Two-and-a-half years ago, in September 1991, a mummified body was discovered in a high snowfield on the Italian-Austrian border. It dates to about 3200 BC. Several sources and accounts, mostly in German, now exist of ‘Ötzi the Iceman’, but there is no collected report in English. We invited Lawrence Barfield, himself a specialist on the region and period, and co-author of one of the first Ötzi books, to review these accounts of a great prehistoric discovery.

On the North Yorkshire Moors, in northeast England, is a series of linear boundaries which are characteristically placed across upland spurs and promontories. Survey and excavation suggest that these boundaries operated in conjunction with natural features to define areas of the prehistoric landscape which may have been concerned with ritual during the final Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.

Striking among the figures of the Grotte Cosquer, the Palaeolithic painted cave newly discovered in Mediterranean France, are some waterbirds. They are identified as Great Auks, the great and extinct ‘penguin’ of the northern ocean.

For the most part the Pleistocene, and even the earliest post-glacial, is a blank when it comes to evidence of humans eating plants. No wonder the old men's stories, of chaps who hunt great mammals and eat their meat, still dominate our unthinking visions of hunter-gathering in that period. Some real evidence, slight though it is, from a classic European Upper Palaeolithic site provides a more balanced view.

A careful survey of reports of early sheep in southernmost Africa combines with new radiocarbon dates to revise our knowledge of early pastoralism in the Cape. The new chronology shows the keeping of domestic stock and the making of pottery are not simultaneous and intertwined but separate events in a more complex history.

As one digs back through the archaeological record, art and other evidence of symbolic behaviour becomes scarcer, so it is much disputed just when human marking behaviour and human language began. Is the fading away a real fact of prehistory, or a distorting effect of selective survival?

A growing quantity of data about the late Pleistocene sequence in Tasmania has not been matched by an equivalent clear understanding of just what are the patterns of its lithic record. A new model is developed.

Field survey of an unexplored zone of southern Africa enlarges and develops knowledge of the region's prehistory.

Since cereals and legumes were successful domesticates, archaeologists and botanists have investigated early domestication with particular emphasis on these plants. What about other foods, which may have been staples in their own time, for which we have no simple continuity into a later subsistence in the classic region of Near Eastern domesticates? The mediterranean climate, and the lifeways, of California provide an analogy.

Across the rocky landscapes of Egypt lies evidence for pharaonic quarrying and mining; fresh fieldwork at neglected sites, such as the Hatnub travertine quarries and the Wadi el-Hudi amethyst mines, now tells us more. The surviving remains of quarrying and mining settlements suggest subtle adaptations in versatile response to changing economic and geographical parameters.

The civil war in the former Yugoslavia, the largest conflict in Europe for half a century, is more than incidentally about objects from the past and proofs of past possession. Here is a report on some of the specifics and some of the generalities.

The genetic history of wheat is the story of the world's temperate staple food. Arcahaeologically, charred grains are the common way wheat is preserved. Study of burnt spelt wheat from the British Iron Age shows DNA is present, and begins to shows the wheat's character.

There is more to a cremation than the human bone — turned white and blue-grey by the fire, enough to fill a fair-sized hat — because so much may go on the pyre with the corpse.

Palaeolithic people could foresee their technological future no more, or even less, than we are able to. They never said, ‘The Middle Palaeolithic has gone on quite long enough — now we'd better get on with a transition to the Upper.’ So what is one to make of those precocious lithic industries which prefigure key features of later innovations, the industries which ‘run ahead’ of their own time?

A report on human representations in cast bronze and terracotta from a Late Bronze Age cemetery near Grozni in the Checken region of the northwest Caucasus.

In 1989, we reported the state of affairs at the Rose, and in 1992 at the Globe, the two Elizabethan theatres in London which survive archaeologically. They are the unique remnants of a unique and uniquely valued kind of building, Shakespeare's workplaces. On December 1993, Sam Wanamaker died, whose inspired scheme to re-make a Shakespearean Globe using evidence from these remnants is at last being built. We asked Andrew Gurr, co-author of our two reports, to tell us what is happening at both original theatre sites. His story is of scenes that are, by Shakespeare's standards, most static.

D.E. Nelson (1993), in the last ANTIQUITY, declared doubts about an old date for rock art in northern Australia we published in 1990. T.H. Loy, another co-author of the original paper, confirms his continuing confidence in the determination.