ANTIQUITY asked Andrew Sherratt, who had been a student of David Clarke at peterhouse, Cambridge in the late 1960s and early '70s, to give his reaction to the foregoing papers, in the light of his recollections of the time.

China is one of the places for the origin of the Asian cultivated rice (Oka 1988), but there are different theories for precise locations where ancient cultivated rice first originated, including those proposing South China and Yunnan (Li 1989) or the middle and lower Yangtze River Valley (Yan 1989), or the middle Yangtze and the upper Huai River Valley (Wang 1996) as the site of the oldest rice cultivation in China. The discovery (Zhang et al. 1994) of ancient rice at Jiahu in Henan province not only pushed the history of rice agriculture in the Huai River region back to 9000 BP, but also indicated the existence of an agricultural tradition of rice cultivation in the region from the beginning of the Holocene Anathermal until the end of the Holocene megathermal.

Green foxtail (Setaria viridis) is an annual grass widely distributed over the Old World, including China, where evidence of the earliest foxtail millet domestication to date has been discovered in the Cishan assemblage, Hebei province, dated to approximately 7900–7500 BP (Institute of Archaeology CASS 1991). Isozymic analysis and interspecific cross between S. viridis and S. italica (domesticated foxtail millet) demonstrated that S. viridis is the progenitor of domesticated foxtail millet (Gao & Chen 1988; Li et al. 1945). Yet little is known about the process of millet domestication, and even less about either the botanical characteristics of S. viridis or its cultural significance regarding human domestication.

The Communist manifesto does not have much to say about the pre-capitalist societies most archaeologists deal with, and still less about the primitive societies that interest most prehistorians. (Nothing from the Manifesto makes its way, for example, into the useful compendium brought together by Godelier (1973).) Much of what Marx and Engels had to say directly about antiquity consists of unpublished sketches and passing references, and even the systematic treatment of The origins of the family, private property and the state (1884) must be considered provisional: the changes that reading Morgan (1877) had on the discussions of the Formen (1857–58) and the Anti-Dühring (1878) can only suggest that the accumulation of positive evidence in the course of a century and a half of archaeological research would have caused Marx and Engels to revise substantially every one of their specific claims.

When in the 18th century European travellers passed through the obscure Ottoman provinces of Mosul and Baghdad, in what is now Iraq, they sometimes paused to contemplate the wreckage of Nineveh and Babylon. We know today that every Mesopotamian mound is an accumulation of history, but at the time it was far from obvious that significant relics of ancient civilizations, known on Biblical authority to have existed but at the same time condemned and destroyed by Divine justice, might still survive beneath the surface of the ground.

In 1820 Claudius James Rich, British Resident in Baghdad, investigated Nineveh and heard of sculptures that had been found among the ruins, but it was 1836 before his widow published an account of his visit. That book was the catalyst for a phase of frantic exploration, between 1843 and 1855, which led ultimately to the discovery both of ancient Assyria and of an entire civilization, that of ancient Mesopotamia, which stretched back past Babylonians and Sumerians to the very evolution of writing and the dawn of history. The discoveries were more than academic. In 1848. when the first results began to be known in Great Britain, they helped undermine some of the fundamental assumptions of established society.