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.

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.

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?

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?

The megalithic monuments of western Europe have long been a celebrated proof of the engineering achievements possible in an early farming society. With the engineering skills to raise up the stones went the capability to move them to the site, with Stonehenge the best-known example of an apparent long-distance transport, incorporating Welsh bluestones and sarsens that perhaps originate in the Avebury region to the north. Following their recent challenge to the belief that the builders of Stonehenge did carry its bluestones from west Wales, the authors look critically at the larger pattern of megalithic manoeuvring.

Although - or because - the 19th century saw great archaeological interest in the standing buildings of medieval England, the early legislation to protect British ancient monuments expressly excluded church buildings that were still in use. A new measure, just come into force, gives cathedral archaeology a formal place, and makes this a timely moment to see what kind of work which the archaeology of a standing cathedral can now amount to.

Flint quarries in the Rohri hills supplied stone to the city of Mohenjo-Daro, out on the silty river-plain and lacking local supply. A new survey has identified workshop sites and an extraordinary scale of production.

The relationship, chronological and cultural between Wessex and Mycenae, was much argued about some 20 years ago, as the implications of radiocarbon calibration were taken note of. New finds from Switzerland, somewhat midway between south England and south Greece, offers some fresh evidence.

There is a large gap between the fact of a radiocarbon determination and the archaeological answer to the question to which it relates. The first part of the gap is addressed by calibration, that turns a measure of 14C activity into an estimate of a calendar date. Here is a contribution to the second part, by which a set of calibrated dates is made to provide a calendar range for the archaeological events under study.

This note follows ANTIQUITY's usual convention, under which uncalibrated determinations are given in lower-case, b.p., and calibrated dates in small capitals, BP, BC or AD.

An important addition to knowledge of the medieval topography of Glastonbury, Somerset.

Issue is taken with the identification of marks on the Trundholm horse, from the later Bronze Age of Denmark, as depiction of a chamfrein.

A new examination of the polish on Late Palaeolithic tools from the Nile identifies some kind of siliceous sheen, but shows no ‘sickle gloss’. This is consistent with the demonstration that cereals were not in precociously early cultivation in Egypt.

The ‘fertility symbols’ of Palaeolithic Europe run from unambiguous female effigies to shapes that may not be human at all. A view is taken of some of the forms that makes them into Mars rather than Venus.