The beautifully illustrated catalogues of Lieutenant General Pitt-Rivers collections at Farnham have recently been presented to the University of Cambridge — where they will be in the public domain for the first time. The background to the collections and their catalogues is an intriguing story, showing the precision and detail demanded by Pitt-Rivers for his Farnham Museum. We are pleased to present some examples here, printed in colour and showing the range of the Victorian collector par excellence.

This paper presents new data on agricultural production, the palaeoenvironment and social change during the Bronze Age of southeast Spain. The authors argue against the inference of irrigation as the basis for agriculture and relate the emergence of cereal monoculture to the extraction of surplus and the exploitation of human labour.

The hunting methods of the Neanderthals are rarely evident in detail in the archaeological record. Here, the rare and important discovery of a fragment of broken Levallois point, embedded in the neck-bones of a wild ass, provokes plenty of discussion of the methods of hafting and killing game in the Middle Palaeolithic of Syria.

Since 1992, on-going excavations of the Early to Middle Jomon period Sannai Maruyama site (3500-2000 BC) have uncovered the large size and complexity of this prehistoric hunter-gatherer settlement.

The bombing of the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy in 1998 provides the focus for an analysis of the political targeting of heritage in Sri Lanka.

Viet Nam has a long tradition of scholarly concern with its own past, born out of 900 years of resistance to Chinese political domination.

New incised bone and limestone Natufian objects discovered during the 1997 season of excavations at Hayonim cave (Western Galilee, Israel), as well as a bone object found earlier in Kebara cave (Mount Carmel), indicate direct connections between the two sites. The incised pattern on the slab is interpreted as supportive evidence for emerging territoriality among Natufian communities in the Levant.

Archaeological evidence and historic records are often at variance on the subject of animal husbandry. This paper discusses the problems of integrating the evidence for medieval and later Britain, and offers new discussion on the interpretation of the zooarchaeological data.

Australia has usually played a supporting role in the story of human evolution — regarded as a place at the edge of the inhabited world where modern humans arrived relatively late and then remained largely isolated from subsequent developments. However, new dates for a human burial at Mungo, New South Wales (Thorne et al. 1999) may not only force revision of views about the peopling of Australia, but also have a wider impact on ideas about modern human origins.

Ancestor worship has been a dominant religious form in ancient as well as modern China. It has shaped thought and behaviour for millennia, and has been used by élites as propaganda legitimizing their political positions. Ancestors can be created and modified, so the nature of the ancestral cult has changed through time. Using archaeological data from China, this article first enables an exploration of the earliest manifestations and the development of ancestor-worship ritual in the Neolithic period; secondly, demonstrates that lineage/tribal ancestors became state deities in the Shang dynasty (c. 1600-1100 BC); and, thirdly, investigates the process in modern history by which a legendary sage, the Yellow Emperor, was first transformed into the progenitor of the Han Chinese, and then into the common ancestor of all Chinese people.

Reconnaissance on the southern edge of the Massif Central is studying field evidence which deepens appreciation of the present-day upland French landscape as not only ‘sauvage’ but also the product of long-term use.

Discussion of the colonization of Scotland in the post-glacial period has long perplexed scholars, because of drowned coasts and archaeological evidence. This paper presents data and new speculation on the subject.

The first colonization of New Zealand is a much debated issue. The lack of appropriate absolute dating has meant chronology has been poorly understood. New 14C dating of materials from archaic Polynesian graves and occupation levels provides important precision and understanding of early exploitation on New Zealand.

In many countries of east Asia, archaeological knowledge is frequently used in the construction of ethnic histories, and the discipline of archaeology is often employed to emphasize ethnic and cultural identities (Fawcett 1995; Nelson 1995). It is thus important for archaeological research in this region to understand how archaeological knowledge is used in each country to establish national identity, to promote national solidarity, to delineate various ethnic groups and to proclaim ancestral territories, cultural antiquity and unbroken cultural and ethnic continuity.