Undertaking a comprehensive review of radiocarbon dates for the 12 000 years preceding the Neolithic in Britain, the author defines two periods when human remains become hard to find. One of these (already noted by Chamberlain) lies between 7-6000 BP; the other, a new addition, runs from 13 850 to 11 000 BP. What could have caused these ‘hiatuses’? Comparison of dated human remains and dated activities associated with humans, with the climatic record from ice cores, shows that the most likely explanation was a change in burial practice, even if this was itself one of a chain of behavioural changes initiated by the rise in sea level.

The authors present a new, two-stage model of the spread of farming along the eastern Adriatic coast based on the first appearance of pottery. The initial stage was a very rapid dispersal, perhaps by ‘leapfrog colonisation’, associated with cave sites in southern Dalmatia. The second stage was a slower agropastoral expansion associated with cave and open-air sites along the northern coast. Migration was a significant factor in the process. The mountainous hinterland formed an agricultural frontier zone, where farming was adopted piecemeal by indigenous groups.

Ancient Egyptians are thought to have been the only people in the Old World who were practising mummification in the Bronze Age (c. 2200-700 BC). But now a remarkable series of finds from a remote Scottish island indicates that Ancient Britons were performing similar, if less elaborate, practices of bodily preservation. Evidence of mummification is usually limited to a narrow range of arid or frozen environments which are conducive to soft tissue preservation. Mike Parker Pearson and his team show that a combination of microstructural, contextual and AMS 14C analysis of bone allows the identification of mummification in more temperate and wetter climates where soft tissues and fabrics do not normally survive. Skeletons from Cladh Hallan on South Uist, Western Isles, Scotland were buried several hundred years after death, and the skeletons provide evidence of post mortem manipulation of body parts. Perhaps these practices were widespread in mainland Britain during the Bronze Age.

The khirigsuurs are large and complex ritual sites that are major features in the landscape of Bronze Age Mongolia and represent considerable investment. The authors present recently investigated examples of this important class of monument, describe their attributes and offer preliminary deductions of the kind of society they imply – and whether it was truly nomadic.

The cities of Greece had their own calendars, so how did they all know when the god Apollo had returned from the northern realms and it was time to consult the oracle at Delphi? The authors show that the heliacal rising of the constellation Delphinus probably provided the annual marker, and that because of the mountains it appeared to rise a month later at Delphi than elsewhere, giving would-be visitors time to travel. The landscape of Delphi was itself instrumental in creating or enhancing the cosmology of Apollo.

Comparing the source of a commodity with the social levels of the people amongst whom it is found can reveal important aspects of social structure. This case study of a Maya community, using archaeological and ethnographic data, shows that pine and pine charcoal was procured at a distance and distributed unevenly in settlements. The researchers deduce that this commodity was not freely available in the market place, but was subject to political control.

How do prehistoric settlement patterns relate to competition for resources? The distribution of fortified and open sites provides one indication, but using an example from Fiji, the author shows that land holding recorded in historic times may also provide a fossil of earlier competition. Comparing the land parcels and the fortified sites with the ecological zones showed that it was the richer – but less reliable – lower parts of the Sigatoka valley that were most fought over, leaving a patchwork of small defended claims, while the upper areas supported larger, co-operative land units.

Exploring the archaeological correlates of Islam in Bahrain, the author finds that ‘Islamic identity’ is no singular condition: communities are diverse, exhibiting a culture that is rich, multicultural and complex.

The social use of granaries in the medieval hinterland of Islamic Murcia is illuminated through ethnographic studies in modern Morocco.

A study of warfare in late medieval Merv, pivotal city on the silk route.

In this exercise in early modern Islamic archaeology, the authors make an intriguing link between pearl fishing and the wind-towers which provided air-conditioning to the luxury apartments of the successful merchants.

Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), which has recently come into use for airborne environmental monitoring, is now beginning to find success in archaeological survey. Liaison between the Environment Agency and English Heritage has led to a lidar survey of the Stonehenge landscape, where new sites have been discovered, known ones extended and its potential as an important new tool for the management of archaeological landscapes is discussed for the first time. Lidar has the potential to radically transform our future understanding and management of the historic environment. The article by Devereux et al. (pages 648-660 of this volume) shows the technique applied to woodland.

The development of lidar opens a new era in archaeological survey. Working with Forest Research, staff of the Unit for Landscape Modelling here explain the technique, and demonstrate its application to woodland, showing how it can be used to see through the trees. The article by Bewley et al. (pages 636-647 of this volume) shows the technique applied to the Stonehenge landscape.

The authors describe rock art dating research in Australia using the oxalate method. While the array of dates obtained (which range from c. 1200 to c. 25 000 BP) show a satisfactory correlation with other archaeological data, there are mismatches which suggest that some motifs were often imitated by later artists, and/or that the mineral accretions continued to form periodically, perhaps continuously, as a regional phenomenon over a long period of time.

The author argues that Colin Renfrew’s farming language dispersal hypothesis for the spread of the Indo-European languages is unverifiable, and rests on dubious theoretical and methodological assumptions. Archaeology is better at recognising institutions than language, and present knowledge defines the Bronze Age, rather than the early Neolithic, as the formative period for the development and spread of so-called of Proto- and Early Indo-European institutions.

Kristian Kristiansen, cogent critic though he may be, commits a category error of a depressingly familiar kind. It is a confusion which has led distinguished scholars such as Dumézil into error, and which, by allowing the conflation of such categories as language, ethnicity, race and institution, worked to the detriment of many groups and nations during the twentieth century, and now, no doubt, also in the twenty-first.

Nowhere does he define precisely what he imagines the term ‘Indo-European’ to mean. Following the perspective agreed by most historical linguists I take it to be a linguistic term, pertaining therefore to languages, members of the language family first recognised by Sir William Jones in 1786, and then further analysed and defined by subsequent generations of linguists. Through examination of the phonology, the morphology and the lexicon, all of which are well-defined and well-understood, it can readily be decided and demonstrated whether a specific language belongs to this family or not. So that when Hittite emerged in the early twentieth century from the archives of Hattusa, and later when documents in Tocharian were discovered and deciphered, the place of both those languages within that family could readily be agreed. Such a methodology is clearly not applicable to social institutions: it only works with words.

In his response, Colin Renfrew retreats to a formalistic argument – Indo-European can only mean a language family. It has nothing to do whatsoever with institutions or religion. This statement simply writes off a whole academic discourse of Indo-European studies. Consequently Renfrew does not accept an argument that links the spread of an institution to a concomitant spread of its language or its terminology. In opposition to this I consider Indo-European languages to have a history linked to social and economic processes of change that we still know too little about. However, it implies a relationship between them, as Colin Renfrew cogently argues in his book (Renfrew 1987: chapter 6). Institutions which appear to have their origin in the Proto-Indo-European period, and which are still preserved – like language diversified – in later Indo-European religious mythology or sagas, are consequently termed Indo-European in this specific research context, as they share a common history. Often they also share a common terminology that can be demonstrated to have a Proto-Indo-European origin. In that they are interlinked in one way or another with language. It is therefore a worthy research task to consider if processes of language spread and the spread of institutions are interlinked, given that their terminology share a common origin.

From this follows that we must either abolish the term Indo-European completely, or accept that it embodies a number of social and religious traditions and institutions whose history cannot be totally separated from that of language, as their meaning is expressed in a specific Indo-European terminology. The danger of political misuse does not originate from research into this relationship; it originates from simplistic theoretical and methodological conflations of such categories with racist and chauvinistic historical constructions. The relationship between language and DNA, which Colin Renfrew has propagated, is no less subject to such manipulation. The only weapon against this is a developed theoretical and methodological strategy.