A central issue in the regional prehistory over the Transition — and therefore of this whole set of papers — is the different life-ways that came to be followed in Papua New Guinea and in Australia itself; the one became agricultural, the other hunter-gatherer. There is more to the story than that divide; this is a story of a human and created world, rather than a simple response to directing environment.

Recent excavations at the Late Bronze Age settlement site of Kalnik-Igrišče, northwestern Croatia, have brought to light evidence of small-scale bronze-casting. From that evidence, and the pattern of similar evidence from other sites in the southwestern part of the Middle Danubian Basin, conclusions can be drawn about circulation of metal and its control by an élite.

The artefact assemblages from early Upper Palaeolithic sites in eastern European Russia contain flint tools of more Middle Palaeolithic type. With these artefacts are bifacially thinned triangular forms that may represent the first use of this technology in the area, and perhaps anywhere in Europe.

Zhukaigou, a late prehistoric site in Inner Mongolia, stands in an important zone, the region where the steppe cultures meet the settled farming civilization of China. As elsewhere across the Asian steppes, that zone where each tradition meets its other is observed both from its archaeology and from such clues as we have to ancient perceptions of significant others.

Across Eurasia and Africa new studies are encouraging archaeologists to rethink the age of of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition. In the Lake Baikal region of southeast Siberia, new radiocarbon determinations on sites of difficult history suggest that the earliest Upper Palaeolithic emerged there as early as 39,000 years ago, 6000 years earlier than previously thought.

Mithraism, the Roman cult to the Persian mystery god Mithras, had a special following in the army–and a matchingly broad distribution across the Empire. The singularly uniform class of Mithraic temples came to an end in several ways, by abandonment, burning, deliberate destruction, even by planned and careful sealing. Comparison of these circumstances can shed light on the different ways in which pagan worship came to cease.

A series of dates for La Hougue Bie, the Jersey passage-grave, shows its complex history of abandonment as well as construction. People were a long time leaving, as well as making, this sacred place.

The subsistence basis for Japanese civilization has always been intensive rice cultivation. What was grown there before the introduction of paddy technology? A glimpse of the plant cultigens in the later Jomon begins to tell.

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.

Archaeological attention in Palestine, as the Holy Land, has focused on research related to the biblical story. The overlooked Ottoman period offers a special opportunity to look back from contemporary knowledge into the archaeological past, explored here in a single village settlement whose full story spans five millennia.

New work at the late Roman fort at Pevensey has recovered oak foundation piles. The precision of a tree-ring date for them is occasion to look again at the pattern of coastal forts of which Pevensey is a part.

A geological look at the hard evidence of Roman stone in central Europe illuminates a major documentary source for the human experience of Roman quarrying.

The distribution of food-plants—both potential and actually exploited — reflects the natural history of contact across the seas and through the region, often long before Pleistocene times. The later and the human contribution has to be discerned from varied lines of evidence. The inventive process of early domestication leading to cultivation in the Sahulian north (New Guinea) was not a part of plant adaptation in the south (Australia). Neither did species diffusion result in adoption of agriculture or stimulation towards domestication among the Aboriginal hunter-gatherers.

The archaeological record is dominated by the repeated object and the repeated event, so we search for patterns that explain the regular in general terms. But human societies are not like that; the mass is actually made up of individuals, and the engine of change more often at the margin than at the centre.

New finds from the Upper Palaeolithic of Anatolia, and the mineralogical analysis of their colours, extends evidence of a precocious interest in pigments from the western European heartland of Palaeolithic painting into the Near East.

A handful of finds of camel bones from Iberia now illuminate the faint story of camels in Roman and Muslim Europe–and hint at why the dromedary never became established as a domesticate in the peninsula.

The designer of the reconstructed Greek trireme, Olympias, first proposed by John Morrison and now built and tested at sea, takes issue with Alec Tilley's divergent ideas and proposals about these ships, together with their practicality. The author is a naval architect.

Crannogs, the artificial island habitations of the Scottish lochs and lakes, are once more a lively field of research. Following our 1993 report on the crannogs of southwest Scotland and their dates, here is news of crannogs on the Isle of Mull, again with striking dates.

Heavyweight civil engineering in Romanized Europe means Roman, one thinks naturally enough. A tree-ring date now identifies a timber-framed bridge pier, previously thought Roman, as dating to the first half of the 8th century AD — Mercian, and the earliest known Saxon bridge in Britain.

The high and low islands of Torres Strait, scattered between the tip of Queensland and the coast of Papua New Guinea, make a unique frontier in later world prehistory: between a continent of hunter-gatherers and the majority world of cultivators. Consideration of just what archaeology there is in the Torres Strait Islands, and of its date, improve on the conventional question: was the Strait a bridge or a barrier?