Excavations at the salt-making village of Kibiro, on the Ugandan shore of Lake Albert in East Africa, suggest that an important part of the economy of the Kingdom of Bunyoro originated early in the present millennium. The predominance of roulette-decorated pottery, in particular the use of carved roulettes, indicates that Kibiro was first occupied by people with northern affinities, possibly from the upper Nile region or further west. Collectively, these findings provide important clues concerning the origins of the Kingdom of Bunyoro.

Southern England, especially after yet another miserably wet summer, seems a surprising place to find neolithic grape-pips – at least by comparison with the sunnier places like southern France and Greece where early records of both wild and domesticated grapes have been reported. But here is a find of a grape-pip from neolithic Dorset.

Since seeds and grains have in the past proved intrusive even into deposits that seemed stratigraphically secure, an uncomfortable choice had to be made after the identification: to preserve the pip, leaving its date unproven; or to make a radiocarbon determination on the pip and so to destroy it in securing evidence of its date. The second option was taken, which is why this report is on a pip which no longer exists.

How can we explain the variations and similarities of Palaeolithic art? Are we to suppose that European artists conformed to one great evolutionary sequence over 20 millennia? Or is the variation geographical, ideological or social? The author begins to address these big questions by deconstructing over 900 images of the horse, the animal most commonly depicted in European caves. He finds it possible to distinguish variations due to differences in live animals and due to differences in methods of representation – allowing the isolation of those few differences due to style. Applying this to a case study at Parpalló in Spain, he notes that the local sequence of horse images correlates with other cultural changes. Here is a method of great potential for revealing conservative and innovative trends.

Among the most impressive monuments of the earlier part of the Bronze Age in Crete are the great circular communal tombs which began to be built, notably in the Mesara plain but also in other parts of the island, before 2000 B.C., and flourished in use throughout the first half of the 2nd millennium. Similarly, the most magnificent surviving architectural creations of the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean area are the stupendous beehive or tholos tombs of the chief Mainland centres like Mycenae. Tombs of this type, with corbelled stone vaults sunk in the ground and approached by long entrance passages (dromoi), seem to appear for the first time in the Aegean about 1600 B.C., and reach their finest and grandest expression on the Mainland of Greece in the two centuries between 1500 and 1300 B.C. A map of the Aegean area showing the distribution of these two types of tombs accompanies this article (FIG. I).

Stratified stone tools found with elephant and hippopotamus teeth at Evron Quarry can be dated to before 780 000 years ago. The assemblage includes handaxes, but less expectedly, small stone tools in the form of flakes with notches and points. Not thought to be points for spears or arrows, these small tools are suggested to be usable for butchery. They represent an adaption of local materials that make poor handaxes—so showing an ingenious improvisation on the part of Homo erectus.

The last four decades have seen marked changes of opinion about the chronology of the Neolithic. While at first a high dating for the Central European Neolithic was generally accepted, since the Second World War this has given way to a short chronology. With the help of archaeological stratigraphy and comparative methods of research it has been possible to determine anew the relative succession of the individual cultures, and to establish convincingly the temporal priority of those parts of South-eastern Europe adjacent to the Near East.

The relationship between economic power and political centralization during the First and Second Palace Periods of Bronze Age Crete is a topical theme in Aegean studies. Here, two scholars argue the case for continuity in the economic base of palatial political authority.

The graphic rock-paintings of southern Africa, with their lively and colourful scenes, have long been one of the glories of the continent's archaeology. The last years have seen them become intellectually quite as graphic, as fragments of San ethnography and ethnohistory have been found to provide a commentary that allows aspects of their symbolism and meaning to be explored. This paper goes beyond, to see what can be iluminated without benefit of commentary.

Going into a cave or shelter, one walks where one can stand upright or has to crouch less. That affects which zones objects are trampled on, which zones they may be kicked out of, which zones they may be kicked into. And those effects interact with the usual spatial order–with its activity zones and drop zones–that develops through occupation of the enclosed cave or shelter.

The authors present the musical properties of well-preserved bone flutes recently recovered from Jiahu, an early Neolithic site in central China with a sequence beginning in the seventh millennium BC (Antiquity 77: 31–44). Tonal analyses of five of the flutes indicate a gradual development from four-tone to seven-tone scale. By adding more holes to the pipe, structuring the pitch intervals closer to each other, and by alternating the keynote, the prehistoric musicians could play increasingly expressive and varied music. In addition, the flutes became progressively standardised in pitch, presumably so they could play in harmony. The study shows that the Jiahu flute makers and their musicians became progressively familiar with acoustics and developed a cognitive scheme of music comparable to that of modern times.

In a characteristically stimulating recent article in ANTIQUITY, Barry Cunliffe has touched on many of the most important issues concerning the publication of ‘rescue’ excavations in Britain in the 1990s (Cunliffe 1990). The purpose of the present article is to follow up some the points which Cunliffe has raised.

Publication, and the dissemination of information, is the lifeblood of any academic discipline, and questions of what is published (and of what is read!), where, how and by whom are of central importance for archaeology. Over the past two decades in Britain, and particularly in England where the volume of work has been greatest, there has been a recurrent concern with the problem of how to publish the results of ‘rescue’ archaeology. Rescue excavations can generate very large quantities of data, collected for reasons which are often largely beyond archaeological control, and the problems (both intellectual and practical) of publishing this material are considerable. In Britain the issues have been the subject of expert examination on two occasions since 1970 -the Frere (1975) and Cunliffe (1983) reports - and now in the 1990s the topic is firmly on the archaeological agenda again. This paper is intended as a contribution to the continuing debate.

Van Andel adds an important postscript to his paper in the December ANTIQUITY

Further work inside the Grotte Cosquer, the Palaeolithic painted cave near Marseilles only accessible by a deep-water dive, improves our knowledge and makes it clear there can be no artificial entrance made to create a dry-land access.

The archer's bow is a machine whose purpose is to impart stored energy effectively and accurately to propel the arrow. A mathematical modelling of different bow types shows how their engineering characteristics define their performances.