The Kow Swamp collection of Pleistocene human remains from southeast Australia is perhaps the largest skeletal collection ever recovered from a single Pleistocene context. It was ‘returned’ for re-burial last year. John Mulvaney, a senior Australian prehistorian, reports on a situation in which the issues concerning the bones of ancient people are at their most acute.

New finds of astonishing splendour have come to light at Snettisham (Norfolk, England), a place which already holds a special, if enigmatic, place in Iron Age studies. Discoveries there first put British gold torques on the map; the magnificent great torque not only gave its name to an art-style but held a coin that helped to date it, and the very wealth of the place has provoked endless speculation.

For want of other secure evidence, the study of art in prehistoric societies normally amounts to looking at pictures, though there must have also been sound, and surely music. The long lithic tradition of central northern Australia permits a rare insight into another kind of prehistoric art, the meaning and aesthetic order that may lie behind a lithic industry.

New Zealand was the last substantial landmass to be colonized by prehistoric people. Even within Oceania, where there are much smaller and more remote islands, such as Pitcairn and Easter Island, New Zealand stands out as the last-settled archipelago. Its prehistory promises, therefore, better archaeological evidence concerning prehistoric colonization of pristine land-masses than is the case anywhere else, as is apparent in the extinction of megafauna (Anderson 1989a). But much depends on the precise antiquity of human colonization and this, following a long period of consensus, is now a matter of sharp debate.

The Deccan Chalcolithic and its sites

Systematic archaeological research began in the Deccan after 1950 when a Chalcolithic settlement was discovered at Jorwe near Sangamner in Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra state. The Deccan, which includes the present states of Maharashtra, (except for the western coast and some parts of Vidarbha in the east) and northern Karnataka, falls in a semi-arid zone with a precipitation ranging between 400 and 900 mm. There are three major river valleys in the Deccan, the Tapi in the north, the Godavari in the centre and the Bhima in the south. Microecological variations in each valley have considerably affected the settlement patterns of the early farmers. Altogether 150 Chalcolithic settlements have so far been discovered in this part of India. The Tapi valley in the north, considered to be one of the most fertile tracts in the country and well watered by the Tapi and several of its perennial tributaries, was extensively occupied, for over 100 Chalcolithic settlements have so far been discovered there (Shinde in press). It was also observed that there was a general tendency to locate a settlement away from the main river because of the danger posed by the severe monsoon floodings. Most of the settlements were located along the banks of its tributaries, which are safe. In the Godavari and Bhima basins, on the other hand, because of the inadequate perennial water supply and limited availability of fertile soil, there were sporadic settlements (Shinde 1989) (FIGURE1 ). On the basis of environmental studies, surface finds, site location, the extent and thickness of habitation deposits, the Chalcolithic sites in the Deccan have been divided into different categories such as a regional centre, a farming village, a farmstead, a herding unit, and a camp to exploit localized resources (Shinde in press).

The horse is ridden by means of the bit, and the bit leaves its trace on the horse's teeth. The beginnings of horse-riding are here identified by defining and detecting microscopic bit wear on equid teeth, using comparative samples from 4 countries and 25,000 years of prehistory. Scanning electron microscope analysis demonstrates that bit wear is clearly distinguishable from other tooth damage. It first occurs in the Ukraine, USSR, at about 4000 BC. Soon thereafter, mobility became a cultural advantage that transformed Eurasian societies. Riding now appears to be the first major innovation in land transport, pre-dating the wheel.

Surface features that possess no useful stratigraphy and are not, by their own nature, informative about their age, are notoriously hard to date. A study of associations now defines with good confidence the dates of the surface arrangements of stones and of cleared areas that make up some of the celebrated Nazca lines, Peru.

The great tells of west Asia, scenes of so many romantic assaults in the early decades of archaeology, present technical problems as challenging as any: deposits to be measured by the tens of thousands of tonnes, complex stratigraphies of re-worked mudbrick. Among the tonnes are finds that run from immense buildings to tiny seals. The venture, as often as not, has its own history going back decades. How does one approach the archaeology of a tell today? Uruk, on the south Mesopotamian plain near Ur, and best known as the type-site for the 4th-millennium city, spans 5000 years, and offers an instructive example of the scale of the problem.

Language is a feature to distinguish the ‘human’ from the ‘animal’ that has seemed a more enduring diagnostic character than some. But how is the breath of words to be made visible in the stony traces of the Pleistocene?

Excavations at the salt-making village of Kibiro, on the Ugandan shore of Lake Albert in East Africa, suggest that an important part of the economy of the Kingdom of Bunyoro originated early in the present millennium. The predominance of roulette-decorated pottery, in particular the use of carved roulettes, indicates that Kibiro was first occupied by people with northern affinities, possibly from the upper Nile region or further west. Collectively, these findings provide important clues concerning the origins of the Kingdom of Bunyoro.

In Classical times, the Indian continent was central to a trading network that ran west to the Mediterranean world revolving round Rome: despite its name, the Mediterranean was not the centre of the known world. Another world opened eastwards from India, and there are many obscure references to its eastern fringes, Now a series of finds from Bali, in the Indonesian archipelago, gives the elusive direct connection of Indian traders to that farther East.

A recent and significant improvement in radiocarbon dating has been the increased ability of the radiocarbon laboratories to provide results combining precision with accuracy. This improvement has been accompanied by increasing recognition that the information must be expressed on the calendar, rather than on the radiocarbon, time-scale. Despite the attempts of Ottaway (1987) and Pearson (1987), archaeologists are not sufficiently aware of the statistical problems involved in the transformation from one scale to the other: ‘Some of the trouble lies in the ignorance of radiocarbon consumers; the many attempts to educate them can have only limited success when radiocarbon study depends on statistical concepts and methods far beyond the average archaeologist’s innumerate grasp’ (Chippindale 1990: 203).

In a characteristically stimulating recent article in ANTIQUITY, Barry Cunliffe has touched on many of the most important issues concerning the publication of ‘rescue’ excavations in Britain in the 1990s (Cunliffe 1990). The purpose of the present article is to follow up some the points which Cunliffe has raised.

Publication, and the dissemination of information, is the lifeblood of any academic discipline, and questions of what is published (and of what is read!), where, how and by whom are of central importance for archaeology. Over the past two decades in Britain, and particularly in England where the volume of work has been greatest, there has been a recurrent concern with the problem of how to publish the results of ‘rescue’ archaeology. Rescue excavations can generate very large quantities of data, collected for reasons which are often largely beyond archaeological control, and the problems (both intellectual and practical) of publishing this material are considerable. In Britain the issues have been the subject of expert examination on two occasions since 1970 -the Frere (1975) and Cunliffe (1983) reports - and now in the 1990s the topic is firmly on the archaeological agenda again. This paper is intended as a contribution to the continuing debate.

Women's issues are deservedly a growing concern in archaeology, with concerns that run from the power (im)balance between the sexes in the present practice of archaeology to the technical question of how gender-relations are, or are not, recoverable from archaeological context. The several aspects that lie within the phrase ‘women's archaeology’are explored.

The focal point of many of the world's cities is a natural stronghold, or fortress, which may also be a religious sanctuary. The Acropolis, the great rock which stands above the ancient and modern city of Athens, is one such place. Why is it once again a place of pilgrimage? And how is its present form the result of its later history?

When did a human presence reach Crete, largest of the Aegean islands, and invitingly joined to the mainland by intervening stepping-stones? Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, or only in the Neolithic, when the deep sequence of occupations under the site of the later palace at Knossos began. How many sailed to Crete? What did they bring with them?