The authors deliver a decisive blow to the idea of unidirectional behavioural and cognitive evolution in this tightly argued account of why the bow and arrow was invented and then possibly laid aside by Middle Stone Age communities in southern Africa. Finding that all are modern humans (Homo sapiens), they paint a picture of diverse strategies for survival and development from 75 000 years ago onwards. It is one in which material inventions can come and go, human societies negotiating their own paths through a rugged mental landscape of opportunity.

In an op-ed piece on The Wall Street Journal's website promoting his latest book, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (Wilkinson, T. 2010), Toby Wilkinson draws parallels between events in Egypt's past to those in its present. “The current situation in Egypt”, we are told, “comes as no surprise to a student of the country's long history” (Wilkinson, T. 2011). It is only appropriate to observe, then, that the problematic nature of Wilkinson's book comes as no surprise to a historian of Egyptology. Both it — and the accompanying comparison of the country's past to its present — are part of a long tradition (although tradition is too positive a word) of questionable Egyptological analysis.

In recent years, Central Europe has experienced an unprecedented acceleration in social development (especially due to the demise of the communist regimes), in streams of thought (for example the post-modern vision of truth and the relativity of scientific knowledge) and, above all, in the availability of new information and communication technologies. Like every discipline, archaeology has been obliged not only to react to the contemporary dynamic but also to adapt to it in a positive — i.e. creative — way. Among the resultant trends to be noted in the Czech Republic are a decreasing interest in a single general theoretical paradigm, coupled with an increasing demand for the conservation and mitigation of sites threatened by development and looting. As a possible consequence of these developments, the past two decades have seen a shift in the agenda of archaeological researchers towards landscape and a realignment of the discipline away from the humanities and towards environmental and geographical considerations.

In early 1988 my grandfather, Robert Barron Kerr Stevenson (1913—1992), former Keeper of the National Antiquities of Scotland, was asked about his recollections of his former teacher and colleague Vere Gordon Childe. “There is”, he wrote in reply, “very little that I can say of use to you”. The reason for such a statement seems to be that my grandfather felt that his contacts with Childe had never been concerned with the broad historical and philosophical concepts that scholars were so interested in, believing rather that his own academic perspectives were more from the “worm's eye than the bird's eye view”. Yet what my grandfather knew was a more personal side to Childe that does not come across in his published works.