This study is concerned with the exploitation of resources by human groups in the Carmel area over a period of about 50,000 years. To this end an attempt is made to evaluate the changing economic potential of the ‘catchments’ of individual sites, for this enables us to make a comparative analysis of hunting-gathering and agricultural economies.

Although the study of prehistoric sites is now usually complemented by some treatment of their setting, the situation in their immediate vicinity—the principal concern of the inhabitants—tends to be neglected or at any rate overshadowed by generalized statements regarding the physiographic, vegetational, climatic or kindred zones of which they form a (not necessarily typical) part. The difficulty that is encountered by attempts to harmonize the findings of the various specialists who nowadays contribute to archaeological studies may, in fact, be due to the limitations of a zonal approach, for the populations or phenomena with which each of them is concerned do not necessarily refer to a single ‘catchment’ area and may have little connection with the picture of the exploited territory that is imprinted on the site record.

This paper examines, through the use of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry dating, the database of Lateglacial cultures involved in the recolonisation of northern Europe. The aim is not only to determine the timing of that recolonisation, but also to propose a general model of hunter-gatherer colonisation at a sub-continental scale. The question is addressed of how long the period of abandonment of northern Europe during the Würm/Weichsel glaciation may have lasted, and when it both started and came to an end. A series of questions is asked concerning the processes and mechanics of recolonisation and the sequences for specific areas are examined. AMS radiocarbon dating shows that a two stage process was involved, which has important implications for our analysis of regional settlement patterns and the changing scale of Lateglacial hunting systems. Recolonisation was a dynamic process, integral to, and internally driven by, the social life of Lateglacial hunters. It may have been constrained by environmental and resource factors, which we have emphasised here, but ultimately it was an historical, social process and should be similarily regarded to that of the farmers. By measuring rates of expansion data are provided for use in other studies of hunter-gatherer colonisation.

Obsidian was not necessarily the earliest object of trade, but it certainly seems to be the first for which material evidence remains. It has been reported from nearly every Early Neolithic settlement in the Near East, although many of these sites are distant from the natural sources.

In our first paper (Cann and Renfrew 1964), we outlined a method for the characterization, by trace-element analysis, of obsidian artifacts from archaeological contexts. This allowed the determination of the natural sources from which the material derived. In that paper, however, only the west Mediterranean region was considered in sufficient detail to give definitive results. The obsidian trade in the Aegean has subsequently been studied in detail also (Renfrew, Cann and Dixon 1965).

In the present paper, the obsidian trade in the Near East is examined. This topic is particularly important since obsidian seems to be the most promising approach towards understanding the extent to which the different Early Neolithic cultural and ecological regions were in contact. It should help to suggest how the early spread in the knowledge and use of animal and plant domesticates took place in the Near East.

Evidence of contact between cultural groups is of great importance to the study of prehistory. Although the development of absolute dating methods has decreased our dependence on the discovery of such contacts for chronology, they are essential material when the origin and spread of culture is being studied. In the past, cultural contacts have generally been demonstrated by typological similarities of artifacts, but unfortunately many typological comparisons are open to discussion, and it can be exceedingly difficult to be certain of direct contact by this means alone.

The importance in this respect of the study of raw materials used in places far from their place of origin and presumably deliberately imported has long been realized. Recently more attention has been paid to the careful characterization of such materials; the detection, that is, of properties of the specimen under study which are characteristic of material from particular sources. By this means it is often possible to assign a source to a given specimen. The petrological identification of British neolithic stone axes is perhaps the most comprehensive archaeological characterization study yet undertaken. Demonstrations of trading links made by such methods, if based on a sure identification and a comprehensive survey of possible sources, are not open to the criticism and doubt which may be directed at typological similarities. The variety of techniques now available for the analysis and identification of materials makes this field a promising one for the archaeologist.

In the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society for 1964, the writer presented (Roe, 1964) an interim report on his programme of research on the British Lower and Middle Palaeolithic material, describing methods of studying assemblages of handaxes by metrical and statistical analysis, and outlining the first results obtained. The present paper offers a summary of the final results obtained for certain aspects of the same research project, in particular the discerning of various groupings among the 38 handaxe assemblages considered. The Groups which emerge are clusters of sites whose industries are similar in terms of the morphological range and usual degree of refinement of their handaxes.

The Thesis for which the research was undertaken was completed in March, 1967 (Roe, 1967), and is available for consultation. It is of course quite impossible to quote in the present paper more than a small part of the evidence upon which the final conclusions depend.

The wooden artifact widely known as the Clacton Spear (pl. 1) was discovered by Samuel Hazzledine Warren, F.G.S., in 1911. He dug it out of an undisturbed part of the freshwater sediments, probably a peaty seam, exposed on the foreshore at Clacton-on-Sea, c. 80 km ENE of London (Warren 1911; 1914, and in conversation with K.P.O. 1933). On 30th September 1911, Warren conducted a party of members of the Essex Field Club on a visit to see the outcrop of Pleistocene fluviatile deposits on the shore west of Clacton Pier, and in the brief report on this excursion, reference was made to the occurrence of fossil mammalia and Palaeolithic flint artifacts. At first Henri Breuil tentatively identified the worked flints with the Mesvinian industry of Belgium; but after Warren's amassment of a larger collection, he recognized that the Clacton flint artifacts represented a distinct Palaeolithic industry, or tradition, for which he proposed the name Clactonian (see Warren 1922 and 1926; Breuil 1932).

Archaeologists tend to refer to the land that once existed between Britain and the continent as a landbridge. It was, however, a landscape as habitable as neighbouring regions, and here called Doggerland to emphasise its availability for settlement by prehistoric peoples. Evidence from the Geological Surveys undertaken by countries bordering the North Sea Basin, together with allied research, is drawn together to provide an overview of the possibilities. A range of interacting geological processes implies that the present-day relief of the North Sea bed does not provide a sound guide to the relief of the former landscape, nor to the chronology and character of its submergence. A series of maps accompanies the text to provide a speculative reconstruction of the topography, river systems, coastline, vegetation, fauna, and human occupation of Doggerland from the Devensian/Weichselian maximum to the beginnings of the Neolithic.

The purpose of this paper is to review the current evidence for plant use in Mesolithic Europe and to summarize its implications. In order to do so, four sources of data are examined: macrobotanical remains, palynological data, artefactual evidence, and the human biological record.

A prelimary survey of palaeobotanical evidence for plant use in the Mesolithic indicates that the evidence is far more extensive than expected hitherto and that accumulations of plant food, especially of nuts, point to their regular and extensive use. In those areas such as Britain, where a large number of fine-resolution palynological studies have been carried out, the incidence of clearance and burning phases seems to be too high to be explained by acts of nature alone. A good case can be made for deliberate forest clearance and the maintenance of a more open landscape by Late Mesolithic groups as part of a promotional strategy to increase the productivity of nut and fruit trees and shrubs, wetland plants, and possibly native grasses.

Artefactual evidence points to a widespread distribution of soil-working tools (hoes and antler mattocks), especially in temperate Europe, and to a greater than expected presence of reaping and grinding equipment, lending conditional support for the existence of a specialized plant processing tool kit for digging, reaping, and plant processing.

Palaeopathological evidence indicates the existence of a dietary pattern in the west Mediterranean making extensive use of starchy and carbohydrate foods which resulted in a high caries rate among the Mesolithic population of that area.

In discussing the signiftcanse of these four lines of evidence, it is argued that, by the Late Mesolithic, the patterns of plant use support the notion of wild plant food husbandry instead of the incidental and opportunistic use of plants for food which has implicitly been accepted as a norm for the Mesolithic in Europe. Three geographical areas can be identified with their specific pattern of plant use: temperate Europe, Mediterranean Europe, and the south-eastern Balkans/Pontic Steppe. The patterns of plant use suggested in this paper emphasize the additive nature of the adoption of the agro-pastoral Neolithic farming practices in Europe.

The occurrence of fires in many types of woodland and forested environments would have benefited human populations in several different ways. In addition to greatly increasing the mobility of the human groups, the occurrence of fire in many types of forest would have led to substantial improvements in the economic potential of the environment. Improvements in both the quantity and nutritional quality of the food supplies available to herbivorous animals would have increased not only the total carrying capacity of the environment for these species, but also the relative growth-rates and reproductive rate of the animals. In certain cases it is likely that burning would have increased the overall ‘productivity’ of ungulate populations by a factor of × 10. Similar improvements may have been achieved in the yields of certain vegetable food resources. The potential impact of these environmental changes on the population numbers and settlement patterns of human communities is discussed, and it is suggested that the adoption of systematic policies of forest burning by hunting and gathering populations may have led in certain situations to the emergence of more complex patterns of man-animal relationships which were closely similar to those of traditional ‘herding’ or ‘pastoralist’ economies.

C-14 datings can not only provide us with estimates of the absolute age of objects or occupation layers, but also, when available in sufficient numbers, with initial and terminal datings for cultural phases, thus defining their duration. The value of this is obvious: differential duration in different areas can at last provide definitive answers to long-disputed questions concerning the direction of cultural movement.

Working with large numbers of C-14 dates is, however, not entirely free of problems. We are, for example, regularly confronted with larger differences between datings expected to be of similar age than can be accounted for by mere statistical error (Vogel, 1969a) or which can be explained by contamination or other simple causes. One can stop at this point and accept a limited testimonial value for C-14 dates (e.g. Steuer and Tempel, 1968), or one can try to go further by calculating average dates, assuming (for the most part incorrectly) that the chance of a date being too young is equal to its chance of being too old (Neustupný, 1968). The danger in this procedure is that one loses sight of the individual character of each determination: in fact one sample is much more securely associated and more closely contemporary with finds of a particular cultural phase than another, and the chance of contamination or admixture is different for each sample.

Another problem is that the number of C-14 dates that one must take into consideration is often so large that they cannot be digested without some form of graphic presentation, and for this there is as yet no uniformity of practice.

The very early development and extent of the obsidian trade in the Near East is being increasingly documented by the discovery and excavation of Early Neolithic sites throughout the area. Since the publication of our last paper (Renfrew, Cann and Dixon, 1966), obsidians from five aceramic Neolithic sites have been analysed, and the natural source of the material determined in each case. All the results fall into the framework of groups already established. In addition, one new obsidian source has been discovered.

This confirmation of the characterizations hitherto achieved is satisfactory, but perhaps more important is the new evidence for the reconstruction of the pattern of the trade or traffic in obsidian in Early Neolithic times. Regularities in this pattern are becoming apparent, which allow a greater insight into the trading mechanisms involved.

In this paper, written by Colin Renfrew on the basis of analyses and group divisions by J. E. Dixon and J. R. Cann, new information concerning the Anatolian sources is first considered, and new results for the Early Neolithic and later obsidians discussed. In the last section, an attempt is made at the more precise definition of the obsidian trading pattern in the 7th and 6th millennia B.C. on the basis of a more detailed analysis of the prehistoric trade statistics.

When and how were the Mediterranean islands first settled? Has insularity itself—the special characteristics of islands everywhere—acted as a constraint on the manner and rate of their colonization by man? If so, is it possible for archaeologists to make use of ecological and biogeographical models which have been developed to account for the abundance and diversity of animals and plants on islands of varying size and remoteness? This paper offers a brief review of the available data on the first of these important questions, seen in the light of the second and third, and it proposes some modifications to the scenarios of colonization to be found in most current accounts of early island prehistory in the Mediterranean. As a reflection of personal research interests, I emphasize the east Mediterranean evidence, but there are useful insights to be gleaned, I believe, by comparing what we find there with the pattern for the islands of the west.

The significance of morphological variation in Acheulean bifaces has been a central issue in Palaeolithic research for well over a century. For much of that period interpretation has been dominated by culture-historical models and it is only in the past 20 years that other explanatory factors have received adequate attention. This paper examines the combined role of several of these factors – namely raw materials, reduction intensity, and function – on biface variability in the British Isles, with special reference to the two major shaped-based ‘tradition’ devised by Roe (1967; 1968). First-hand examination of bifaces from 19 assemblages suggests that final biface shape depends largely on the dimensions of the original raw materials and the technofunctional strategies designed to deal with them. Through these observations a new model is generated and tested. This suggests that the patterning in the British Acheulean simply reflects the nature of the resources available at a site and the hominid procurement and technological strategies used to exploit them. According to this model, well-worked ovates with all-round edges were preferentially produced wherever raw materials were large and robust enough to frequently support intensive reduction procedures, usually when obtained from primary flint sources. Assemblages characterised by partially-edged, moderately-reduced pointed forms were only manufactured when smaller, narrower blanks, that imposed restrictions on human technological actions regarding the location and extent of working, were exploited. Such blanks were usually obtained from a secondary flint source, such as river gravel. Thus, Roe's pointed and ovate ‘traditions’ are seen not as the products of different biface making populations, but as the same broad populations coping with the exigencies of a heterogeneous environment, using different resources in an adaptive, flexible manner.

Although fire is a fundamental building block of interpretation, details of its effect on archaeological substrates are still poorly understood. The key questions, from an interpretative point of view, are the level of heating produced in the soil underneath different fires and the degree of reddening preserved in the final stratigraphy. This paper explores these questions by examination of previous studies and through a series of instrumented experimental fires. We conclude that, although there is some variation, temperatures beneath most surface-built fires remain below 500° C and reddening of the soil happens only rarely. These two generalisations are, however, linked in a complex way which is not fully clarified. Some sediments redden dramatically at temperatures commonly found under the experimental fires and in the literature on soil heating, while others fail to redden even at significantly higher temperatures. These ‘anomalies’ could relate to either organic matter content or chemical variations affecting the progress of the iron oxide transformations that lead to soil reddening.

This is an interim report on a Cambridge Research Thesis which has been in progress for three years, and which will eventually cover the major part of the British Lower and Middle Palaeolithic. The whole project may be divided into four phases:

• 1. Collection and examination of all the available material;

• 2. Selection of those groups of implements appropriate for study;

• 3. Application of objective methods of study, mainly in the field of metrical and statistical analysis;

• 4. Interpretation of the results.

The present paper gives some account of what has so far been done under the first three of these headings. It is still too early to attempt any major conclusions, although it is perhaps fair to indicate the lines along which it can be hoped they will take shape.

In the interpretation of the evidence provided by archaeological investigation it is important to realise its limitations, and to appreciate the complexity of the factors involved. From this point of view it is hoped that a demonstration of the influence of the seasonal factor in the life of a contemporary nomadic hunting group, living under ‘stone age’ conditions in Northern Australia, showing the close relationship in which these people stand to their environment, and demonstrating the influence of the seasonal cycle, and even of seasonal fluctuations, upon their local movements and occupations, may be of interest. It will be apparent that an onlooker, seeing these people at different seasons of the year, would find them engaged in occupations so diverse, and with weapons and utensils differing so much in character, that if he were unaware of the seasonal influence on food supply, and consequently upon occupation, he would be led to conclude that they were different groups.

History came late to Lethbridge Pocket, on Mt. Moffatt's northern boundary, just over the crest of the Great Dividing Range, source of the extensive Maranoa, Warrego and Fitzroy river systems. Explorer Major Thomas Mitchell skirted the area to the westward in 1846, observing (Mitchell, 1848, 208) that the prospect towards the dominating, massive table-lands ‘was very grand’; the name of Dean Buckland, geologist and antiquarian, was bestowed upon the loftiest table-land, at the foot of which Lethbridge Pocket lay concealed. Ludwig Leichhardt had passed to the north-east, a year previously, but he too preferred to avoid the rugged mountains, now termed the Carnarvon and Chesterton Ranges. Both the journals of Mitchell and Leichhardt testify, on many pages, to the abundant material traces of a populous aboriginal community in the region. Leichhardt commented (1847, 45) that ‘appearances indicated that the commencement of the (Carnarvon) ranges was a favourite resort of the “blackfellows”. The remains of recent repasts of mussels were strewed about the larger water-holes’.

The mountainous region, which became Mt. Moffatt cattle station, was traversed first in the late 1870's, when the route across the ridge was located (Cameron, 1964, 372). The rugged Pocket was probably entered at the same time, perhaps by a member of the Lethbridge family, pioneers on Forest Vale station, 80 miles to the south.

Five pollen diagrams from two mires in the province of Huelva in south-west Spain are re-evaluated in the light of 15 radiocarbon dates, and multivariate numerical analyses of modern and fossil pollen samples in the region. The results of these analyses suggest that managed woodland of dehesa type can be detected in pollen diagrams, and can be interpreted within the archaeological sequence known from the area.

This paper explores how the lifecycles of Middle Bronze Age settlements were intimately related at both a practical and metaphorical level to the lifecycles of their inhabitants. Many settlements of this date appear to have been single-generational sites. Building sequences and other changes in the use of settlement space can be understood within a framework that explores how the demographic, social, and economic circumstances of a site's occupants changed over time. However, the lifecycle of the settlement was not only related to that of its occupants in practical terms; each was also a symbolic representation of the other. For example, such acts as the deposition of whole quernstones or animal burials in pits and ditches may have been carried out at critical points in the lifecycle of a settlement, its structures, and its inhabitants. The notion that settlements had lifecycles introduces the possibility of anthropomorphic symbolism in house architecture, a suggestion that may help to explain the presence of a standardised house form during the Middle Bronze Age. Yet, despite the formality of the architecture, there was considerable diversity in how space was actually used within the round-house. Likewise, variability in other aspects of these settlement sites suggests that, although cultural ideals may have existed, in practice the developmental cycle of each household group depended on a particular set of social and material circumstances as well as on household members' commitment to communal tradition.

Current research on the prehistory of the Near East is proceeding at a pace unmatched since the ‘golden era of archaeology’ immediately preceding World War II. Iran, because of its great archeological potential and its stable political situation, has become a prime target for new investigations. Expeditions from the United States, Great Britain, Denmark, France, and Japan have all made substantial contributions to knowledge of Iranian prehistory in the last five years.

One recurrent problem in the new research, however, is a lack of coordination and communication between expeditions, which means that many opportunities for useful cooperation are lost. For example, in 1961 we surveyed in some 15 valleys in western Iran, plotting the distribution of pre-Uruk settlements. Unbeknown to us, at least one American and one Danish survey team crossed our path, duplicated many of our survey runs, and excavated one of the sites found on our project. We later learned that we, in turn, had duplicated several survey runs made previously by a British team, who were interested mainly in later sites but would have been happy to share their data on sites in our range of interest. Had all of us known what our colleagues were doing, we could have saved ourselves many hours of duplication.

This situation is worsened by the fact that many surveys and test-excavations remain unpublished, and diagnostic artifacts remain undescribed. With regard to pottery sequences, the urgency of the problem has recently been stressed by one of our colleagues (Young 1966: footnote 28).