The settlement of mainland Australia at an early (and uncertainly known) date required a water-crossing. What about the settlement of the islands — neither numerous nor large compared with the island continent itself — that are offshore from Australia? The evidence reviewed shows a late settlement for nearly all of them, and a perplexing lack of pattern.

A timely book now in press explores the roles of drink and drugs in the lives of prehistoric Europeans. Here, an analysis of diagnostic forms in the megalithic art of Irish passage-tombs—with its spirals, lozenges and turning curves—develops the explorations of that visionary interpretation begun by Bradley in 1989.

The wetter tropical zones of northern Australia are linked by their monsoonal climates. Their archaeology shows its own distinctive pattern as well, and rock-art is an important source of evidence and insight. This study focusses on a part of Queensland, setting this local sequence alongside Arnhem Land (reported by the paper of Taçon & Brockwell) and in the northern pattern as a whole.

For a century a notion of a prehistoric Mother Goddess has infused some perceptions of ancient Europe, whatever the realities of developing archaeological knowledge. With the reverent respect now being given to Marija Gimbutas, and her special vision of a perfect matriarchy in Old Europe, a daughter-goddess is now being made, bearer of a holy spirit in our own time, to be set alongside the wise mother of old.

Dolní Věstonice, a classic Palaeolithic site, is a crucial place for our understanding of human settlement in glacial Europe. In that central European zone of moving national boundaries, it has been crucial in another sense; frontiers, ideologies and attitudes have moved across the place, each time re-making the frame of ideas through which it is seen. Those changes continue. Dolní Věstonice is presently located in the Czech Republic, a state founded in 1993: it remains a site alive in history as well as in prehistory.

A characteristic feature of human subsistence as the last glaciation ended was the turn towards new food sources, in a ‘broad spectrum’ transformation. Australia took an unusual course, and the trajectory in its arid zone is especially striking. What were the broad spectrum diets in arid Austalia? Why did they arise so late? Did they arise late?

In the Kumaun region of Uttar Pradesh, India, on the southern slopes of the Himalaya are cist burials, as well as megalithic monuments. Radiocarbon dates from the cists now hint at their going back to the 3rd millennium BC, and linguistic affinities would associate them with early Indo-European migrations into the western and central Himalaya regions.

When was silk first brought across the steppe from far China towards the European world? There is silk from the Middle Bronze Age of Uzbekistan, in Scythian burials of Siberia and among the Hallstatt grave-goods of western Europe. Teasing out the story of silk depends on identifying the textile, and distinguishing its several varieties apart.

The study of gender in ancient societies seems inseparable from the place of gender in our own society–and therefore inseparable from the particular attitudes and expectations those contemporary manners create. This BIG problem is explored, and some approaches to its resolution are developed.

A linear earthwork in lowland Scotland, known a couple of centuries and often thought to be connected to Roman military operations on this far north frontier, is shown to be a Neolithic feature of a kind more often seen further south in Britain.

Stone artefacts are made central in Australian prehistory by their dominance in the material we have from the field. Their contribution to this prehistory comes in the form of an unchanging tradition that spans the transition and changes only in the mid Holocene. This makes the Australian record almost unique in the world; but it is a uniqueness that may owe more to archaeological methods than cultural conservatism.

New discoveries across the steppe zone of eastern Europe, and new dates relating to those discoveries, keep that oldest of archaeological puzzles, the Indo-European question, happily unanswered. A version of this paper was given at a 1994 meeting, on ‘Language, culture and biology in prehistoric central Eurasia’—its title a reminder that the biological view of Indo-European may again be a growing interest.

Previous articles in ANTIQUITY have taken different views of the dating pattern for the human settlement of Australia. Is the apparent limit in the region of 35–40,000 years ago visible in the radiocarbon determinations a real date for the human presence? Or is it an artificial result of the dating method? A comparative study of the dating pattern in archaeological as against non-archaeological contexts may inform.

The hippopotamus is a large beast with large teeth—large enough for hippopotamus ivory, then and now, to be a useful alternative to elephant ivory (there are both kinds in the Aegean Bronze Age, as well as the little tusks of wild boar). A newly found cache of hippopotamus ivory at Gao, medieval city of the south Saharan edge, opens a wider place for the material in contact across the great north African desert.

When a distribution map of Neolithic stone axes in Ireland was published in ANTIQUITY (Grogan & Cooney 1990), the new Irish Stone Axe Project (ISAP) was mentioned. Stone axes, it turns out, are unusually common in Ireland. Here Project progress is outlined, with special attention being given to those axes identified as having been moved across the Irish Sea.

Britain in 1995 enjoyed a dry summer, with the longest hot spell since weather records began. The air photographers enjoyed a good year. This report from the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England sketches both their own work and that of the independent fliers.

Dalmatia, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic Sea, is a region of contact between the several worlds of the early metal ages–the Danube region inland, the Adriatic coasts and beyond towards the sea. New finds from caves and burial mounds, and new radiocarbon dates help tease out complexities in the region's cultural order.

Australia, with its wide continental shelves, is a difficult region for the study of coastal adaptations over the Transition, as so much land was drowned by the post-glacial sealevel rise. What can be discerned has a place in a larger and longer-term pattern of adaptation.

As well as jade, obsidian, chert and limestone, the Classic Maya of Central America were accomplished workers of another stone–slate. Recent research at the site of Pacbitun, Belize, where a possible slate workshop has come to light, is cause to look closely at Maya slate-working and the scientific means to study it.

First generation modelling of cultural systems, as applied in archaeology, frequently invoked linear, deterministic relationships as well as privileging concepts such as stability and an assumed cumulative evolution towards increasing complexity. But can the world of human affairs with its numerous reversals and unintended consequences really be captured by such models? Recent advances in the natural sciences have demonstrated the central role of non-linear phenomena, discontinuities and unpredictable breaks from established patterns and events. It is argued that such findings can form the basis for a new theoretical framework, human ecodynamics.