A set of papers on the human settlement of the steppes, epoch by epoch, is not complete unless it pays attention to the last glaciation, when periglacial steppe adaptations show remarkable cultural development, especially in the famous mammoth-bone houses. The subsistence basis depended - as a coincident paper in this issue (pages 719-32 above) shows – on an unusual and unusually early development of food storage, with all that implied for social evolution.

Pressure of present commitments did not allow the writing of a new single paper on this time-period. Instead, we print here a collected set of five short contributions, by N.D. Praslov and colleanues that indicate well the evidence and the range of Soviet approaches to it. We thank Olga Soffer and George Frison for allowing us to draw on the outlines of papers given at the joint USSR-USA meeting on the Upper Palaeolithic-Palaeolndian held in the USSR in August 1989.

A key to the understanding of ancient iconography is knowing just what the pictures are pictures of. That is not always an easy question: in this case, a classic collection of Peruvian depictions, it is at least clear the pictures are of birds. But what kind of bird, and why?

New publications addressing the age-old question of the match between Egyptian, Aegean and European chronologies in later prehistory are reviewed by an egyptologist and a prehistorian.

The culture-historical development of Neolithic and Bronze Age communities under Eurasian steppe conditions is indissolubly linked with the establishment and development of early forms of productive economy, and displays a number of distinguishing features, which are the product of both natural and historical factors.

Within the USSR, the steppe extends from the mouth of the Danube to the upper reaches of the Ob and the Altai mountains (Milkov 1977). To the north, the steppes naturally grade in to the forest zone to form a belt of transitional foreststeppe landscape. To the south, the steppe is bounded by the coast of the Black Sea, the foothills of the Caucasus and beginning in the Lower Volga region the semi-deserts and, further south, deserts of Soviet Central Asia.

Among the postglacial changes in human diet is the larger place for cereals that led on to full plant agriculture. Here, a specific trace is found in human osteology of the new kind of labour that the grinding of cereal seeds required.

It was a quarter of a century ago that ANTIQUITY first announced the ‘Pleistocene colonization of Australia’, when Mulvaney (1964) reported secure dates before 12,000 b.p. from Kenniff Cave, Queensland. The last three years alone have seen dates from New Guinea of around 40,000 b.p., early dates from the offshore islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, and dates from Australia itself that show a rapid colonization of both the arid central desert and cold, wet Tasmania – environments very different from the tropical islands of Southeast Asia, whence the first Australasian populations must surely have come. It is a record with great implications for early settlement elsewhere, most plainly of the American continents.

Human origins research has had a long history of vigorous debate. Recent discussion has been no exception, the more so perhaps as the strands of evidence — anthropological, archaeological, and now molecular-biological — are sufficiently diverse that not many can be well placed to deal fairly with them all. Here issue is taken with Foley's cladistic view of human evolution, and with the ‘Garden of Eden’ hypothesis of a single source in Africa for modern human populations.

In Southeast Asia the archaeological record is virtually silent about early rice cultivation, for which there is now good evidence from the Chinese Neolithic. Here, new fieldwork from Thailand provides both direct evidence of rice cultivation and, earlier, an indirect clue from palynological indicators.

Ammerman & Cavalli-Sforza's ‘wave of advance’ model figured in the Indo-European Special Section in the September ANTIQUITY. One of its architects here comments on how his model was presented there, and makes some wider proposals.

Several cultural features distinguish the northern Black Sea region from the rest of the Antique world. The region is rare or unique in that it was the scene of direct contact over a long period, not only between communities at different stages or levels of socio-economic development, but between communities of different economic and cultural types: nomadic pastoralists on the one hand and and sedentary plough agriculturalists (both autochthonous and immigrant Greek) on the other.

The late Pleistocene colonization of Greater Australia by humans by c. 40,0130 b.p. is now generally accepted. This landmass, which comprised at periods of lower sea levels Tasmania, Australia and Papua New Guinea, has now produced sites with rich and diverse sequences extending towards or now mainly beyond 30,000 b.p., in the present arid country of western New South Wales (Barbetti & Allen 1972), in southwest Western Australia (Pearce & Barbetti 1981), in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (Gillieson & Mountain 1983), and recently even in Tasmania (Cosgrove 1989).

Prior to 1985, with the exception of an 11,000 b.p. date for occupation in Misisjl Cave on New Britain (Specht et al. 1981), the tropical lowlands of Papua New Guinea and its attendant nearer Melanesian island chain had remained a blank on the region’s map of Pleistocene human expansion.

The Lapita question

The prehistory of the western Pacific has, for the last 30 years, been dominated by the problem of the origins of the present Polynesian and Melanesian cultures (Terrell 1988). In 1961 Golson drew attention to the distribution of highly decorated Lapita pottery, now known to date from between 3500 BP and 2000 BP, which crossed the present-day division between Melanesia and Polynesia. Furthermore, sites with Lapita pottery represented the first evidence of occupation on Tonga and Samoa, the most westerly Polynesian islands from which it was thought that the rest of Polynesia was colonized. Lapita pottery came to be associated with a movement of people from Melanesia to Polynesia and was seen to represent the founding group ancestral to later Polynesian groups.

South Siberia – bordered by Lake Baikal, the Irtysh river, the west Siberian forest-steppe zone, and the basin of the Great Lakes of Mongolia – is broadly coextensive with the foothills of the Sayan and Altai ranges. It occupies a special place in the early medieval history of the Eurasian steppe populations. The ethno-cultural processes which operated here over thousands of years have a significance which goes far beyond South Siberia.

How, given a collection of absolute dates from individual structures on a settlement site, is one to work out how many might have been occupied at any one time?

Graham Connah, who has himself just published a historical archaeology of Australia, reviews a large new book in American historical archaeology, and examines the particular approach that is expressed in its title, the archaeological ‘recovery of meaning’.

It is common knowledge that the West Indies were inhabited by three cultures at the time of European contact—the Island Caribs, the Tainos and the Ciboney – identified largely from the accounts of Spanish and French explorers and chroniclers. Is this knowledge accurate? This evaluation of evidence for the Guanahatabey (‘Ciboney’) of western Cuba and southwestern Haiti finds they did not survive until the time of European contact.

As with conventional definitions of the Neolithic anywhere, the concept in this region relies on there being an agricultural economy, the traces of which are largely indirect. These traces are artefacts interpreted as being linked to agriculture, rather than direct finds of agricultural crops, which are rare in Island Southeast Asia. This definition by artefacts is inevitably polythetic, particularly because many of the sites which have been investigated are hardly comparable. We can expect quite different assemblages from open village sites as opposed to special use sites such as burial caves, or frequentation caves that are used occasionally either by agriculturalists while hunting or by gatherer-hunter groups in some form of interaction with near-by agricultural populations. And rarely is a full range of these different classes of sites available in any one area.