Immediately to the north of Australia, the island of New Guinea forms the largest single land mass in the cultural area known as Melanesia (FIG. I). Politically the island is divided; to the west is the Indonesian state of West Irian, to the east is the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, at present administered by the Australian Government. While such political boundaries are disregarded as a matter of course in attempting to reconstruct the prehistory of the area, the development of archaeological research reflects, and has been impeded by, this artificial division.

Zambujal is c. 40 km. NNW of Lisbon, 11.5 km. from the Atlantic coast. A farmhouse (casal) of this name is situated on a steep inland promontory above the Ribeira de Pedrulhos. This stream flows into the Rio Sizandro near its mouth. The location of the settlement is one of easy access from the coast; at the same time it is far enough from it to be safe from surprise attacks from that direction. When approached from the coast or along the valley, the casal is not immediately visible. Its position on the mountain ridge was presumably advantageous for the fortified settlement too. From the site itself one has an excellent view of the region, including the approach routes and a strip of the coast.

In April and June 1972 Sotheby’s auctioned part of the most valuable antique treasure yet recovered from an historic shipwreck around the British Isles, and yet despite extensive publicity in the months before, in which the value of that part of the treasure was estimated at £ 1OO,OOO, not one museum approached the divers to discover what they had found. Had this been done the museum would have discovered, amongst many other things, fragments of the oldest known octant, predecessor of the sextant, and the first accurate navigation instrument, as well as one or two previously unrecorded silver coins.

In recent years research has been directed to looking for the origins of agriculture and to finding the causes of the transition from hunting and gathering to food production and the domestication of plants and animals. From these studies it has become apparent first, that the transition occurred several times and in several places in prehistory; secondly, that the mechanisms underlying the transition are quite complex; and thirdly that the transition occurred in some regions but not in others, in spite of the prevalence of similar environmental conditions and patterns of exploitation.

In the United States, prehistoric archeologyas distinct from Classical Archaeology-has been taught primarily in Departments of Anthropology. A predictable outcome of this is that students so trained have attempted to give archeology-often minimally characterized as mere excavation technique-a strong anthropological orientation. This movement culminated in the 1960s. The following brief review of books published in that decade that illustrate the viewpoint of the ‘ew archeology’ is not meant so much to be critical of as introductory to a literature.