Archaeology encompasses the study of human artefacts, and the largest of those artefacts is the landscape–at least in those many countries where human settlement is old and enduring in its impact. The landscape is also the domain of natural history. Yet human history and natural history are often treated as if they inhabited separate lands, and are addressed in different terms. Here is the point of their union, through a questioning of recent approaches to archaeology.

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.

Crannogs, artificial island settlements built of stone and timber in lakes, are a feature of Scotland and Ireland from later prehistoric times to the medieval period. They have been absent from England and Wales until the recognition that is reported here of the Llangorse site–known and puzzling for a century–as a first Welsh crannog, and a special one.

What is one to do with megaliths, now that their classification into evolutionary sequences – the mainstay of megalithic study over so many years – seems to offer insufficient insights? Yet in some regions of Europe the great stone monuments provide the major physical evidence from their period. Here is a study of one of the megalithic zones, which seeks to find new insights by asking new kinds of questions.

The discovery of the Qin dynasty terracotta army at Mount Li near Xianyang has provided an interesting insight into the equipment of 3rd-century BC Chinese soldiers, and also opens up a number of issues of interest to students of armour from other regions and periods in the ancient world, particularly concerning the use of evidence.

Where London was in the Roman and later medieval periods is clear enough: largely in the walled city, now under the modern financial district that is the City of London. But what of the period between? New evidence is assessed on this longstanding problem.

What is the connection between storage and sedentism in hunter-gatherer societies? What is the pattern of ethnography? What other patterns show themselves in Late Palaeolithic Eurasia, in those late hunter-gatherer adaptations that are precursors of Holocene food production? And is material storage a necessary and a sufficient condition for hunter-gatherer sedentism?

The oxygen-isotope curve, derived from the record of organisms stratified in the deep ocean ooze, has replaced the old pattern of four glaciations with a more complex record of cool and warm events. Since people live by their local sea-level, rather than an abstract world average, that global pattern is itself mediated by other geological forces, on several scales, before it directs the possibilities of human settlement. Here the effect of those forces is unravelled and illustrated.

Mr Wrigley (Reader Emeritus in History, University of Sussex) presents himself as a witness to British prehistory ‘from without’, because he is a ‘historian ofsorts’ rather than archaeologist. Surprised to see prehistorians turning to ethnography and contemporary social theory, more than the history of intervening centuries, he offers here a different perspective.

The identification, partial excavation, and covering-up again of the Rose Theatre in London this summer roused public interest unparalleled since the discovery of the Temple of Mithras 35 years ago. How is it that the future of an archaeological site of such importance has still to be resolved under threat in a flurry of direct action, injunctions, and media attention? Martin Biddle was almost the only archaeologist not directly involved who was prepared publicly to explore the issues in the press and on radio and television. Here he sets out his views of the lessons of the Rose.

The old importance of the eastern coastal region of the Mediterranean for the later Palaeolithic has been recently reinforced by remarkably early TL dates for modern hominids there. This important series of dates for the early Upper Palaeolithic at a Lebanese site adds to the story.

Perhaps more than any other country Israel is a state founded on a consciousness of history. How does this special place for history (especially for early history, where archaeology provides much evidence) influence the purpose and the manner of Israeli archaeology?

Ritual, or apparently ritual, burials of Iron Age date are not uncommon in Britain. However, most of those for which records survive were recovered in less than ideal circumstances or from sites which are not securely dated. This example was recovered in recent excavations of a well-dated site, and from an area of Britain for which evidence of Iron Age burial practices is unusually scanty.

The steppe region, the temperate grassland of the Asian land-mass that runs the thousands of kilometres practically from the coast of the Atlantic to the coast of the Pacific, is one of the great zones of human settlement. It offers archaeology on the large scale, where local adaptations link to a grander picture. Most of the steppe falls in the Soviet Union and is studied by Soviet archaeologists, much of whose work is inaccessible to those many of us who have no Russian.

The steppe is novel in a second way also, for Soviet archaeology has a distinctive flavour in its ideas and how it works with them; there are concerns and terminologies that do not quite correspond with the common concepts of west European scholars.

A set of papers on the human settlement of the steppes, epoch by epoch, is not complete unless it pays attention to the last glaciation, when periglacial steppe adaptations show remarkable cultural development, especially in the famous mammoth-bone houses. The subsistence basis depended - as a coincident paper in this issue (pages 719-32 above) shows – on an unusual and unusually early development of food storage, with all that implied for social evolution.

Pressure of present commitments did not allow the writing of a new single paper on this time-period. Instead, we print here a collected set of five short contributions, by N.D. Praslov and colleanues that indicate well the evidence and the range of Soviet approaches to it. We thank Olga Soffer and George Frison for allowing us to draw on the outlines of papers given at the joint USSR-USA meeting on the Upper Palaeolithic-Palaeolndian held in the USSR in August 1989.

The culture-historical development of Neolithic and Bronze Age communities under Eurasian steppe conditions is indissolubly linked with the establishment and development of early forms of productive economy, and displays a number of distinguishing features, which are the product of both natural and historical factors.

Within the USSR, the steppe extends from the mouth of the Danube to the upper reaches of the Ob and the Altai mountains (Milkov 1977). To the north, the steppes naturally grade in to the forest zone to form a belt of transitional foreststeppe landscape. To the south, the steppe is bounded by the coast of the Black Sea, the foothills of the Caucasus and beginning in the Lower Volga region the semi-deserts and, further south, deserts of Soviet Central Asia.

Several cultural features distinguish the northern Black Sea region from the rest of the Antique world. The region is rare or unique in that it was the scene of direct contact over a long period, not only between communities at different stages or levels of socio-economic development, but between communities of different economic and cultural types: nomadic pastoralists on the one hand and and sedentary plough agriculturalists (both autochthonous and immigrant Greek) on the other.

South Siberia – bordered by Lake Baikal, the Irtysh river, the west Siberian forest-steppe zone, and the basin of the Great Lakes of Mongolia – is broadly coextensive with the foothills of the Sayan and Altai ranges. It occupies a special place in the early medieval history of the Eurasian steppe populations. The ethno-cultural processes which operated here over thousands of years have a significance which goes far beyond South Siberia.