For want of other secure evidence, the study of art in prehistoric societies normally amounts to looking at pictures, though there must have also been sound, and surely music. The long lithic tradition of central northern Australia permits a rare insight into another kind of prehistoric art, the meaning and aesthetic order that may lie behind a lithic industry.

Surface features that possess no useful stratigraphy and are not, by their own nature, informative about their age, are notoriously hard to date. A study of associations now defines with good confidence the dates of the surface arrangements of stones and of cleared areas that make up some of the celebrated Nazca lines, Peru.

In Classical times, the Indian continent was central to a trading network that ran west to the Mediterranean world revolving round Rome: despite its name, the Mediterranean was not the centre of the known world. Another world opened eastwards from India, and there are many obscure references to its eastern fringes, Now a series of finds from Bali, in the Indonesian archipelago, gives the elusive direct connection of Indian traders to that farther East.

When did a human presence reach Crete, largest of the Aegean islands, and invitingly joined to the mainland by intervening stepping-stones? Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, or only in the Neolithic, when the deep sequence of occupations under the site of the later palace at Knossos began. How many sailed to Crete? What did they bring with them?

Pecked figures – seeming to depict humans, animals, objects and ‘abstract’ shapes - are an important and recalcitrant aspect to the archaeology of the desert USA, in the Great Basin and the Southwest. Where they are covered by desert varnish, they provide an opportunity for an absolute dating by cation-ratio method. Here - as they did not for a similar study in South Australia reported in an earlier Antiquity - the cation-ratio dates do seem to run alongside the chronological pattern inferred by conventional means.

The Avebury region has been given World Heritage status for its complex of Neolithic sites - Avebury itself, Silbury Hill, the West and East Kennet long barrows, and others. New fieldwork reveals a further complex of sites on the edges of the Kennet valley bottom.

A new look at the old collections from Jebel Moya, the site in the southern Sudan excavated by the Wellcome expedition early in the century, sets Jebel Moya in the light of modern understanding of the Nile and Sahara sequences.

Late in the 16th century, a man fell into the glacier crossing a high Alpine pass between Switzerland and Italy. The ice has released him these last years.

We reported last year on the course of TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) and its annual conferences over several years. This further report reads the meaning of the post-modernist agenda which dominated the most recent TAG conference.

The sling, a feared weapon in early antiquity, in time lost its force to the cutting weapons, especially the cutting weapons of the horseman, and to the shot arrow. The sling itself perishes, and the sling-shot may not be an easy object to recognize in the excavation trench. Evidence for the sling – that is, the sling-shot – in the Aegean Bronze Age is here reviewed.

Since the beginning, studies of Indo-European have seen it as a large phenomenon necessarily having a large, usually single cause. Yet apparent pattern can arise from chance causes that need have no great historical order. In a minimalist view, set out here as a theoretical hypothesis, the pattern of Indo-European can simply arise from a kind of social Brownian motion, in which a large pattern invents itself out of countless little perturbations between adjacent language communities

For a century, pictures painted and carved on to rock surfaces have been a vital and alluring strand of prehistoric evidence. Yet their dating remains a fundamental problem. The last few years have seen an interest in direct dating of rock-art, both painted and engraved, using the small-sample capabilities of the accelerator radiocarbon technique. Here. issue is taken with the security of one of the new methods, the cation-ratio technique for dating engraved figures in arid regions where a ‘desert varnish’ forms - a method whose results have already been published in Antiquity in 1988 and again in the present issue (pages 246–55 above).

Another contribution to discovering the history and origin of words for ‘prehistory’ comes from Sweden, a critical land for 19th-century archaeological ideas.

Two material points are taken up in the matter of megalithic movement.

John Morrison reported in Antiquity (61: 455–9; 62: 713–14) on the sea-trials of his reconstructed trieres (trireme) Olympias, tests which explored the capacities in the water of this most feared of ancient fighting craft. Here he looks critically at two ancient Greek measurements, the units of length to which the trieres was built, and the units of distance over which she sailed.

Whatever the journalist’s definition of eastern Europe might be (cf. S. Milisauskas in ANTIQUITY 64: 283], let us state, as introduction to this Special Section, that Czechoslovakia (FIGURE 1) is a country in Central, not Eastern, Europe. It is somewhat controversial to speak about its ‘return to Europe’, as some politicians would have it, as it has been there all the time. After the period of limited contacts of Czechoslovak archaeologists with their colleagues ‘in the West’ it is felt that now, in the changed (post-November-1989) situation, information on the current state of research, and especially on the approaches applied recently to the study of Czech and Slovak archaeological material (and perhaps on Czechoslovakia's geographical position as well?) may be of use for an interested English-speaking reader. The following – rather random – selection of articles is the result.

Introduction

The well-known fact that the sources of evidence concerning the pre-Neolithic period are seriously incomplete has not yet been analysed sufficiently, being concealed by the intensive interaction of very complex and variable factors. It is obvious, though, that even an imperfect attempt to quantify this problem could contribute to an explanation of the causes for the striking differences between the volume of archaeological source material from adjacent territories, or show the limits of attempts at a historical interpretation of the interrelationships between pre-Neolithic cultures. Unlike the post-Mesolithic period, the sources of the pre-Neolithic foraging societies suffer from reduced field visibility:

1 first of all, they are not usually indicated by colour contrasts in the feature fillings;

2 as a rule, they are reduced only to residues made of the most resistant materials;

3 because of the mobility of small hunter-gatherer groups, only limited accumulations of finds occur in temporary camps, both in extent and in volume, easily escaping attention;

4 Palaeolithic finds lie deeper under the present-day surface and are discovered less frequently than the remains of later periods;

5 the Palaeolithic record was, over tens of thousands of years – this partly under the extreme Pleistocene conditions – subjected to destruction more frequently than the post-Palaeolithic romains;

6 the intensity of the sedimentary and denu-datory processes differs regionally, and in other ways.

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.

In most periods of European prehistory population was organized into local segments which can be called communities irrespective of what meaning is ascribed to this concept. The reality of prehistoric communities is best born out by the discontinuous distribution of both cemeteries and habitation sites in the country. The fact that the archaeological records seem to suggest spatial continuity in some regions is mostly due to our inability to classify the finds in accordance with a sufficiently fine chronological scheme. In cases where fine chronology can be applied – and Bohemia is one of the possible examples – it becomes clear that the seeming spatial continuity of the record is a consequence of our projecting many discontinuous patterns into one plane – the landsc ipe of today as archaeologists perceive it.