Late last year, the British Museum showed a new Thracian treasure from Rogozen in Bulgaria (Fol et al. 1986), including over 150 silver-gilt vessels and a superb discovery in itself. Here the evidence of Rogozen is taken as another clue in finding the origin of perhaps the most famed single find from later prehistoric Europe.

Despite the ‘archaeology’ in its name, industrial archaeology is a world of its own which barely figures in ANTIQUITY or the other general archaeology journals. A consistent trend in recent archaeology has been an interest in landscapes and the physical contexts of settlement, studies by survey rather than excavation of rich spot sites for their own sake. That landscape is usually rural, and its industry – mills, olive presses, or building-stone quarries – of a pastoral nature. Here, an approach is presented in that same spirit, as the archaeology of a more fully industrial landscape.

For someone accustomed to the rural intensity of settlement one still finds in northern Europe, it can be a surprise to find, in mountain France or Italy, how many are the high valleys that now have lost their people. In just one the editor happens to know, La Maglia in the eastern Alpes-Maritimes, which once supported 40 or so farms, the cultivated land, so laboriously won by terracing, is virtually all let go now to grass and scrub. But how old are the structures and fields that belong with dense settlement of these marginal lands? A study has been made at the other side of the same département of the Alpes-Maritimes, in the extreme SE corner of France.

The physical scale of buildings like the Baths of Caracalla give the clearest indication of the importance of bathing in the classical order of things – though whether what Romans did in the bath was always clean and decent may be an open question. But what about the prehistory of bathing, and particularly of bathing in steam? An answer is given here which links the historical and ethnographic record to burnt mounds, among the more common and puzzling types of north European site.

Les Trois-Frères, in the French Pyrenees, is one of the classic sites of palaeolithic cave-art, and of Abbé Breuil's recording of it. A new survey, and new recording methods, are giving a different and a fuller picture of its art.

The traditional distinction between the Middle and the Upper Palaeolithic is a technical one, the change from flake industries to blade industries. Finding a distinction in more active terms of human behaviour is a rewarding prospect, rather harder to achieve. Here, an attempt is made to find a fundamental distinction in the way groups of humans organized their lives, as recorded in the patterns of scattered stones and bones. The study depends on the meticulous and very detailed records of findspots made by excavation teams led by Jean-Philippe Rigaud, Director of Prehistoric Antiquities for Aquitaine, Bordeaux.

Curwen, writing in ANTIQUITY 60 years ago about prehistoric agriculture in Britain (Curwen 1927), found his best evidence for the fields of earliest times came from the hut-circles and enclosures of Dartmoor. Andrew Fleming has done the same in studying the large-scale land divisions made by the Dartmoor reaves. Until his work these prehistoric boundaries were thought to be of medieval date – understandably as they demonstrate not the piecemeal and local enclosing of little fields but planned land division on a medieval scale. In this paper Fleming extends his view out from Dartmoor to the wider pattern of land division on the grand scale at early dates, and to its social implications.

The Ladby ship-burial, excavated in Denmark during 1935, was the precursor of Sutton Hoo, excavated in 1939. Both were ‘ship-moulds’, with the timber vanished but the shape of the vessel left in the earth and marked by its nails. While the British excavated Sutton Hoo and back-filled its barrow, the Danes left Ladby in place and on public display. Now Martin Carver's team is working again at Sutton Hoo though not on the ship-barrow itself; and the Danes have revisited Ladby, where they have made further discoveries in the barrow and made new provision for the ship-mould's continued preservation.

A fast-growing quantity of fossil material – post-cranial as well as skulls and teeth – is combining with cladistics and other new theoretical perspectives radically to change the picture of human evolution. Here, a summary of that picture is given, as the basis for a re-examination of that fundamental question of Pleistocene archaeology, the matching with the bones of the stones of the palaeolithic sequence.

South American archaeology is a field which ANTIQUITY all too rarely embraces, and we are glad to have this report (originally planned for volume 59, 1985) on a new project studying trans-Andean contacts between the Pacific coast and the Amazon jungles.

When General Pitt-Rivers was appointed as first Inspector under the 1882 Act, which first protected British Ancient Monuments, the Act's Schedule named just 50 sites nationally. Although many monuments have been added to the Schedule since then, the growth in knowledge of the long and intensive occupation of England has been such that the current total of nearly 13,000 scheduled monuments amounts to only 1 in 50 of the sites thought to exist.

In matters of monument protection, Britain lies somewhere in the middle: well short of the promised land, as we see it, of Denmark where effective protection goes out from the spot site to include its environs; but well ahead of, for example, the USA where respect for a landowner's formal rights of property is so strong that there is still no Federal protection for monuments in private ownership.

English Heritage feels that now is the time to put the Schedule of protected monuments, as it has grown over the years, into rational shape. The present Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Andrew Saunders, and his colleagues explain why and how.

Next year will mark the twentieth birthday of the ‘New Archaeology’, whose founding texts – Binford & Binford's New perspectives in archaeology in the USA and Clarke's Analytical archaeologyin Britain – both appeared in 1968. Nearly two decades on, some fundamentals are not yet resolved, which may indicate – as Lester Embree argued in the last number of ANTIQUITY – that archaeology is a harder science than most.

In March 1987, Paul Mellars and Chris Stringer organized a conference in Cambridge on ‘The Origins and Dispersal of Modern Man’. This review, prompted by the conference, gives a viewpoint on the body of ideas currently circulating, based mainly on recent publications by the participants, and some others whose work is too significant to ignore.