The Levantine Epipalaeolithic, c. 20,000–10,000 BP, represents one of the most intensively studied periods in prehistoric research in the past 30 years, with literally hundreds of sites being discovered and many systematically investigated. The researchers involved come from a diverse range of backgrounds and national 'schools', and include American, Australian, British, French and Israeli scholars. Some, myself included, see its variability in chipped stone tool morphology, techniques of manufacture and specific means of hafting to reflect, in addition to functional factors, the stylistic traditions of specific groups in the landscape (Bar-Yosef 1991a; Goring-Morris 1987; 1995). This evidence is further bolstered by chrono-stratigraphy, settlement patterns, inter- and intra-site organization and patterning, as well as other material culture residues (Goring-Morris 1989a; 1989b; 1991).

In contemporary green perceptions, rainforests are an Eden of biodiversity. But they seem also to be a famously hard environment for human subsistence, with foods scattered or high up beyond reach — which is why reports of Palaeo-Indians' flourishing in the Brazilian rainforests have caused surprise. What place do the rainforests have in Aboriginal Australian settlement, as archaeologically perceived?

Under and behind the splendours of Maya ceremonial buildings are the craft skills of the artisans who put them up. A first find of a lime-plaster kiln, from Copan in Honduras, illuminates one of those technologies, the burning of lime in a closed oven rather than on an open-air pyre.

The Holocene mud-flats of Formby Point, at the mouth of the Mersey estuary in northwest England, have long provided information about their palaeoenvironment. Now they yield a more direct evidence — in the form of preserved footprints — of the people and animals that frequented the foreshore.

An important step in our knowledge of the British Lower Palaeolithic has been the finding that its two recognized components, ‘Clactonian’ and ‘Acheulean’, are not ranged into a simple sequence; the exact relationship between the two is the subject of much debate. What does this do to interpretations of Swanscombe, classic site of the Lower Thames Valley, which has been studied in terms of stratigraphic succession?

A little bow — at less than half a metre long too small to be a practical tool — comes from the later prehistoric Fenland of east England. Along with the wristguards, fine arrowheads and smoothing stones of the British Bronze Age, it tells of the special meaning of archery in later prehistory — whether in the animal chase or in human combat.

The relationship between raw material availability, economizing behaviours and technological procedures undoubtedly influenced the configurations of Levantine Epipalaeolithic assemblages, as has been well recognized for over 20 years (Bar-Yosef 1970; Henry 1973). Other 'functional factors' have also been examined — environmental settings, settlement mobility and provisioning strategies. While each factor has been shown to have influenced the specific configurations of Epipalaeolithic assemblages, none (other than broad environmental settings) has been shown to account for the large-scale patterned variability that distinguishes the three major taxa, the Geometric Kebaran, Natufian, and Mushabian complexes. This is why most prehistorians working in the region hold that ethnicity, at some scale, provides the most robust explanation for the patterned variability observed and for the temporal and geographic distributions at the taxonomic level of 'complex'.

It has been received wisdom for nearly half a century that 6th-millennium BP models, discovered at Eridu in southern Mesopotamia, are the earliest direct evidence for sailing-boats. Yet certain features of the models, and their contexts, identify them instead as spinning bowls used by weavers.

Different models of stone-working technology in the Upper Palaeolithic are tested by examining an assemblage from Haua Fteah, on the Libyan coast of north Africa. Evidence that some scrapers have been reworked into burins, while some burins were modified to form scrapers, show how this typically Upper Palaeolithic industry contains morphological transformations between types. This evidence is consistent with a technological continuity from the Middle Palaeolithic.

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.

Canarium is a group of rainforest trees found in southeast Asia and into the Pacific, whose nuts are edible. The nuts have quite often been found in early archaeological contexts: that evidence and the palaeobotanical record largely deriving from pollen now enables some rounded account of the early human place of the tree and its nuts.

Until modern cultivation invaded even the permanent pasture-land, the ubiquitous trace of medieval farming in the lowland English landscape was ridge-and-furrow. A record in themselves, the undulating slopes are now seen to act as a device to preserve older features underneath.

Museums across the USA are busy carrying out their new obligations under NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. There is more to the mood than some change in how human remains are curated in archaeological and anthropological collections.

New dates and new finds give cause to look again at that central issue in later European prehistory — the origin of wheeled light vehicles of battle.

Enclosed prehistoric spaces can have fine echoes. The Hypogeum, celebrated underground ossuary of Neolithic Malta, is the most resonant place to chant a rhythmic ‘Oum’. Are the acoustic features of structures like the megalithic chambers of northern Europe integral to their design? An expert description of their acoustic properties is the point to start.

The reactions to the N&B essay tell more about epistemological concerns (or lack thereof) than they do about construals of pattern and of what pattern might mean in Levantine Epipalaeolithic archaeology.

We thank those whose interest in the Levantine Epipalaeolithic has led them to comment on our research. Such public discussion of differing interpretations is vital to understanding the past. In this article, we briefly respond to some of the points raised by those writing in this issue (G.A. Clark, N. Goring-Morris, D.O. Henry and J.L. Phillips) and in a previous issue (Fellner 1995; Kaufman 1995) of ANTIQUITY.

The spy satellites — by repute of the thriller writers — have such good image-resolution that they can read the letters on a vehicle licence-plate. A generation after LANDSAT imagery vividly showed broad ecological zones, higher resolution pictures are now being released of a quality to allow practical archaeological application. The example printed here illustrates the Stonehenge landscape — a little patch of southern England that is among the most photographed archaeologically anywhere.

Pontnewydd, in north Wales, is known as a rare Middle Pleistocene site in northern Europe with human remains. Radiocarbon AMS dates identify human specimens, deriving from later use of the cave at Pontnewydd and its neighbour Cae Gronw, that have no part in its earlier story.

A defined ‘Mesolithic’ era is a fixture in the cultural sequences of European prehistory — though not of other regions of the world. Why and how did the entity come to be invented, and to take just that form?