For temperate Europe, the transition to the Neolithic is still both defined by a shift from a hunter-gatherer to a farming economy and archaeologically recognized by its characteristic artefacts of pottery and polished-stone axes. But what should be the criteria in the far north of Nordic Europe, where the definition of a Neolithic is a less straightforward issue?

The Minusinsk Basin is located where China, Mongolia, Siberia and Kazakhstan meet. Enclosed, but broad, and rich in copper and other minerals, the valley offers missing links between the prehistory of China and that of the greater Russian steppes. In the late Bronze Age the material from Minusinsk was important for the origins of bronze metallurgy in China, and in the Iron Age the area was a focus for the development of that equestrian mobility which was to become the elite way of life for much of the Eurasian steppe for more than a millennium.

We are privileged to publish the following two papers deriving from research at the Institute for the History of Material Culture at Saint Petersburg, which give us the story so far on the archaeology of this remarkable place. In The emergence of the Karasuk culture Sophie Legrand discusses the people who occupied the Minusinsk Basin in the Bronze Age, and in The emergence of the Tagar culture, Nikolai Bokovenko introduces us to their successors, the horsemen and barrow-builders of the first millennium BCE.

Radiocarbon ages for the Côa petroglyphs are very similar to those obtained by Watchman (1995). Fundamental problems in the use of radiocarbon dating at Côa include evidence for the addition of younger carbon in an open system, and evidence of contamination from older sources of carbon. Radiocarbon measurements, therefore, cannot be used to decide whether the engravcings are or are not of Palaeolithic age.

The authors propose a correlation between certain elements of Neolithic material culture — painted pottery and anthropomorphic figurines — and Y-chromosome haplotypes, suggesting a shared history of dispersal of human populations and cultural ideas.

We are grateful for the opportunity to respondto Erickson's (1999) critique of our articles onhuman-environment interactions in the LakeTiticaca basin of Bolivia (Ortloff & Kolata 1993;Abbott et al. 1997; Binford et al. 1997). Hisdecision to publish this critique in ANTIQUITY,rather than in the journals in which our articlesappeared, permits us to reach a broaderaudience. Erickson labels our interpretationsa form of 'neo-environmental determinism', buthis rejection of our conclusions stems fromserious misunderstandings and is misleadingto readers who have not examined our originaldata. He (p. 634) claims:1 our research represents 'simplistic reductionistthinking' that treats humans as 'passivepawns' of environmental change;2 our dating of the chronic drought in the Andeanaltiplano after AD 1150 is impreciseand not correlated with the 12th-centurydisintegration of the Tiwanaku state; and3 the drought did not affect intensive agriculturalproduction.

At the south and north limits of our region are mountainous areas very different from the open arid spaces of the Australian continent between. In the north, the high country of New Guinea offers a complex and well-studied environmental sequence as the arena for early and puzzling human adaptations, precursor of the extraordinary societies of the island today.

Recent excavations at La Bastida in south-eastern Spain have revealed an impressive stone-built fortification system dating to 2200–2100 cal BC that protected one of the main economic and political centres of Argaric Early Bronze Age society. It consists of parallel walls with projecting towers flanking a narrow entrance passage. The defensive character of these structures appears beyond question and their design suggests they were a response to significant changes in warfare and weaponry in this period. This sophisticated fortification system raises once again the question of possible Mediterranean contacts, along with social change and the role of physical violence in the rise of Argaric society.

The First World War left its mark on the ground surface of Europe as perhaps no other human catastrophe before or since. The author applies modern digital mapping technology to the aerial photographs taken by the intrepid early pilots, and creates a landscape of military works that would not have been known in detail to either historians or generals at the time. The GIS inventory has great potential for historians of the war and is a vital instrument for the management of this increasingly important heritage.

Radiocarbon dating began in archaeology with ancient Egypt, for it was to the securely dated materials from Egypt that Willard Libby naturally turned when his new radiocarbon method needed verification from reliable historical sources. With this paper the reverse process begins: verifying and correcting the conventional chronology for Egypt and neighbouring regions by calibrated radiocarbon.

This paper compares calibrated radiocarbon dates against historical dates in a manner not well covered by ANTIQUITY's usual convention. So in this paper only uncalibrated radiocarbon dates are denoted by ‘b.p.’, historical dates are denoted by ‘BC’, and calibrated radiocarbon dates by ‘Cal BC’ or simply ‘BC’ when the meaning is clear from the context.

The authors show that the principal correlates of feasting in Viking Age Iceland were beef and barley, while feasting itself is here the primary instrument of social action. Documentary references, ethnographic analogies, archaeological excavation and biological analyses are woven together to present an exemplary procedure for the recognition of feasting more widely.

With its forts, swords, halberds and daggers the Argaric people of south-east Spain has long been seen as a warrior society. The authors dismantle this model, showing that defences around settlements and weapons and knives in tombs have quite different social roles. An analysis of skeletons showed that while these Bronze Age people might have been periodically clubbing each other on the head, they were not doing a lot of lethal stabbing.

The large island of Euboea, which lies along the north coast of Attica and Boeotia, was little known archaeologically until recent years (FIG. 1). Nor, apart from its involvement in the Persian Wars, then as a victim of Athenian imperialism and later as a step in the expansionism of Philip of Macedon, does it play any prominent role in the accounts of ancient historians. Yet, they have left hints of its former greatness in an early period of which little was remembered. The island was known to have sent out the first colonies to Italy and Sicily in the eighth century BC and to have settled the region of North Greece, still known as Chalcidice, after the name of one of Euboea's main cities, Chalcis. They remembered something, too, of a war between Chalcis and Eretria, the other major city of the island, in which their respective allies took part, and it is this conflict which seems to have exhausted both sides and led to the eclipse of the island's pre-eminence.

A well in the Jordan Valley shows that the Neolithic revolution included an understanding of underground water and how to access it. The excavation of the well in longtitudinal cross-section is also something of a revolution in fieldwork.

During the late Holocene, Aboriginal rock painters in north Queensland selected and combined various natural inorganic and organic materials in paint recipes – possibly to increase the longevity of their paintings. The organic materials make direct radiocarbon dating possible.

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?