It is a startling experience to look down a microscope at a stone tool — a real Palaeolithic artefact, not a modern thing or a replicated copy — and see on its flint surface grubby brown-red stains that look the colour of old blood. Is a consensus emerging from the archaeological scientists as to just what traces of, especially, biological materials do survive on ancient stone surfaces, where they can be reliably characterized and identified?

The end of the Cold War in 1989 prompted the opening of central European skies that had been closed to archaeological air photography for decades. The occasion of a summer school in 1996 provided the opportunity to record some results from Hungary.

The well-protected walls and floors of deep caves are some of the few places where human markings on soft materials — sands, muds, clays — survive archaeologically. Since 1979, a special group of caves in the eastern United States has been reported with ‘mud-glyphs’ or prehistoric drawings etched in wet mud. Here, the seventh of these mud-glyph caves is described; once again, its iconography connects it to the ‘Southern Cult’ or ‘Southeast Ceremonial Complex’ of the Mississippian period.

The nature and date of the human colonization of Australia remains a key issue in prehistory at the world scale, for a sufficiently early presence there indicates either Homo sapiens sapiens arriving precociously in a place remote from a supposed African origin, or a greater competence in sea-crossing than has been expected of archaic humans. Stratigraphic integrity, the new science of luminescent dating and the recognition of worked stone and of rock-engraving are immediate issues in this report from far northwestern Australia.

Three carved wooden images have come to light in Jamaica, the most important find of Taíno carvings for two centuries from that island. Their discovery prompts a reconsideration of Taíno zemís, and their placing into the known context of the Caribbean region, with its South American links.

Among the industrial crafts introduced into the Hispanic New World was the growing of grapes, and the making of wine at a grand scale. The technology and the artefacts of wine-making in Spain were, in their turn, largely those of the Roman world. These continuities, and their changing contexts, are evident in this study of the wine-making bodegas of a Peruvian valley.

Do gender roles, or expectations about gender roles, affect what kind of study is pursued by the individual researcher? Has excavation been rather a man's business? And if so, have other kinds of study — regional survey, for example — rather become women's business? These issues are explored as they are illuminated by the research careers of two eminent Australian contemporaries.

A lake-sediment sequence from Marcacocha in the central Peruvian Andes provides a well-dated and continuous vegetation record from an area rich in Inca and pre-Inca remains over the last 4000 years. Climatic changes in this record at AD 1–100 and AD 900–1050 seem to be broadly contemporaneous with major arid events from Lake Chichancanab, Mexico, affecting the Maya civilization and corroborated by the Quelccaya and Huascaran ice cores in Peru.

The impact of the human presence on the fauna of a Pacific island is often immediately archaeologically visible in the slaughter of its land birds seen in the bones. The impact on vegetation is less distinct archaeologically, and many of the Pacific cultigens have soft tissues which rarely preserve. So a study of prehistoric agriculture on one of the high Micronesian islands largely involves pollen and charcoal.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?