The thriving study of acoustic archaeology is here applied to an excavated plaza site in Peru, where the authors show that an intimate sound-space was intended, one which featured panpipe music as well as the spoken word. Their method involved the measurement of three sound levels of speech at various distances from the plaza, giving us an easy-to-use mode of on-site investigation, which will surely win wide application. The study also showed a dramatic change from the use of acoustics in a previous period, where sound was canalised in U-shaped temples in order to address large numbers of people.

John webb, in his preface to Inigo Jones's posthumously published Stonehenge, in 1655 says : ‘This discourse of Stonehenge is moulded off and cast into a rude Form, from some few indigested notes after the late judicious Architect, the Vitruvius of his Age, Inigo Jones’. Upon these notes, Webb undoubtedly dined not wisely but too well and I trust I shall not be accused of doing the same with Colonel Hawley's many and well digested notes. I have one advantage over Webb in that I have seen Stonehenge, and I very much doubt whether he had.

In describing the stones, I shall begin at the centre and work outwards, taking as centre the point where a line drawn from stone 91 just inside the bank to stone 93, and a line from hole 92 in the middle of the supposed barrow to hole 94 in a similar barrow in the NW quadrant, cut each other and the axis of Stonehenge. It is from this point as centre that all the black circles on the plan are drawn. The axis is a line through the centre, which divides the stones and earthworks into two equal parts.

Instances of cultural interaction between Norse and native American have long been accepted. But current archaeological research recognises that the indigenous peoples of the north were themselves diverse and had diverse histories. Here the author shows that the culture of one of them, the Dorset people, owed nothing to the Norse and probably had no contact with them.

Double infant burials in unusually high numbers occurred at Khok Phanom Di during a phase associated with immigration and some evidence of early agricultural practices. A study of their stratigraphic context and relative ages led to the interpretation that these were twins. Through an exploration of the medical and anthropological literature of twins, and in conjunction with their mortuary context, the authors conclude that these babies died of natural causes at, or soon after, birth.

N&B, incorrectly attributing variability in these assemblages as representing strategies in lithic reduction, give as an example the differentiation between the Mushabian and the Geometric Kebaran complexes. Their thinking the microburin technique was used by the Geometric Kebarans but is masked by retouch on these trapeze/rectangles (sic!) suggest to me they have either never seen Geometric Kebaran and Mushabian microliths (although I understand that Neeley visited Goring-Morris' laboratory) or they cannot recognize microburin scars when they see them. In my original publication on the Mushabian (Phillips & Mintz 1977), they would see microburin scars on lamelles scalènes which were partially retouched in the Mushabian. Having recently analysed 12 Mushabian sites from Gebel Maghara, containing over 5000 microliths and 3000 microburins, and three new Geometric Kebaran sites from Sinai, containing over 800 trapeze/rectangles and no microburins, I can attest to the differences between these two assemblages in terms of reduction sequences, style of debitage, and the morphology of geometric and non-geometric microliths.

Ritual practices and their associated material paraphernalia played a key role in extending the reach and ideological impact of early states. The discovery of a leather bag containing snuffing tablets and traces of psychoactive substances at Cueva del Chileno in the southern Andes testifies to the adoption of Tiwanaku practices by emergent local elites. Tiwanaku control spread over the whole of the south-central Andes during the Middle Horizon (AD 500–1100) but by the end of the period it had begun to fragment into a series of smaller polities. The bag had been buried by an emergent local elite who chose at this time to relinquish the former Tiwanaku ritual practices that its contents represent.

The question of human contacts between Africa and the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle and Upper Pleistocene is of key interest in research of human origins. Discussion continues to focus on whether the sea gap separating the landmasses proved an effective barrier to cultural interchange and population movements. At its narrowest point the Gibraltar Strait is no more than 14 km wide and at times of lower sea level in the Pleistocene the gap would have been considerably reduced by the exposure of several offshore islands. Such sea crossings were apparently well within the capabilities of early human colonizers, as shown by the 800,000-year-old occupation of islands in the Indonesian archipelago. Despite these observations, many archaeologists have pointed to the ostensible lack of evidence for human interactions between Europe and North Africa until some time in the Upper Palaeolithic. This is surprising, given the presence of populations in both areas from the Lower Palaeolithic onwards. Such an ‘isolationist’ view is emphasized by the recent work of the Gibraltar Caves Project (Barton et al. 1999; Stringer et al. 2000) which has shown that Neanderthal populations with Middle Palaeolithic technology lived there until at least 32,000 years ago uncal, at a time when anatomically modern humans were already present elsewhere in Europe and Africa. Until now, no evidence of Neanderthals has been found in North Africa but the dating and nature of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in this region remains poorly understood.

Kristian Kristiansen takes issue with Cornelius Holtorf's vision of a people-driven archaeology; and the popular context replies in kind.

The first person to introduce these bowls to the archaeological world as a group, and with appropriate comment, was that profound student of Celtic art, the late Mr J. Romilly Allen; subsequently, Mr Reginald Smith set himself the task of making a complete list of all the bowls, or parts of bowls, that were known, and he has since placed us further in his debt by the care he has taken in seeing that every new example, as it came to light, was adequately recorded. Since Mr Allen wrote his paper, however, we have not made very much headway with the main problem of deciding their position in the cultural history of this country; even the recent discovery of the beautiful Winchester bowl, that excited us so much in 1930, was allowed to pass without any revision and revaluation of the really astonishing material that had been collected by Mr Smith, and it seemed that the chief interest aroused by the bowls was for ever to be focussed on the apparently insoluble problem of their use. But last year my friend Mr J. D. Cowen published a paper that constitutes in many respects a very important advance; it was the stimulating kind of article that often provokes other people into rival activities, and I hope it will not be counted against him if I admit that one of his results was an immediate decision on my part to put into print the notes I had collected on this same subject. It is Mr Cowen's distinction that he is the first to isolate and appreciate the ‘heater’ group of bowls, to which I shall refer below, and there are several other points in his very vigorous paper that strike me as being valuable and sagacious observations. But what I have to say here and now is that if Mr Cowen is right throughout, much that I am going to say below is completely wrong.