A 1934 photograph of a man dressed in an animal skin and a painting of three figures in a cave at Melikane, Lesotho led to a new hypothesis about the role of the roan antelope in both the economy and beliefs of early Africa. The author shows that not only art, but language too, may reach back to a time when the need for food first began to find expression in ritual.

When Francis Pryor excavated the settlement complex on the dry gravels at Fengate, east England, he was a full-time archaeologist. Now that he is working at the adjacent wetland site of Flag Fen, he has also become a sheep-farmer. That practical experience leads him to a new view of what created the pattern of these planned later prehistoric landscapes.

The authors comment on ways of comparing the results of stable isotopes, on the one hand, and faunal remains, on the other, as evidence for diet

Plant foods are closely connected to cultural, social and economic aspects of human societies, both past and present. Food-preparation techniques and the etiquette of consumption involve complex interactions of natural resources and human cultures. During European prehistory, these changes included the shift to sedentism, the cultivation and domestication of plants, food storage, the production and exchange of alcoholic beverages and luxury foodstuffs, and the continuous adaptation of established culinary practices to newcomers in fields and gardens.

Joy McCorriston's paper in the March 1994 ANTIQUITY, on acorn-eating and agricultural origins, used California ethnographies as analogues for the ancient Near East. This reply explores some issues of analogy and explanation that go beyond the important specifics of the matter.

The first Indian Palaeolithic stone implement was found more than 60 years ago in a ballast pit at Pallavaram, a little to the west of the Madras-Trichinopoly road. Since then a large number of stone tools belonging to various prehistoric cultures have been discovered by several keen archaeologists, among whom Bruce Foote deserves special mention.

During the last fifteen years or so, however, little has been published from the southeast of the Peninsula, archaeological attention having been more specially focussed on the unsuspected Sumerian-like discoveries in the north. Nevertheless, both in Southeast India and in Africa, fresh information has been collected which is very important for the elucidation of the origins and movements of prehistoric cultures.

Professional archaeology in Britain has changed out of all recognition over the last 40 years, from an amateur world with a few paid professionals, to a fully professional activity. The changes have come about through different intiatives — popular and bureaucratic — and have led to new organizational structures, new funds, new people and different approaches. Few individuals have bridged this dynamic period as close to the driving seat as Professor Geoffrey Wainwright, or been able to see from where the many pressures for change came. Rarely were the initiatives widely published or documented, and the present state of things often seem to bear little relation to what went before. We have commissioned Professor Wainwright to review the changes and developments in the archaeology of England — from his perspective — and explain how and why many of the changes that underlie archaeology in 2000 have come about.

A meteorite impact crater in the Sirente mountains, central Abruzzo has recently been dated to the four/fifth century AD. The author shows that this catastrophic event can be equated with a locally preserved legend which describes how local people saw a new star fall to earth during a pagan festival. Their conversion to Christianity was expeditiously effected … .

Ducation as a subject for post-war planning is on everyone’s lips today. E Public interest has never been higher. Yet it may be doubted whether even now the full measure of its importance is realized. Next to winning the war, nothing is of greater moment than the battle for enlightenment, for if this is lost the ‘victory’ will be vain and we may all prepare for an ordeal more terrible than the present, because fought out among still larger aggregations of political and military power. The whole of history bears witness to the corruption of power, the struggles of the few for spoil of the many, the ignorance of the peoples and its lethal consequences to themselves. Today, thanks for the most part to the heroism of the common man, whether citizen of a bombed city, defender of Stalingrad, peasant of China, inhabitant of oppressed Europe or member of the forces of liberation, we stand on the threshold of what could be a new world: whether we cross that threshold or are elbowed back into the dark passage that leads to another holocaust, depends primarily on our attitude to education, on the steps taken during the next few years to bring to the common man everywhere a realization of his inheritance as a citizen of the world and an awareness of his power to mould his own destiny. What is needed above all is an overriding sense of human solidarity such as can come only from consciousness of common origins. Divided we fall victims to tribal leaders: united we may yet move forward to a life of elementary decency.

A defined ‘Mesolithic’ era is a fixture in the cultural sequences of European prehistory — though not of other regions of the world. Why and how did the entity come to be invented, and to take just that form?

From the beginning, the culture-history of the Chinese archaeological sequence has had its own character. And in a country and a civilization so vast, regional variation can also be on a grand scale. An examination of a late Neolithic culture on the southeastern coast finds jade in early contexts that give a new perspective to the traditional – and later – importance jade bears in the dynastic northern sequence.

Farmers in Late Iron Age Denmark lived in centuries-old villages, within territories inhabited for milfennia. Long-held patterns of settlement, movement, economic interaction and socio-political structure characterized the cultural landscapes of these loosely integrated, heterarchical societies. During the transition to a state in the late Viking Age, many new settlements were established and rapid landscape change transformed older communities into highly controlled, newly regulated places.

In reply to Machin's criticism of Kohn and Mithen's (1999) 'Sexy Handaxe Theory' in a recent Antiquity debate (Machin 2008: 761-6), Mithen (2008: 766-9) states that sexual selection is still relevant to the symmetry of Acheulean handaxes because this provides the only theory that can account for the various features typical of such artefacts. This conclusion may be misconceived, however, due to the conflation of the various factors relating to symmetry, attractiveness, and health. Crucially, recent studies have not found a genetic link based on sexual selection for physical traits based on symmetry. For example, Koehler et al. (2002) established that there was no difference in preference for the symmetry of male faces by females nearing conception compared to those females taking contraceptives. Similarly, Rhodes et al. (2001) found that, although there might be a link between facial symmetry and perceived health, there was no correlation between facial symmetry and actual health.