreting the sites and structures of early industrial activity, particularly the monuments of the Industrial Revolution’ (Rix 1967: 5). The emphasis on the term ‘industrial monument’ followed a need to define an industrial class of Ancient Monument so that some examples would be scheduled. Industrial archaeology, then, grew from the need to record and preserve standing structures threatened with demolition rather than an inherent desire to understand more about the historical period of the monuments. It was perhaps felt that understanding of the industrial revolution period was more readily arrived at by other means, particularly written historical evidence. During the ‘rescue’ years of the 1960s and 1970s, archaeology was one of the two areas of fastest university expansion and very popular in extra-mural teaching. But none of the archaeology departments took up industrial archaeology, although many of the extra-mural departments did; it is largely as a part-time, amateur interest that industrial archaeology has flourished ever since. The author’s post as an industrial archaeologist in the Leicester archaeology department is one of the first occasions on which the specialism has been given a place in full-time undergraduate archaeology courses.

The first major season of field operations at this major Lowland Maya site, located on the eastern edge of the Classic Maya core area, has revealed a great deal of information about the layout of the site and also demonstrated that its history was a long one.

The authors show that the Jomon clay figurines made by hunter-gatherers use imagery that emphasises a narrow waist and full hips, showing that a female construct was part of the symbolism of these possibly shamanistic objects. In creating these figurines, prehistoric people were no doubt turning a recognition of health and fertility into more cultural icons. Admirers of the female form will be interested to learn that preference for the fuller, curvaceous ‘hourglass’ shape ‘has probably been the norm over much of human evolution’.

CC intro: The genesis of urnfield cemeteries and of Late Bronze Age culture change is often related to an economic and environmental crisis. In the Lower Rhine Basin, changes in burial rites, settlement structure and hoarding practices show a transformation of ideology, consistent with the dissolution of a society into smaller, more autonomous social units.

A new look at one of the more famous puzzles in prehistoric art, and the derivation of a scene at Lascaux from shamanistic practice.

A suite of radiocarbon dates for a regional group of the earlier Bronze Age in Hungary provides a valuable underpinning to the absolute chronology of a key region and period.

The classification of man-made features recorded on aerial photographs depends on a combination of morphological comparison and functional interpretation. Here, a computer-based method of morphological recording and classification is described, and its advantages argued. It has special relevance in England, where the Monument Protection Programme needs to assess the relative value and importance of many thousands of buried archaeological sites that are known only from the evidence of aerial photography.

The subdivision of the Chinese Palaeolithic is a controversial topic. A recent article in Antiquity (Yee 2012) critiqued Gao’s two-stage model that distinguished only an Early and a Late Palaeolithic. Yee argued that the two-stage model should be abandoned, and that a distinct Middle Palaeolithic phase can be identified. Responding to Yee, Feng Li argues that there is no solid evidence of distinctive and widespread technological changes before the Late Palaeolithic, and that it is hence premature to abandon Gao’s two-stage model at present.

The basic importance of food in the daily lives both of individuals and of communities, and the all-pervading influence upon outlook and social structure exercised by the methods adopted to ensure its adequate supply have become more and more widely recognized among students of ancient society during recent years (1). Rather less attention has yet been paid to water (2), that other necessity of life, bound up so intimately with the distribution and density of human settlement, and linked at the same time with man’s exploitation of his physical environment. Yet water-supply merits the closest attention, not only of those who approach prehistory from a functionalist point of view, but of all those whose studies are in the last resort based on archaeological material. In the first place, the connexion between human settlement and sources of water offers a cardinal clue to the location of ancient sites; in the second, the dampness of wells and springs has made for conditions favourable to the preservation of objects, organic as well as inorganic, which in the course of time have found their way into their recesses; and in the third, the veneration in which sources have been held has fostered from time immemorial the deposition in their waters of offerings as welcome to the archaeologist as to the spirits themselves.