Leather, hide and fur were probably the preferred material for all kinds of equipment (tents, bags, pots and drinking vessels) and clothing in prehistory. It is therefore remarkable that our knowledge of this material is so restricted, and its survival even in suitable circumstances very limited. Palynological data and experimental methods attempt to explain this phenomenon.

A deposit of dismembered and cooked human remains from Ana Manuku in the Cook Islands, Polynesia, provides evidence for ritual practices c. AD 1390–1470.

Issue is taken with the arguments offered by Neeley & Barton to explain interassemblage variability in the Epipalaeolithic. The techno-typological attributes they discuss do, indeed, mark cultural/temporal traditions and there are no grounds for viewing them as representing stages within a reduction sequence.

In the early Middle Ages there was a short period when prehistoric burial mounds were reused and new barrows constructed over much of western Europe. This is interpreted as an expression of opposition to the new Christian ideology, in a time of social changes in the distribution of power and property.

Professor Paolo Graziosi is Professor of Anthropology in the University of Florence, and also Director of the Istituto di Paletnologia in that University. He here describes new discoveries of rock paintings which he saw in Ethiopia in 1961, and relates these discoveries and earlier ones from that country to prehistoric European and African art in general. In order to allow space to illustrate this article as fully as possible, it is being published in two parts. The rock art of the Adi Caieh and Karora regions will be described in the September number of ANTIQUITY, together with Professor Graxiosi’s discussion of Ethiopian rock art as a whole.

The authors present and interpret rock drawings found in caves in the Lenggong Valley, Perak, Malaysia. The drawings, which begin by depicting ritually important patterned mats, and continue with images of cars, bicycles and figures with their hands on their hips, provide rare and precious insights into how the indigenous people of the area came to terms with changes that occurred as the result of the arrival of Europeans in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Sir John Beazley (1885-1970), founder of the modern and archaeological study of Classical vases, was a master of method. Is the Beazley method just that, a well-judged method fitting to the material under study? Or does that considered method in truth amount to a considered theory, held and used by a consciously most untheoretical archaeologist?

Modern research in the Caucasus involving both obsidian artefact characterisation and sourcing enhances our knowledge of the early exploitation and exchange of this raw material (Le Bourdonnec et al. 2012; Montoya et al. 2013; Chatainger & Gratuze 2014; Doronicheva & Shackley 2014; Frahm et al. 2014; Pleurdeau et al. 2016).

In the eighteenth to nineteenth century West Africa was the scene of the infamous Atlantic trade in ivory and slaves. The authors' researches show a different situation in the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, when the people of Ghana were engaged in the indigenous procurement, manufacture and trade in ivory with neighbours across the Sahara

The Magdalenian stage of the Upper Palaeolithic is renowned for its ‘art’, both in the form of portable objects and of motifs and depictions on cave walls. Many of these portray animals, with human imagery playing a relatively minor role. Systematic analysis of human images from three separate zones of south-western France demonstrates that different styles of image were chosen by different communities. The evocative power of the human form, and the conceptual importance of the human image as a depiction of the self, highlights the significance of these Magdalenian representations. Particular attention is drawn to the realistic styles of portrayal employed in some parts of the region. This, it is argued, betokens the arrival of the individual, and the regional styles illustrate the presence of separate Magdalenian territories, occupied by communities that were in contact with one another but that chose different approaches to the human form as expressions of group identity.

Round and rectangular buildings with grain silos at a Copper Age site in Israel suggested social stratification to the excavators. Using micromorphology, the author demonstrates that while the rectangular building was occupied by people, the round ones had contained animals, perhaps as providers of milk, and dung for fuel. While this removes the direct indication of social variance, it strengthens the argument that animals, as well as grain, formed the basis for the creation of surplus.

Rings and buttons and beads cut from the marine shell, Spondylus gaederopus, are among the most distinctive exchange items of Neolithic Europe. From sources on the coast of the Mediterranean, these highly valued objects were widely distributed across central Europe. A re-examination of the nature and contexts of shell objects and manufacturing waste at Dimini, a key late Neolithic site on the coast of northern Greece, explores their social role within a Spondylus-working community.

Later in this number of ANTIQUITY is a review, page 930, of our knowledge, direct and often indirect, about chariots and wagons in the Europe of 2000 years ago. How much greater is our knowledge in China, where sacrificial burials of vehicles with their horses and drivers may give evidence of chariots by the fleet!