What is the role of women in processes leading towards a more sedentary way of life? Pottery plays an important role as a functional factor and in symbolic expressions. With sedentism hearth-centred activities organized around females grew, and the position of the woman as the nurturer. Some of this symbolism, expressed on a multitude of ritual occasions, may be retrievable archaeologically.

What do we know about the effects of the transition to agriculture on human biology? A literature has grown up that gives us the impression that we know a great deal about what happened to bones and teeth when people became sedentary farmers. A review of the sources of these ideas and the evidence supporting them, especially based on work in Portugal, reveals that a reconsideration of the biological consequences of farming in Europe is overdue.

Boxgrove in Sussex has been in the headlines for its human bone (‘the first Englishman’); more to the research point is its superb in-place deposits of debris from handaxe-knapping. This is a timely moment to look once again at the reports of Worthington G. Smith, who a century ago recognized, amongst the scores of sites with river-rolled handaxes, rare deposits of a more informative character.

Modern belief in the veneration of a single Great Goddess in the European Neolithic is often accompanied by the notion that those cultures of ‘Old Europe’ were woman-centred in society as well as religion. What is the long history which precedes these contemporary notions? What is the complex history of their political development? A chain runs from Classical times to Marija Gimbutas (Meskell 1995) and our own day.

As many an excavator — and many an older person — knows, it is in the nature of human teeth to fall out, before death if they can, after and into the ground if they may not. So any consideration of tooth loss as we see it in prehistoric remains — if it is to be the cultural evidence for the deliberate removal of teeth — needs properly to identify a sufficiently distinctive pattern.

In December 1995, ANTIQUITY published contrary reports on the age of the animal and other figures engraved on open-air schist surfaces of the Côa valley in northern Portugal. João Zilhão (1995) contended that the figures, Palaeolithic in their look, are indeed of Palaeolithic age: they belong with the other Iberian sites where Palaeolithic petroglyphs survive on open-air surfaces. Robert Bednarik (1 995), using his own and others' physical-science studies, contended they were certainly under 3000 years old: the Palaeolithic presumption — and stylistic dating as a method — is false. We here print together two studies concerning the age of the Côa Valley rock-surfaces, and of the figures they bear.

In South Africa, as in so many regions, the world of dirt archaeology in shelter floors and of rock art on shelter walls, have also been rather separate as domains of study. In research at Rose Cottage Cave, bridges are being made to link both strands of evidence of the forager social strategies from which both derive.

The role of plants in the subsistence economy of pre-agricultural societies of the eastern Sahara is poorly known because vegetal remains, except for wood charcoal, are seldom found in archaeological sites. Site E-75-6 at Nabta Playa, with rich assemblages of charred seeds and fruits, is exceptional. Around 8000 b.p. the inhabitants of this site collected a wide spectrum of wild food plants. Wild sorghum was of special interest and its occasional cultivation cannot be excluded.

The Moche tombs at Sipán, on the north Peruvian coast, are a major addition to our knowledge of high-status élite burial rituals. Its Tomb 1 contains the remains of nine individuals — three adult males, one adult female, three adolescent females and one child — besides the principal burial. Who are these people, as their biological remains instruct us?

The 1950s, era of the first radiocarbon revolution, saw famous clashes between confidence in the old chronologies and the new results from radiocarbon, which sometimes appeared ‘archaeologically unacceptable’. The same issues continue in respect of the radiocarbon dating of rock art, where the sheer technical difficulty of securing a dating number in which one can have confidence, remains a large real obstacle.

Panel faces in teh Côa valley, Portugal, were available for engraving during the Upper Palaeolithic, according to 36Cl exposure ages of 16,000 to 136,000 years.

Antiquity last year reported a startlingly old series of dates from Jinmium in tropical north Australia. At Jinmium are old rock-engravings, the pecked cups or cupules that are widespread in Australia. This study of the Jinmium cupules goes beyond that immediate topic to broader issues.

What was the population of imperial Rome? City blocks in Pompeii and Ostia are sufficiently well explored that a fair estimate of population density can now be arrived at. That peoples the city of ancient Rome with roughly 450,000 inhabitants, within the known population and density range of pre-industrial and modern urban centres.

Radiocarbon ages for the Côa petroglyphs are very similar to those obtained by Watchman (1995). Fundamental problems in the use of radiocarbon dating at Côa include evidence for the addition of younger carbon in an open system, and evidence of contamination from older sources of carbon. Radiocarbon measurements, therefore, cannot be used to decide whether the engravcings are or are not of Palaeolithic age.

The Ronaldsway Culture of the Isle of Man was recognized as a classic later Neolithic assemblage over 50 years ago; its dating and duration have been matters of debate. AMS radiocarbon determinations from carbonaceous deposits on Ronaldsway-style pots resolve chronological questions, while new research provides a more secure social context.

Evidence of early occupations by hunter-gatherers in diverse tropical forests is increasing the world over (e.g. Gorman 1971; Pavlides & Gosden 1994), even in America (Roosevelt et al. 1996). This paper reports them in northern South America. Several lines of evidence suggest that many kinds of forests, some or all without modern analogues, existed in the American tropics during glacial times and remained there, with changing composition, until the present. According to evidence presented here, human beings adapted to those forests in northern South America since, at least, the end of the Pleistocene.

What were the fine garments vividly painted in the Minoan frescoes made of? Fine cotton (cotton from Egypt is still prized today)? Or the yet finer fabric of silk? And if silk, where did the stuff, or knowledge of cultivating the silk-worms, come from? A cocoon from Santorini offers new evidence.

Çatalhöyük, on the Konya Plain in south central Anatolia, in the 1960s became the most celebrated Neolithic site of western Asia: huge (21 hectares), with early dates, tightpacked rooms with roof access, exuberant mural paintings, cattle heads fixed to walls, dead buried beneath floors in collective graves.

This site, as difficult to excavcate as it is strange, is the object of a pioneering application of the ‘post-processual’ approach, hitherto largely a matter of re-working and criticism outside the trench. The Çatalhöyük project director explains his approach, in which the conclusions as well as the work in early progress will be ‘always momentary, fluid and flexible’.

What was burned in lamps in the prehistoric Mediterranean? Olive oil, as one would first suppose? Analysis of absorbed lipids preserved in the fabric of lamps and conical cups from the Minoan site of Mochlos in eastern Crete shows for the first time that beeswax was used as an illuminant.

Much of Australian prehistory lies under water. Although confined to the continent's extreme southwestern corner, field studies described in this report show that this submerged prehistoric component is very real, with numerous archaeological sites and former land surfaces awaiting investigation on the floors of Australia's lakes, rivers and estuaries, and on its submerged continental margins.