For temperate Europe, the transition to the Neolithic is still both defined by a shift from a hunter-gatherer to a farming economy and archaeologically recognized by its characteristic artefacts of pottery and polished-stone axes. But what should be the criteria in the far north of Nordic Europe, where the definition of a Neolithic is a less straightforward issue?

Are sites in lowland Europe destroyed when they are ploughed many times? In north Denmark, many Neolithic and Early Bronze Age sites are now reduced to just lithic scatters, but distinctive ‘site signatures’ persist. A lithic economic prehistory from the ploughsoil is possible and instructive.

All across the thousands of kilometres of northern central Asia — from the Baltic Sea to the Yellow Sea — burials have been key to the later prehistoric sequence. The immediate subjects of this article are three late Bronze Age burials from North China; rich and well-preserved with weaponry and horse fittings, with agate and rush matting, they tell also of the world outside China, for into one of the daggers is cast the full-face image of a Caucasian male, complete with handlebar moustache.

Industrial archaeology has traditionally concentrated on the recording and study of technological and engineering survivals — hence the name ‘industrial’ as, often, a near-synonym for ‘post-medieval’ in naming the archaeology of early modern capitalism. This study of three mundane industrial buildings draws upon building and documentary evidence as aids to understanding working structures not distinguished by technological or engineering innovation.

From Lattes, an ancient port on the low Languedoc coast of Mediterranean France, comes the material for an archaeobotanical study of the last centuries BC and the first AD. It illustrates the complexity of ways in which seeds are incorporated into urban deposits, where they are informative about cereals and vines in the town and in the countryside.

Greenland, far north land of the Atlantic, has often been beyond the limit of European farming settlement. One of its Norse settlements, colonized just before AD 1000, is — astonishingly — not even at the southern tip, but a way up the west coast, the ‘Western Settlement’. Environmental studies show why its occupation came to an end within five centuries, leaving Greenland once more a place of Arctic-adapted hunters.

‘As the glaciation ended, the ice melted and the sea-level rose.’ Yes — but it has not been as simple as that, as the Earth has adjusted in several ways to the changing surface-loads it suffers under ice and under weight of water. The important issues are set out in a simple mathematical treatment, and their varied consequences are shown for Greece and especially for the Greek coastal plains and the Greek islands, where the impact on human settlement has been large.

Intensified dryland agriculture was a component of the late prehistoric Hawaiian subsistence base. Which environmental factors permitted, encouraged, restricted, blocked the spreading of intensive agriculture into new areas of fields? A GIS study of the great field system at Kohala on the leeward side of Hawai'i Island explores the controlling variables.

The later-prehistoric linear ditches that divide the chalk landscape of Wessex, south England, are markers in an area. It is a topographic space. The ditches seem to be placed with a view to their visibility in the landscape. It is a human topographic space. A GIS study of the ditches' place, in terms of what a human sees in moving acros undulating ground, goes beyond that environmental determinism which underlies many GIS studies.

Two pure and opposing models exist to give historical account of the structure in modern cultural patterns. A phylogenetic account explores divergence from some shared commonality (the word ‘phylogenetic’ is from the Greek words for ‘tribal origins’). A reticulate account concentrates on a network of interactions (the word ‘reticulate’ comes via French from the Latin for ‘small net’). It follows that neither model may tell all the story. These continuing issues are explored with particular attention to the relations between histories as they are inferred from archaeological and from linguistic patterns.

The concepts of style and function are theoretically defined from a neo-Darwinian perspective and the expected spatial-temporal distributions of each kind of trait outlined. Fish-hook assemblages from Aitutaki, Cook Islands, are examined using this framework and related to previously studied collections. Emerging stylistic patterns support notions of interaction between certain East Polynesian archipelagos around the 14th century AD.

The archaeological evidence of the Pedra Furada rock-shelter (northeastern Brazil), showing a long sequence of dated layers from 50,000 years b.p., was questioned in a paper presented by Meltzer, Adovasio & Dillehay, who visited the region at the end of 1993, in volume 68 of ANTIQUITY (1994). This paper presents the reply of the team directly involved in the research programme in this key area of American prehistory.

In December 1993 Brazilian, European and American researchers joined forces in São Raimundo Nonato, Piauí, Brazil, to analyse the state of research on the peopling of the Americas (conference proceedings in press).

The Great Powers — starting with ancient Imperial Rome and running up to the present — have valued Classical Greek culture as embodying the founding spirit of their own, our own western world. So where does the modern state of Greece stand? It is, more than most nations, encouraged or required to share what might be its particular heritage with a wider world.

In the rough and rugged country of the Lesotho highlands, rock-paintings and archaeological deposits in the rock-shelters record hunter-gatherer life-ways; at Sehonghong, a long sequence runs from recent times to and through the Last Glacial Maximum. Survey of the region's Middle and Later Stone Age sites shows a pattern of concentrations that likely applies to other parts of the Lesotho highlands.

The nomadic peoples of central Eurasia are famous for their elaborate burial customs — both as those are known ethnohistorically and evident in the frozen tombs of Pazyryk. The Mongolian chambered grave reported here is of the 9th century AD. To that era the ethnohistorical record may have relevance in inferring its ceremony, alongside a considered knowledge in experimental spirit of just what must have taken place at the grave in order to create the certain pattern seen on excavation.

The hot and dry summer of 1995 once again proved the value and cost-effectiveness of aerial survey. Numerous parchmarks were a product of the dry conditions throughout England, but especially in chalk grassland, and they revealed important new archaeological information. A parchmark within the great Neolithic henge at Avebury identifies a new subterranean feature, confirmed by geophysical survey, which fills in further details of the Avebury enclosure.

Recent prehistoric and palaeoanthropological debate is focusing new interest on the peopling of the Americas — an old and difficult research-case. Proponents of new sites need to submit their putative 'new and revolutionary' discoveries to a wider judgement, mainly contra sceptics and partisans of more conservative theories. Such a review is helpful, and we are grateful to our colleagues for their considered assessment of the evidence proposed in our Brazilian research. Nevertheless their view of the Pedra Furada evidence has gaps, misunderstandings and ambiguities.

The ANTIQUITY paper by Neeley & Barton (1994) — hereafter ‘N&B'— prompted responses published in the June number last year: Fellner (1995) and Kaufman (1995). Here are more (all shorter than the full versions received), together with a response from Barton & Neeley (B&N) that rounds off the present discussion. The debaters have seen others’ contributions, so there is some cross-comment within them. The questions and the issues are old fundamentals of lithic research and analsis, which one cannot expect to end with this debate.

It is a singular fact that the treaty ending the brief war of 1864 between Prussia/Austria and Denmark addresses the Flensburg Collection of antiquities as an issue to be resolved by the peace. It is not a surprising fact, given the special place antiquities had, and have, in defining national identities in the Scandinavian lands. As J.J.A. Worsaae (1821–1885) said, any country which takes itself seriously ought to know about its own past.