Since her death almost 30 years ago, researchers interested in the life and work of one of the greatest prehistorians of her generation have searched, largely in vain, for material additional to Dorothy Garrod's published work. It seems they need search no longer.

Publication of a new volume on the beginnings of Old World farming (Harris 1996) has provided a compendium of current views on this critical inflection-point in human inhabitance of the world. Was it driven by climatic change, as Gordon Childe suggested? And what of the earlier emergence of modern human behaviour: were these two chapters in the same story?

The editor of ANTIQUITY remembers travelling, as a child, on the main A1 highway to see relatives in southeast England, watching the banks of sharp-nosed Bloodhound missiles ranged close by the road – pointing east, to meet incoming Soviet bombers. The obsolete monuments of the Cold War, and before that of the Second World War, are history now, famously the Berlin Wall (Baker 1993 in ANTIQUITY). Many, like the concrete runways of the airfields, are so solidly built they are not lightly removed. These remains of England's 20th-century defence heritage are not well understood. However, and contrary to popular belief, they do have a large documentation; and it is this, the authors argue, that should form the basis for systematic review.

Grinding-stones as a technology are seen as a key element in the artefactual transformations of the latest Pleistocene – both for themselves and the foods which were ground on them. In Australia, as in other regions, their age and status is also material to what (if any) kind of a broad-spectrum revolution in foraging accompanied them.

‘Hair-rings’, like other artefact categories of the European Bronze Age, are distinctive in form, and distinctively placed in space and in time. But we have not easily come to know just what they were for, or in what other ways we can discern meaning in and from them. Although modest in appearance, it does appear that ‘hair rings’ were significant objects that possibly indicate social ranking but also trading activities.

Further work inside the Grotte Cosquer, the Palaeolithic painted cave near Marseilles only accessible by a deep-water dive, improves our knowledge and makes it clear there can be no artificial entrance made to create a dry-land access.

The human capacity for recognizing categorical forms and their defining characterstics extends to a recognition of natural forms and shapes that may suggest these categories. The issue is raised below by the analysis of an archaic figure from the Levant in which a natural form was apparently intentionally modified to produce an enhanced human image.

A generation ago, enquiries into the astronomical and mathematical knowledge of the standing stone-erectors of prehistoric Britain dealt largely with statistical patterns. Since then, the great passage grave at Newgrange, eastern Ireland, has proved to be engineered to address the midwinter sunrise. It is time once more to look at another great chamber tomb, Maeshowe in northernmost Scotland, with these concerns in mind.

CC intro: The genesis of urnfield cemeteries and of Late Bronze Age culture change is often related to an economic and environmental crisis. In the Lower Rhine Basin, changes in burial rites, settlement structure and hoarding practices show a transformation of ideology, consistent with the dissolution of a society into smaller, more autonomous social units.

What is the role of women in processes leading towards a more sedentary way of life? Pottery plays an important role as a functional factor and in symbolic expressions. With sedentism hearth-centred activities organized around females grew, and the position of the woman as the nurturer. Some of this symbolism, expressed on a multitude of ritual occasions, may be retrievable archaeologically.

In South Africa, as in so many regions, the world of dirt archaeology in shelter floors and of rock art on shelter walls, have also been rather separate as domains of study. In research at Rose Cottage Cave, bridges are being made to link both strands of evidence of the forager social strategies from which both derive.

The 1950s, era of the first radiocarbon revolution, saw famous clashes between confidence in the old chronologies and the new results from radiocarbon, which sometimes appeared ‘archaeologically unacceptable’. The same issues continue in respect of the radiocarbon dating of rock art, where the sheer technical difficulty of securing a dating number in which one can have confidence, remains a large real obstacle.

The Ronaldsway Culture of the Isle of Man was recognized as a classic later Neolithic assemblage over 50 years ago; its dating and duration have been matters of debate. AMS radiocarbon determinations from carbonaceous deposits on Ronaldsway-style pots resolve chronological questions, while new research provides a more secure social context.

What were the fine garments vividly painted in the Minoan frescoes made of? Fine cotton (cotton from Egypt is still prized today)? Or the yet finer fabric of silk? And if silk, where did the stuff, or knowledge of cultivating the silk-worms, come from? A cocoon from Santorini offers new evidence.

Minute biological traces, with their prospect of recovering even ancient DNA, are the most attractive of archaeological materials to work with. This supplementary report on field studies of rock-art first published in ANTIQUITY further explores how these studies may in truth be carried out.

Trevisker pottery is a common Bronze Age type in Cornwall and the southwest of England. It is often well-made and with a distinct petrology. It was, however, traded in prehistory with some petrologically similar vessels being found in Brittany and northern France. Recently, a Cornish-style vessel made from Cornish clays has been located in eastern Kent, almost 500 km from its source.

The history of field manuring is poorly known. Domestic waste may have been used for this purpose from the Early Neolithic onwards. It is possible that the practice of collecting animal dung began with the introduction of the ard.

As Rosenfeld & Smith report in this number of ANTIQUITY, the reconciliation of conventional chronologies for rock-art with the emergent radiocarbon-based dates is not proving an easy affair. Here are the first steps for the classic area of San hunter-gatherer art, on the South Africa/Lesotho border.

A rock-shelter near the north Argentinian coast offers an archaeological sequence of hunter-gatherer occupation running intermittently from Palaeo-Indian times to the era of European contact.