The rock art of Southeast Asia has been less thoroughly studied than that of Europe or Australia, and it has generally been considered to be more recent in origin. New dating evidence from Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, however, demonstrates that the earliest motifs (hand stencils and naturalistic animals) are of late Pleistocene age and as early as those of Europe. The similar form of the earliest painted motifs in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia suggests that they are the product of a shared underlying behaviour, but the difference in context (rockshelters) indicates that experiences in deep caves cannot have been their inspiration.

The article by Bahn and Pettitt (above) carries the suggestion that the diverse dates obtained for Candamo in some way throw doubt on those for Chauvet and by implication on the performance of the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (LSCE) at Yvette-sur-Gif (Gif). The authors respond. Readers might also like to note the article by Marian Scott and colleagues which follows.

Western Arnhem Land is a small area (by Australian standards) on the north coast where remarkable sequences of sediment illuminate its complex landscape history. Matching the enviromental succession is an archaeological sequence with lithic sites running back into the Pleistocene. The famous richness of the region's rock-art also documents the human presence, again over a great time-depth, and gives a direct report of how ancient Arnhem Landers depicted themselves. By ‘bridging’ between these three themes, a rare and perhaps unique synthesis can be built.

The authors report on investigations at quarrying sites on Mount Pua, Israel. they suggest that the area shows a degree of industrial organization from the late Lower Palaeolithic with a resultant impact on the landscape.

Pecked figures – seeming to depict humans, animals, objects and ‘abstract’ shapes - are an important and recalcitrant aspect to the archaeology of the desert USA, in the Great Basin and the Southwest. Where they are covered by desert varnish, they provide an opportunity for an absolute dating by cation-ratio method. Here - as they did not for a similar study in South Australia reported in an earlier Antiquity - the cation-ratio dates do seem to run alongside the chronological pattern inferred by conventional means.

New dating of several key sites in eastern Central Europe refines our view of human presence there around the Last Glacial Maximum. The author shows that, with the advancing Ice Age, this part of Europe was abandoned later than the west, and a critical environmental factor was increasing aridity rather than the dropping temperatures.

The chambered long barrow known as Wayland's Smithy lies a little south of the crest of the Berkshire Downs, about a mile west of the Uffington White Horse, within an oval plantation of beech trees. The excavation here described was carried out during II weeks in 1962 and 1963 under the direction of Professor Stuart Piggott and the writer. The barrow has now been restored to its appearance in antiquity, so far as the surviving features allow.

Before excavation, the site appeared as a long low mound, much flattened by cultivation and erosion, with a length of about 200ft. and a maximum height of about 4ft. above the surrounding surface. At the south end were the ruined remains of a cruciform burial-chamber constructed of large sarsen slabs, in front of which was a line of four large fallen stones, evidently parts of a massive fayade similar to that of the West Kennet long barrow. To the east, a row of four smaller sarsens, still upright, marked the line of the kerb of slabs which had once delimited the mound. A sketch made by John Aubrey in the mid-17th century shows that apart from the presence then of additional visible kerb-stones the appearance of the site has altered little in the last 300 years.

While palaeobotanical remains provide clear evidence for the exploitation of the date at various locations in Egypt and Nubia, it is the detection amongst lipid residues in closed form vessels of fatty acid distributions dominated by diagnostic short-chain fatty acids, i.e. C12:0 and C14:0′ that provides the first direct evidence for the processing of palm fruit in pottery vessels.

Travellers naturally prefer to use the most passable routes and establish staging points on the way. Cost surface analysis predicts the easiest routes and viewshed analysis the territory visible from a staging point or destination. Applying these GIS techniques to the Buenavista Valley Corridor, our authors write a history of travel and exchange that vividly reflects the rivalry of two polities and the rise and fall of their nodal settlements.

The Paso Otero 5 site is located in the middle basin of the Quequén Grande river (Buenos Aires Province, Argentina). This site is the first recorded Pleistocene-Holocene archaeological context in the grasslands of the Interserrana Bonaerense Area at which extinct megamammals and a ‘fish-tail’ projectile point have been recovered in association from buried soil dated to c. 10,200–10,450 BP.

The term 'catastrophe' in my title is not chosen idly, but reflects the now well-established fact that Earth is experiencing (anthropogenic) climate change at a rate and scale unparalleled in human history (IPCC 2007a). Dramatic events such as the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 are so unexpected that one retains a clear memory of precisely when and where one learned of them. Regrettably, climate change is subtler, its effects slower, its consequences less immediately obvious. Yet something of the same is true. In my own case, I vividly recall the moment when I first grasped what it might mean. At the 1993 Kimberley meeting of the Southern African Society for Quaternary Research (SASQUA), a presenter commented that her palaeoenvironmental research, which reached back through the Holocene, might, perhaps, be relevant to modelling future climatic change. Back came the comment from another participant that the Holocene climatic 'optimum' was far from relevant; a bestcase analogue might instead be the conditions prevailing during the Pliocene, 5.3-1.8 million years ago.

Did Neanderthal hunters drive mammoth herds over cliffs in mass kills? Excavations at La Cotte de St Brelade in the 1960s and 1970s uncovered heaps of mammoth bones, interpreted as evidence of intentional hunting drives. New study of this Middle Palaeolithic coastal site, however, indicates a very different landscape to the featureless coastal plain that was previously envisaged. Reconsideration of the bone heaps themselves further undermines the ‘mass kill’ hypothesis, suggesting that these were simply the final accumulations of bone at the site, undisturbed and preserved in situ when the return to a cold climate blanketed them in wind-blown loess.

Stable isotopes extracted from two hominins and a range of animals from the original Neanderthal site shows these Middle Palaeolithic people to have been hunters predominately on a meat diet. Comparison with other specimens further south suggests this diet – deer, but no fish or plants – to be something of a behavioural norm, whatever the latitude and plant cover.

The postmodern, or ‘postprocessual’, tendency in contemporary archaeology pays much attention in its rhetoric to that wider public, that wider constituency whose views of the past may not match much or at all with the academics. What happens when the realities of archaeology in the real world meet with those of postmodern theory?

It all began in a railway carriage. Two businessmen, travelling to the Kingston Assizes in Surrey, nodded to each other as strangers do, but did not strike up a conversation. They were expert witnesses appearing for different sides in the Croydon Water Question; a legal test case that boiled down to who owned the undergroundwaters of London (Mather 2008: 83–4). Joseph Prestwich (Figure 1a), the older by 11 years, represented the water suppliers. As the train rattled along under full steam he would have seen landmarks from his pioneering geology of the London Basin. But water was not his business. His family ran a profitable wine importers. Geology, however, was his passion.

The authors summarise the latest evidence for the introduction of rice cultivation into northern China, and show that it most probably began there in the early seventh millennium BC as a result of influence or migration from the Yangtze Valley.

The authors present the discovery of a Han period farming site sealed beneath 5m of flood deposits, where courtyard houses have been excavated belonging to the Western Han Dynasty and Wang Mang period (c. 140 BC–AD 23). Preservation is exceptional, both at the village of Sanyangzhuang itself and, by dint of satellite reconnaissance, over a vast landscape contemporarily covered by the flood. Deep profiles show that here land surfaces of the Neolithic and Warring States periods also lie buried. The potential for the study of the early agricultural sequence and a deeper knowledge of Han society is truly outstanding. The discoveries also offer a vivid account of the way a settlement was overwhelmed by flooding.