It is over a decade since Palaeolithic parietal art was first spotted in Europe on exposed open-air surfaces—cave art without the caves. Now the major site in Portugal is threatened by the lake behind a river-dam under construction. Here is a report on what cave art outside the caves amounts to, and of the confrontations over the Côa site that were in the headlines early this year.

Once upon a time the characteristic way to transport the reader into another and different world was by science-fiction, through tales set into a supposed future. Now that genre is being swallowed by another, the fantasy fiction of sagas placed in a pretended past, whose usual descent is by California out of medieval, with Jean Auel’s tales of Palaeolithic Europe as a prehistoric variant. This new area of dominance for the past is worth an archaeological attention.

David Harris, its Director, reports on recent academic developments at the Institute of Archaeology, 10 years after its incorporation into University College London.

The archaeological department at the University of Bradford is the only one in Britain to be called a Department of Archaeological Sciences. Its Professor–whose own background was in physics and then chemistry before archaeology–explores the relationship of archaeology to the sciences in a contribution adapted from his talk given at Harvard University on Science and archaeology.

The Pacific Coast of Colombia has a complex history of change and upheaval. How is one to reach to it, with the variety of its human experiences? And how to grasp it from the diverse and often fragmentary sources that are its archaeology?

Mesolithic sites are rare in the Aegean, and Mesolithic burials are uncommon throughout Europe. The Mesolithic human remains from Franchthi Cave, that remarkable, deeply stratified site in southern Greece, offer a rare glimpse into the burial practices of early Holocene hunter-gatherers of the Mediterranean.

Stable-isotopic analyses of human bone, now an established aid to dietary reconstruction in archaeology, represent the diet as averaged over many years. Separate analysis of different skeletal components enables changes in diet and place of residence to be tracked, giving a fuller life-history for long-dead individuals.

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 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.

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.

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.

Across Eurasia and Africa new studies are encouraging archaeologists to rethink the age of of the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition. In the Lake Baikal region of southeast Siberia, new radiocarbon determinations on sites of difficult history suggest that the earliest Upper Palaeolithic emerged there as early as 39,000 years ago, 6000 years earlier than previously thought.

Mithraism, the Roman cult to the Persian mystery god Mithras, had a special following in the army–and a matchingly broad distribution across the Empire. The singularly uniform class of Mithraic temples came to an end in several ways, by abandonment, burning, deliberate destruction, even by planned and careful sealing. Comparison of these circumstances can shed light on the different ways in which pagan worship came to cease.

A geological look at the hard evidence of Roman stone in central Europe illuminates a major documentary source for the human experience of Roman quarrying.

A handful of finds of camel bones from Iberia now illuminate the faint story of camels in Roman and Muslim Europe–and hint at why the dromedary never became established as a domesticate in the peninsula.

Issue is taken with the arguments offered by Neeley & Barton to explain interassemblage variability in the Epipalaeolithic. The techno-typological attributes they discuss do, indeed, mark cultural/temporal traditions and there are no grounds for viewing them as representing stages within a reduction sequence.

Two further points in Neeley & Barton's 1994 paper are explored.