Stonehenge is a small site (its central stone setting just 30 m across) standing in an open landscape where archaeological concerns can direct land management. Its twin hengesite in a joint World Heritage designation, a little distance away on the south English chalk, is Avebury. It is a larger site, the great stone circle 350 m across. And the prehistory is embedded in the modern village of Avebury.

Both the state agency English Heritage and the voluntary association the National Trust own parts of each site. English Heritage is taking the management lead at Stonehenge, the National Trust at Avebury. The Trust has announced the creating of a ‘virtual reality’ show in the Great Barn by the village centre.

Knowledge of Avebury archaeology grows: also reported in this issue of ANTIQUITY is a new feature within the great circle first spotted on air photography: pages 639–46.

Kate Fielden, archaeologist and free-lance editor, has taken an active interest in planning at Stonehenge and Avebury since moving to Wiltshire in 1988.

Christopher Gingell, archaeologist, is Property Manager for the National Trust at Avebury.

A further contribution on the issues raised by modern genetics, and on their relationship to the material evidence offered by archaeological remains.

The events to do with peopling the New World archaeologically represented by ‘Clovis’ and ‘Folsom’ have been — tantalizingly — beyond the range of radiocarbon calibration. Now calibration extends further, one can ask if the aburptness of Clovis, of Folsom, and of the transition between them are realities. A calibrated chronology for those sites where the stratigraphic security is best shows these in truth are rapid human affairs.

The later Palaeolithic sites of Moravia, the region of the Czech Republic west of Prague and north of Vienna, continue to provide remarkable new materials. To the art mobilier for which Dolní Věstonice and Pavlov have been celebrated, there has recently been added the technologies of groundstone and ceramics — and now woven materials, interlaced basketry or textiles, again of a kind one expects only from a quite later era.

Long-running discussions about when Europe was first colonized have recently been fuelled by new discoveries from the Iberian peninsula, which reports hominid occupation by 800,000, or even by 1.8 million years ago. The proceedings of the important Tautavel workshop (1993), published as The earliest occupation of Europe (Roebroeks & van Kolfschoten (ed.) 1995), are now central. This new assessment takes forward ANTIQUITY'S notice by Roebroeks & van Kolfschoten of 1994 (68: 489–503).

Allen (1994) and Allen & Holdaway (1995), noticing the pattern in early radiocarbon dates from Australia, have advanced the notion their limit records the human settlement of the continent. A critical analysis of context and content in those carbon determinations leads to a different view. The results may be disconcerting for every region which builds its late Pleistocene chronologies on radiocarbon!

Fontana Nuova di Ragusa, a small rock-shelter in southeast Sicily, was thoroughly excavated by Bernabò Brea in 1949. In the far south of Europe — Sicily is nearly on a latitude with Africa — it has continuing importance as marking a southern geographical limit of Aurignacian settlement, and as proof of humans crossing the strait into island Sicily.

All across the thousands of kilometres of northern central Asia — from the Baltic Sea to the Yellow Sea — burials have been key to the later prehistoric sequence. The immediate subjects of this article are three late Bronze Age burials from North China; rich and well-preserved with weaponry and horse fittings, with agate and rush matting, they tell also of the world outside China, for into one of the daggers is cast the full-face image of a Caucasian male, complete with handlebar moustache.

‘As the glaciation ended, the ice melted and the sea-level rose.’ Yes — but it has not been as simple as that, as the Earth has adjusted in several ways to the changing surface-loads it suffers under ice and under weight of water. The important issues are set out in a simple mathematical treatment, and their varied consequences are shown for Greece and especially for the Greek coastal plains and the Greek islands, where the impact on human settlement has been large.

The later-prehistoric linear ditches that divide the chalk landscape of Wessex, south England, are markers in an area. It is a topographic space. The ditches seem to be placed with a view to their visibility in the landscape. It is a human topographic space. A GIS study of the ditches' place, in terms of what a human sees in moving acros undulating ground, goes beyond that environmental determinism which underlies many GIS studies.

In the rough and rugged country of the Lesotho highlands, rock-paintings and archaeological deposits in the rock-shelters record hunter-gatherer life-ways; at Sehonghong, a long sequence runs from recent times to and through the Last Glacial Maximum. Survey of the region's Middle and Later Stone Age sites shows a pattern of concentrations that likely applies to other parts of the Lesotho highlands.

The hot and dry summer of 1995 once again proved the value and cost-effectiveness of aerial survey. Numerous parchmarks were a product of the dry conditions throughout England, but especially in chalk grassland, and they revealed important new archaeological information. A parchmark within the great Neolithic henge at Avebury identifies a new subterranean feature, confirmed by geophysical survey, which fills in further details of the Avebury enclosure.

The Holocene mud-flats of Formby Point, at the mouth of the Mersey estuary in northwest England, have long provided information about their palaeoenvironment. Now they yield a more direct evidence — in the form of preserved footprints — of the people and animals that frequented the foreshore.

A little bow — at less than half a metre long too small to be a practical tool — comes from the later prehistoric Fenland of east England. Along with the wristguards, fine arrowheads and smoothing stones of the British Bronze Age, it tells of the special meaning of archery in later prehistory — whether in the animal chase or in human combat.

Different models of stone-working technology in the Upper Palaeolithic are tested by examining an assemblage from Haua Fteah, on the Libyan coast of north Africa. Evidence that some scrapers have been reworked into burins, while some burins were modified to form scrapers, show how this typically Upper Palaeolithic industry contains morphological transformations between types. This evidence is consistent with a technological continuity from the Middle Palaeolithic.

Enclosed prehistoric spaces can have fine echoes. The Hypogeum, celebrated underground ossuary of Neolithic Malta, is the most resonant place to chant a rhythmic ‘Oum’. Are the acoustic features of structures like the megalithic chambers of northern Europe integral to their design? An expert description of their acoustic properties is the point to start.

The spy satellites — by repute of the thriller writers — have such good image-resolution that they can read the letters on a vehicle licence-plate. A generation after LANDSAT imagery vividly showed broad ecological zones, higher resolution pictures are now being released of a quality to allow practical archaeological application. The example printed here illustrates the Stonehenge landscape — a little patch of southern England that is among the most photographed archaeologically anywhere.