A Society for American Archaeology survey (1997) reports that its membership is overwhelmingly ‘European American’. Although it is no longer true that archaeology in the US is simply man's business rather than woman's, where are the practising archaeologists descended from historically marginalized groups so much of archaeology studies?

Amongst the most striking and the most handsome of ancient Australian relics are the Bradshaw paintings of the Kimberley, in the remote northwest of the continent, uncertainly dated but seemingly most ancient. According to one published view, the Bradshaws are not so much ‘early Aboriginal’ as ‘pre-Aboriginal’. Issue is taken with that notion, in light of European attitudes to Aboriginal accomplishment over the last two centuries.

Is the meaning of prehistoric art beyond recovery — especially the meaning of early art in deep caves, a remote and strange location which itself suggests some out-of-the-ordinary purpose? David Lewis-Williams has been extending his explorations of meaning in later southern African rock-art to the famous enigma of the European Palaeolithic, here in the particulars of a single distinctive motif.

The English Fenland, a million acres of drained wetlands in eastern England, is on the doorstep of Antiquity's present office. But no local excuse is needed to report once more on work in a classic region; from large-scale survey the focus has moved to assessment of what survives, and now to managing for its better future that discouragingly small proportion of its old archaeological wealth which is still with us.

The Emeryville Shellmound is a famous but now destroyed midden once located on the east shore of San Francisco Bay. Analyses of the fish remains from the stratified late Holocene deposits indicate that prehistoric peoples had substantial impacts on the sturgeon populations of the Bay. This calls into question the commonly held belief that native peoples lived in harmony with nature and has important implications for the management of modern vertebrate populations.

For half a century now — ever since radiocarbon dating began — there have been regional reconciliations between relative chronologies and the new absolute dating. Sometimes they have been friendly, some times less so when the two schemes have not matched well. For Inner Asia — centre of the Old World — there is belatedly now the means to resolve some fundamentals.

Two fundamentals for the place of the individual in society are age and gender; well-studied cemeteries can provide an good archaeological base for their study. This examination of the Copper Age site of Tiszapolgár-Basatanya, Hungary, explores the relationship between age and gender though the course of prehistoric lives and how it might be possible to distinguish sex from gender in archaeological contexts.

Even after decades of spearthrower studies, researchers have relatively little reliable data on spearthrower performance, and yet prehistoric lifeways are often reconstructed through consideration of the capabilities of such weapon systems. Experimental study and considered dependence on ethnographic knowledge clarify the realities of the spearthrower in use.

The concept of ‘Celtic’ is fittingly ambiguous, ambivalent and disputed in its archaeological definition: ‘fittingly’ because later prehistoric and Roman iconography in temperate Europe is ambiguous and ambivalent. And ambiguous and ambivalent things are hard to understand unambiguously!

Boxgrove in Sussex has been in the headlines for its human bone (‘the first Englishman’); more to the research point is its superb in-place deposits of debris from handaxe-knapping. This is a timely moment to look once again at the reports of Worthington G. Smith, who a century ago recognized, amongst the scores of sites with river-rolled handaxes, rare deposits of a more informative character.

The role of plants in the subsistence economy of pre-agricultural societies of the eastern Sahara is poorly known because vegetal remains, except for wood charcoal, are seldom found in archaeological sites. Site E-75-6 at Nabta Playa, with rich assemblages of charred seeds and fruits, is exceptional. Around 8000 b.p. the inhabitants of this site collected a wide spectrum of wild food plants. Wild sorghum was of special interest and its occasional cultivation cannot be excluded.

Antiquity last year reported a startlingly old series of dates from Jinmium in tropical north Australia. At Jinmium are old rock-engravings, the pecked cups or cupules that are widespread in Australia. This study of the Jinmium cupules goes beyond that immediate topic to broader issues.

What was the population of imperial Rome? City blocks in Pompeii and Ostia are sufficiently well explored that a fair estimate of population density can now be arrived at. That peoples the city of ancient Rome with roughly 450,000 inhabitants, within the known population and density range of pre-industrial and modern urban centres.

What was burned in lamps in the prehistoric Mediterranean? Olive oil, as one would first suppose? Analysis of absorbed lipids preserved in the fabric of lamps and conical cups from the Minoan site of Mochlos in eastern Crete shows for the first time that beeswax was used as an illuminant.

The Mesolithic — as the ‘time in between’ — raises issues of definition, the more so as chronology is refined and the abruptness of environmental change at the end of the glaciation becomes clearer. This clarification of an unusual regional sequence is an instance.

Grapes appear rather early in temperate Europe: even in the cool north of Sweden, their pips occur in the Neolithic. With grapes go wine, and with wine go the artefacts of wine, amongst them the cauldron on wheels — a grand and an odd artefact type of Bronze Age Europe.

Mediterranean obsidian-provenance studies are changing in direction and focus of modern research, with characterization of the Sardinian sources, application of minimally destructive and inexpensive analytical techniques, analysis of complete or large parts of assemblages, and the integration of provenance data with reduction technology and use-wear traces.

Three aurochs horn cores, unearthed during the construction of the city baths in Vác (Hungary), were purchased from a private collector in 1951. One of these stray finds deserves attention in light of new archaeozoological research, and the relation between mundane horn manufacturing and high-status medieval craft industries.

As has often been the case before, the actual manufacture of a distinctive class of ancient artefact offers valuable insight about the realities of an ancient craft knowledge.