Alfred Russel Wallace visited southern Celebes in 18567. Captivated by its unique natural history, particularly its colourful butterflies, he concentrated upon collecting in the rugged limestone mountains around Bantimurung waterfall, east of Maros. Observing that the high, precipitous, cliffs were heavily vegetated, Wallace (1890, 181) wrote words of archaeological allurement—‘their surfaces are very irregular, broken into holes and fissures, with ledges overhanging the mouths of gloomy caverns’. He also made an incidental comment (1890, 165) of relevance a century later to Australian archaeologists, when he noted that his Makassarese servant had voyaged to the north Australian coast on several occasions to collect trepang (bêche-de-mer).

Important new insights about long-term changes in human behaviour are gained when cultural landscapes rather than focal points or ‘sites’ are studied. The abundance of obsidian artefacts preserved on easily recognized, well-defined and short-lived ground surfaces makes Garua Island an excellent setting for monitoring the changing patterns of human behaviour through time and within cultural landscapes. The results raise questions about traditional interpretations of settlement and land use in Near Oceania, particularly during the time of Lapita pottery.

The authors report the discovery of a cemetery of richly furnished graves in the western desert of south Egypt. Artefacts, burial rites and radiocarbon dates relate the cemetery to pastoralists practising transhumance in the later Neolithic period. The first such cemetery to be investigated, its cultural affiliations offer a pre-echo of what would become the Egyptian civilisation.

The World Heritage Site of Wanar in Senegal features 21 stone circles, remarkable not least because they were erected in the twelfth and thirteenth century AD, when Islam ruled the Indian Ocean and Europe was in its Middle Ages. The state of preservation has benefited the exemplary investigation currently carried out by a French-Senegalese team, which we are pleased to report here. The site began as a burial ground to which monumental stones were added, perhaps echoing the form of original funerary houses. Found in a neighbouring field were scoops left from the cutting out of the cylindrical monoliths from surface rock. While the origins of Wanar lie in a period of state formation, the monuments are shown to have had a long ritual use. The investigation not only provides a new context for one of the most important sites in West Africa but the precise determination of the sequence and techniques used at Wanar offers key pointers for the understanding of megalithic structures everywhere.

The 1950s, era of the first radiocarbon revolution, saw famous clashes between confidence in the old chronologies and the new results from radiocarbon, which sometimes appeared ‘archaeologically unacceptable’. The same issues continue in respect of the radiocarbon dating of rock art, where the sheer technical difficulty of securing a dating number in which one can have confidence, remains a large real obstacle.

A growing quantity of data about the late Pleistocene sequence in Tasmania has not been matched by an equivalent clear understanding of just what are the patterns of its lithic record. A new model is developed.

Thousands of artefacts are found every year by the public the world over, and many are sold or destroyed. How are we to ensure that these discoveries can take their place in archaeological research (Editorial, December 2004)? For some, legislation, state control and strong penalties are the best or only option. Here, the co-ordinator of the English Portable Antiquities Scheme makes the case for a voluntary code, led by co-operation, education and reward.

T.J. Dunbabin's book The western Greeks was published 50 years ago. In it he modelled the development of the Greek cities of Italy on the British Empire of the 1930s. Here Franco De Angelis explores the problem of faulty and distorting analogies.

The recent general accounts of Miss Kathleen Kenyon's brilliant series of campaigns at Tell es-Sultan, the mound in Jordan generally conceded to be that of ancient Jericho, will be well known to readers of Antiquity (cf. especially Wheeler, no. 119, 132–6; Kenyon, no. 120, 184—95). Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Miss Kenyon interpret the prehistoric archaeological assemblages of the two basal phases of Tell es-Sultan as evidence of civization (Miss Kenyon's italics), and the surprisingly early radiocarbon dates for the upper portion of the second basal phase of the site are accepted at face value. Miss Kenyon, in fact, believes (Ill. London News, no. 6,123 [13 October, 19561, 612) that Tell es-Sultan was already a ‘town’ at a date ‘which must approach the 8th millennium’ B.C.

The authors use their revised chronology for the Mariupol-type cemeteries (presented in Antiquity 76: 356-63 (2002)) to offer a new sequence for Neolithic settlement and economy in Ukraine. They find that the transition to the Neolithic began about 6500 cal BC, but co-existed with Mesolithic communities for a further millennium. In about 4500 cal BC early copper age cultures appeared, which in turn coexisted with the Neolithic in neighbouring areas. Co-existent cultures are defined in terms of their artefacts, subsistence strategies, burial practice and physical types. The Mariupol-type cemeteries seem to have had their origins in the late Mesolithic and endured into the Copper Age, a period of more than two thousand years (c. 6500–4000 cal BC).

A timely book now in press explores the roles of drink and drugs in the lives of prehistoric Europeans. Here, an analysis of diagnostic forms in the megalithic art of Irish passage-tombs—with its spirals, lozenges and turning curves—develops the explorations of that visionary interpretation begun by Bradley in 1989.

Almost a century and a half ago, Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871: 141) highlighted the evolution of bipedalism as one of the key features of the human lineage, freeing the hands for carrying and for using and making tools. But how did it arise? The famous footprints from Laetoli in Tanzania show that hominin ancestors were walking upright by at least 3.65 million years ago. Recent work, however, suggests a much earlier origin for bipedalism, in a Miocene primate ancestor that was still predominantly tree-dwelling. Here Susannah Thorpe, Juliet McClymont and Robin Crompton set out the evidence for that hypothesis and reject the notion that the common ancestor of great apes and humans was a knuckle-walking terrestrial species, as are gorillas and chimpanzees today. The article is followed by a series of comments, rounded off by a reply from the authors.

The rôle played by humans in the extinction of late Pleistocene vertebrate fauna is a controversial topic (Diamond 1989; Grayson 1989; Martin & Klein 1984), and actual archaeological data for a human factor are quite rare. Recent multidisciplinary excavations in Cyprus, however, suggest that people were at least partially responsible for the extinction of local endemics, primarily pygmy hippopotamus (Phanourios minutus).

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.

The Iron Age in north-eastern Thailand is marked by the appearance of multivallate ‘moated sites’ some of them up to 50ha in extent. Current evidence for their date and function shows them to be contemporary with other developments – expansion into new agricultural land, increases of ranking in burial and the arrival of regional pottery industries. In interpreting the reasons for these changes, the author draws on analogies from the Bronze/Iron transition in Britain, where forts are also seen as instruments of socio-economic change.