Current models for the origin of writing do not pay sufficient attention to the origin and early development of means adopted by modern humans to record, transmit and process information outside the human body. The present article attempts to fill this gap by elaborating a theoretical model able to classify and describe the variability of these systems. The model is applied to the study of the engraved antler from La Marche, one of the better-known Palaeolithic objects to have been interpreted as an early system of notation. Technical analysis of the marks, through application of a range of experimental criteria, suggests that the sets of marks carved on this object should be interpreted as an artificial memory system with a complex code based on the morphology and the spatial distribution of the engraved marks. These results have important implications for current theories on the origin of writing.

This article seeks to gain an understanding of distinctive changes in certain artefacts produced in Corinth in the late eighth and seventh centuries BC. The focus is the development of figurative imagery on miniature ceramic vessels (many of them perfume jars) which travelled from Corinth particularly to sanctuaries and cemeteries in the wider Greek world. Connections, conceptual and material, are traced through the manufacture and iconography of some 2000 pots, through changing lifestyles, with juxtapositions of contemporary poetry from other parts of the Greek world. Aspects of embodiment are foregrounded in a discussion of stylization and drawing, the character of monstrosity (appearing in ceramic decoration), experiences of risk in battle, discipline and control. Techniques of the self (leading through the floral to wider lifestyles) also feature in this context, together with perfume, and the consumption or deposition of the pots in circumstances of contact with death and divinity. The argument is made that the articulation of an ideological field lay at the core of the changes of the early city states such as Corinth. The article is offered as a contribution to a contextual and interpretive archaeology. It attempts to develop concepts for dealing with power relations in an understanding of material culture production which foregrounds human agency and embodied experience.

The evolution of human manipulative abilities may be clearly linked to the evolution of speech motor control Both creativity and complexity in vocal and manipulative gestures may be closely linked to a single dimension of brain evolution — the evolution of absolute brain size. Inferring the linguistic capabilities of earlier hominids from their lithic artefacts, however, required us to take account of domain-specific constraints on manipulative skill In this article we report on a pilot flint-knapping experiment designed to identify such constraints ‘in action’.

There are few aspects of human behaviour more fundamental than our ability to use language. Language plays a key role in the study of any living human society, and of all historical communities which have left us written records. In theory it could also throw enormous light on the development and relationships of prehistoric human communities. But here there is a huge and obvious problem: what evidence can there be for human languages in the pre-literate, prehistoric age? In other words, what hope is therefor a prehistory of linguistics? There is no easy answer, yet it is hard to accept that any account of human prehistory can be considered adequate without some knowledge of prehistoric languages and linguistic relationships, if only at the broadest scale.

The list of questions we might wish to pose stretches back to the period of the very earliest hominids. When did our human ancestors first begin to talk to each other? Was language acquisition sudden or gradual? Did human language arise in one place, and then spread and diversify from- that point? Or did it emerge independently, among separate groups of early humans in different parts of the world?

Leading on from this is the study of ethnicity and ethnogenesis. Since the end of the nineteenth century one of the biggest problems facing prehistoric archaeologists has been the identification and interpretation of archaeological cultures and cultural groups. Do these have any social or ethnic reality? Is it right to speak of a Beaker ‘folk’? Was the Bandkeramik colonization the work of one people or of many? These questions would be so much easier to resolve if only we could trace the prehistory of languages, and could establish, for instance, whether all Bandkeramik and Beaker users spoke the same or a related language.

Such possibilities may seem exciting and hopeful to some, irredeemably optimistic to others. Whatever view we take, they clearly merit serious discussion. In the present Viewpoint, our third in the series, we have asked five writers — two archaeologists (Renfrew & Bellwood), three linguists (Bynon, Ruhlen & Dolgopolsky) — to give their own, personal response to the key question ‘Is there a prehistory of linguistics?’ Can we, from the evidence of archaeology, linguistics (and now DNA studies), say anything positive about langtiage in prehistory?