The discovery of Palaeolithic wall paintings and engravings in a cave whose entrance lies below the present sea-level near Marseilles has created considerable interest – and no little controversy. The paper describes and analyses the remarkable find, with special attention to its authenticity.

During the Pleistocene there were large variations in sea-level under the influence of glaciations and inter-glacial warm episodes. During the Late Wurm glaciation in the Upper Palaeolithic the sea-level dropped to 110–120 m below its present level (Lumley 1976: 311). At that time the Lerins islands, the Hyeres islands and the Frioul archipelago and the islet of Planier off Marseilles were linked with the coast, and much of the Golfe du Lion was occupied by a vast plain.

Olympias and all other trireme reconstructions have been based on a misinterpretation of the Greek terminology, according to the author, a dedicated student of ancient ship design and former naval officer.

Kerma is an ancient city on the Nile in Middle Nubia, long known and the subject of renewed recent exploration. Its position, at the southern limit of Egyptian control, sets it strategically on the routes to the African interior. Its environment in the arid desert results in remarkable preservation of organic remains.

Meroë, capital of Ethiopian kings up to the first centuries AD, is an extraordinary culture. Its inscriptions are in its own Meroitic script or in Egyptian or sometimes in Greek – a reminder of its links through Egypt to the larger Mediterranean world nearly 2000 kilometres to the north. And what about the end of Meroeë Did it collapse to barbarians? Or did it take its own course?

The conventional chronology of the Aegean Late Bronze Age was challenged by P.J. James and his co-workers in Centuries of darkness (1991). The present paper is an exhaustive and critical re-examination of radiocarbon dates from a number of key sites in the region using the technique of probabilistic computer archaeological wiggle matching which concludes that the conventional arhcaeological chronology still holds good (whatever the flaws in its original construction) on the basis of the independent radiocarbon evidence.

The quantity and quality of material from the late Mesolithic/early Neolithic in southern Scandinavia has dominated the study of this important period in northwest Europe. Recent evidence from the west of Scotland suggests that, despite a rich and varied resource base similar in many ways to that in southern Scandinavia, a very different process of change occurs. The evidence suggests a very gradual transformation, with selected parts of the farming socio-economy being being adopted at varying rates. This situation is compared with that in various parts of Europe and is considered to fit in well with a pattern of great regional diversity in the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic.

Studies of prehistoric extractive and fabrication techniques suggest that the traditional view, that the earliest copper metallurgy in the British Isles was based on the exploitation of primary minerals deriving from the southwest of Ireland, is fallacious. Elaborate mineral selection and process control is not needed to produce copper of the composition reported for the Early Bronze Age, and so ore deposits in Britain were probably being exploited from a very early period.

Excavation of a Neolithic settlement of the Altheim culture and analysis of the finds demonstrated that its inhabitants made optimal use of raw materials available in the immediate vicinity and supplemented these with selected material from distances usually not more than 40 km away. Some contact with Switzerland and Austria is also indicated. Survey of other sites in the area indicate that there was dense occupation of the river flood plain, possibly linked with upland settlements.

A distinctive type of stone tool, from midden sites on the eastern Queensland coast of Australia, is identified from ethnographic accounts of the preparation of fern roots as food.