The treasures from Troy, removed from Berlin to be kept quietly in Moscow and–it now proves–in St Petersburg these last 50 years, are now being seen. Here is a first first-hand report on just what they amount to.

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.

The Canary Islands, 1000 km southwest into the Atlantic from Iberia, are close to the African coast; at the latitude of southern Morocco, they are far southern outliers to Europe as presently defined by its nation-states. The archaeology of their indigenous people, the Guanches, is caught up now in the contemporary politics of the Islas Canarias.

A recent court case in Australia changes the established frames under which research archaeologists, parks administrators and Tasmanian Aborigines deal with the prehistoric archaeology of the island.

The obscure and ugly language of theoretical archaeology conceals as well as reveals fundamentals that no real practice of archaeology can actually escape. In this paper, revised from a plenary address at the TAG conference at Bradford last year, one of the cannier of the old hands puts some of those fundamentals into proper place.

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.

We asked Sarah Colley, who teaches Aboriginal archaeology and heritage management at the University of Sydney, Australia, to give an account of the 3rd World Archaeological Congress, held at New Delhi, India, 4–11 December 1994, as she experienced it.

The Pleistocene to Holocene transition is both a reality of climate history, and a notion of the prehistorian. A century of approaches to Australian archaeology guides the frameworks of the issue today.

The wider context to events at the World Archaeological Congress — 3, held in New Delhi late 1994, that were reported in the March 1995 ANTIQUITY.

Australia, a dry island continent in mid latitude, spans from tropical to cold temperate regions; long isolation has given it its own flora and fauna. Environmental changes in the late Quaternary have had their own and special courses in the continent and its several regions. The role of fires set by people is an important issue in the changing ‘natural’ landscape.

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

The Côa petroglyphs, seen in the established framework of rock-art studies, belong in the corpus of west European parietal art of late Pleistocene age, as found in scores of caves and some open-air locations. One of the four researchers who this summer studied the age of the figures using ‘modern rock-art science’ summarizes the group's' conclusions, and states how they kill off the stylistic dating of Palaeolithic rock-art.

A comparison of the evidence for the earliest scripts in different parts of the world suggests that an apparent preponderance of ceremonial; and symbolic usage should not be interpreted too literally. It seems to have more to do with archaeological preservation–the better survival in archaeological contexts of the durable materials preferred as vehicles for ceremonial texts–than with any deep-seated differences in the function of the scripts. It may well be that the earliest Chinese, Egyptian or Mesoamerican texts were largely as utilitarian in their application as those of Mesopotamia.

Thirty years ago, the finding of a single hand-axe in Greece was remarkable enough to have its own note in ANTIQUITY. A recent conference is occasion to review the regional picture, now broad as well as deep enough for patterns to emerge which look more like early prehistoric realities than the chance consequence of where the pioneers have been looking.