While the caves round Oban, on the west coast of Scotland, are famous for their Mesolithic artefacts, they have also produced Bronze Age finds and numerous burials. Radiocarbon dates on human bones from one cave show these to be Iron Age, suggesting the Obanian assemblages are composites accumulated over millennia.

A place named Wot-a-emi has been associated by the Andaman Islanders with the origins of their ancestors. How does this myth square with archaeological findings?

Stone-built installations known as ‘leopard traps’ are found throughout the deserts of the Middle East. They have generally been considered to be recent in date, and to have been built by Bedouin or other local communities to trap carnivores that threatened their flocks. But how much older might they be? Survey in the hyper-arid ‘Uvda Valley of the southern Negev Desert in Israel discovered 23 ‘leopard traps’, 19 of them clustered in a relatively small area. This study describes the architecture and function of these structures and presents the first optically stimulated luminescence ages for two of them. These results demonstrate that the traps are ancient and were already in use before the late fourth millennium BC, not long after the adoption of herding by the desert dwellers.

Since Dorothy Garrod’s pioneering work at the Mousterian site of Hazar Merd on the western slopes of the Zagros Mountains in 1928, a number of Middle Palaeolithic sites in the area have been discovered, sampled and, in some cases, partially excavated. Some of these sites are located in the Kermanshah Plain, Central Western Zagros Mountains. These sites include the Hunter’s Cave and Gha-e Khar in Bisotun (Coon 1951: Young & Smith 1966), Kobeh and Warwasi in Tang-e Kenesht (Braidwood 1960), and two sites near Harsin (Smith 1986). All but the last two are among a large number of Palaeolithic localities on the south face of a series of calcareous mountain ranges (Kuh-e Parau/ Bisotun massif) on the northeastern rim of Qara Su basin in the Kermanshah Plain (FIGURE 1).

Following a hiatus in archaeological research after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, an independent series of surveys in the area by the authors led to the discovery of three Mousterian sites at Bisotun in 1986 (Biglari in press). During recent years, we located two more Mousterian sites, including Do-Ashkaft, the subject of this note.

Human origins research has had a long history of vigorous debate. Recent discussion has been no exception, the more so perhaps as the strands of evidence — anthropological, archaeological, and now molecular-biological — are sufficiently diverse that not many can be well placed to deal fairly with them all. Here issue is taken with Foley's cladistic view of human evolution, and with the ‘Garden of Eden’ hypothesis of a single source in Africa for modern human populations.

The author revisits the celebrated cemetery of the Bronze Age Kerma culture by the third cataract of the Nile and re-examines its monumental tumuli. The presence of daggers and drinking vessels in secondary burials are associated with skeletal remains that can be attributed to fighting men, encouraging their interpretation as members of a warrior elite. Here, on the southern periphery of the Bronze Age world, is an echo of the aggressive aristocracy of Bronze Age Europe.

Ruth & Vincent Megaw questioned the motivation behind the current critique of the use of the term ‘Celtic’ for the La Tène Iron Age in ANTIQUITY (1996: 175–81). They explained it is a nationalist reaction derived from insecurity about modern English identity. Here we have a reply to their paper, which rejects these interpretations.

When I wrote a short history of archaeological and other air-photography in 1928 the earliest examples quoted were those taken by Major Elsdale between 1880 and 1887 ; this information was given me by the late Colonel Sir Charles Arden-Close, himself a pioneer of the craft. Since then two earlier instances have come to light. The Science Museum, South Kensington, has exhibited an air-photograph of Boston, Mass., taken in 1877 ; but unfortunately it has no history. In a book published in 1930 there is reproduced a photograph taken above Paris from a captive balloon, taken by that photographic genius who called himself Nadar. Through the good offices of Professor Vaufrey, editor of L’AnthropoZogie, prints were obtained from the Service Photographique des Monuments Historiques, and two combined are here reproduced on PLATE III. They look towards the Arc de Triomphe, and have on the left the Avenue du Bois de Bouiogne (Avenue Foch) and on the right that of Victor Hugo : note that these splendid thoroughfares, then only a decade old, were still only half built-up (the left hand part of the photograph is defective). Photography itself was not much older, Fox Talbot’s first efforts having been made from 1842 onwards.

Ceremonial architecture over 4600 years old has been discovered at the open air site of Asana in the high sierra of southern Peru – the best part of a thousand years earlier than in the central Andean sierra and with different architectural detail, form and content. This discovery provides new insights into a new regional architectural tradition and an alternative trajectory for the evolution of settled village life in the Andean highlands

This note reports the initial results of a joint multidisciplinary project between the University of Sheffield and the Musée d'Art et d'Archéologie in Antananarivo, which has concentrated on the investigation of the social and economic significance of the tombs that are an outstanding landscape feature in an area of southern Madagascar.

Archaeology in education has been introduced in South Africa only recently as the politics of the past precluded the application of archaeology in the classroom. This paper presents the background to South African education and educational archaeology and discusses some of the issues and studies undertaken in South Africa. It also offers comment on the factors which determine and shape educational archaeology of the present and those that may affect the discipline of archaeology in the future.

Here is a paper of pivotal importance to all prehistorians attempting to reconstruct societies from assemblages of shells or stone artefacts in dispersed sites deposited over tens of thousands of years. The authors demonstrate the perilous connections between the distribution and content of sites, their geomorphic formation process and the models used to analyse them. In particular they warn against extrapolating the enticing evidence from Pleistocene Willandra into behavioural patterns by drawing on the models presented by nineteenth-century anthropologists. They propose new strategies at once more revealing and more ethical.

The volcanic Javaketi Range (Lesser Caucasus, Georgia) has recently aroused the interest of both geologists and archaeologists on account of its rich environmental and geological history, the prehistoric exploitation of its raw materials and the discovery of archaeological sites ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Historical Ages (Gogadze 1980; Kikodze 1983). In 2012 and 2014, two systematic surveys were conducted on Mount Chikiani (Koyundağ) with the aim of defining the areas from which obsidian was obtained during different prehistoric periods, and to characterise its sources (Biagi & Gratuze 2016). A longer season of archaeological prospection was carried out in 2016. Among the many important finds was the discovery of a large number of obsidian mining pits along the northern and north-eastern lower slopes of the volcano (Figure 1), as well as several obsidian workshops. During the 2016 season, research focused on the 2417m-high trachyrhyolitic dome—a source of high-quality obsidian—emerging from the plain around 300m north-east of Lake Paravani.

An inaugural lecture is often the occasion to stand back from the specifics and the technicalities, to see the place of our subject in a larger order of things, and to look forward to its proper future. This is what Martin Carver, the second Professor of Archaeology in the University of York, looked at and saw in his inaugural last year.