We include here books which have been received for review, or books of importance (not received for review) of which we have recently been informed. We welcome information about books, particularly in languages other than English, of interest to readers of ANTIQUITY.

The graphic rock-paintings of southern Africa, with their lively and colourful scenes, have long been one of the glories of the continent's archaeology. The last years have seen them become intellectually quite as graphic, as fragments of San ethnography and ethnohistory have been found to provide a commentary that allows aspects of their symbolism and meaning to be explored. This paper goes beyond, to see what can be iluminated without benefit of commentary.

Theory in archaelogy has largely been an anglophone enterprise, and perhaps too inbred for its own good. The main French school, known particularly from the work of Alain Gallay and Jean-Claude Gardin, was well represented at a CNRS—NSF conference on ‘Symbolic, structural and semiotic approaches in archaeology’, held at Indiana University, Bloomington (IN) in October 1987, where a small group of American, British, French and Swiss archaeologists met to confront their theoretical views. Here Alain Gallay sets out the fundamentals of the ‘logicist’ position.

Clearly the pattern of space in buildings can be expected to relate to the way that buildings are used to structure and reproduce social relations. As an archaeologist, wishing to infer social structure by its reflection in the building pattern, one may hope the relation may be reasonably direct. Here the formal geometrical method of access analysis is used to elucidate the pattern in a distinctive kind of prehistoric settlement form, and thence to elucidate the social structure which both produced it and was structured by it.

Two generations ago, Sir Mortimer Wheeler made himself the master of public relations in archaeology. He found some of the funds for digging Maiden Castle from opening the site to the visitors, who were able to buy souvenirs for a few pennies. After a period when the public have seemed a nuisance on-site, the fashion has come back — with added urgency in Britain where the pipeline of funding from public sources no longer flows so easily and where responding to some apparent public demand is becoming a new essential.

Flag Fen, in the wetland of eastern England, is being seen as a model of the new approach. It is conspicuous in the pages of Visitors welcome, the new English Heritage guide for excavators, which is reviewed warmly from across the Atlantic elsewhere in this issue. Here the Wheeler of the Fens explains what he is doing there and way.

This report of a tradition of Copper-Age stone sculpture from the Caucasus introduces a wider discussion of the place of stone sculpture in the artistic traditions of early Asiatic civilizations. It underlines once more the special place of evidence from the Soviet Union, the northern periphery of the regions of early states.

‘Pete Marsh’, the bog body from Lindow Moss in Cheshire that is properly called ‘Lindow 2’, has given remarkable research opportunities. One of these-perhaps less expected-has been the study of the considerable discrepancies in the suites of dates for the body obtained by two radiocarbon laboratories. The laboratories think this is a specific anomaly which has no implications for any other dates, but one may wonder how many other anomalies would declare themselves if more sites had so many determinations that should relate to the same event.

Handsome four-wheeled wagons — finely crafted and decorated — are among the more remarkable large artefacts of later prehistoric Europe. Their find-contexts and condition certainly do not suggest everyday use or heavy wear. But when and how were they used? What did they stand for?

Australia and the Americas provide the two case-studies of the late human settlement of a continent by, it seems, Homo sapiens sapiens. At one time the corollaries of first occupation of the Americas, at perhaps 12,000 b.p., were a similarly late settlement of Australia and the need for a land-bridge across the Bering Straits. But now the pattern of occupation in New Guinea and its offshore islands proves that a long sea-crossing was made there before about 40,000 b.p. Here an Australian researcher looks across the Pacific to the evidence that has been offered for a Pleistocene occupation in south America, of a date comparable with that in Sahul.

The classification of man-made features recorded on aerial photographs depends on a combination of morphological comparison and functional interpretation. Here, a computer-based method of morphological recording and classification is described, and its advantages argued. It has special relevance in England, where the Monument Protection Programme needs to assess the relative value and importance of many thousands of buried archaeological sites that are known only from the evidence of aerial photography.

The Canary Isles, scattered in the Atlantic off the Sahara coastline of southern Morocco, have a remarkable archaeological heritage. Initial settlement, for which mummified bodies from caves are important evidence, relates to the Berbers of the Maghreb, and the islands' distinctive culture was not overwhelmed until the European impact of the 15th century AD. Explanation is given of the special value of Canarian archaeology, and of the efforts now being made more properly to protect it.

The British Isles, at the northern fringes of human occupation in Pleistocene Europe, offer a collection of Upper Palaeolithic sites which cannot match the riches of the continental mainland. And many of its sites, studied in the 19th century, have been much quarried or even quarried out. New finds from Gough's Cave — one of the classic sites that was almost emptied in the work that made it classic-show, nevertheless, that important new discoveries are still being made from such deposits as remain.

Notice was taken in ANTIQUITY last year of the Australian bicentennial, and in particular of the remarkable ‘art of the First Fleet’, the ethnographic record provided by the watercolour artists of the contact years around Botany Bay. This note, held over into the bicentennial-plus-one year, finds further insight by tying closer together the painter's record, the ethnographic collections, and the archaeological record.

Megaw & Megaw, in the December 1988 ANTIQUITY, published a new study of the carved stone head from Mšecké Žehrovice. Here the excavator of the site adds new information about the archaeology of this remarkable find-spot.

New publications addressing the age-old question of the match between Egyptian, Aegean and European chronologies in later prehistory are reviewed by an egyptologist and a prehistorian.

Human origins research has had a long history of vigorous debate. Recent discussion has been no exception, the more so perhaps as the strands of evidence — anthropological, archaeological, and now molecular-biological — are sufficiently diverse that not many can be well placed to deal fairly with them all. Here issue is taken with Foley's cladistic view of human evolution, and with the ‘Garden of Eden’ hypothesis of a single source in Africa for modern human populations.

Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza's ‘wave of advance’ model figured in the Indo-European Special Section in the September ANTIQUITY. One of its architects here comments on how his model was presented there, and makes some wider proposals.

How, given a collection of absolute dates from individual structures on a settlement site, is one to work out how many might have been occupied at any one time?