A key place in the 19th-century view of the British prehistoric landscape was taken by an ancient wonder which was was not a human or artificial device at all. An account of this anomaly is called for.

The last decades of fieldwork have not decisively upset the long-held view that the settlement of the Americas occurred in the very latest Pleistocene, as marked in North America by the Clovis archaeological horizon at about 11,200 years ago, and by a variety of contemporaneous South American industries. Yet there are several sites that may prove to be older, among them Pedra Furada, in the thorn forest of northeastern Brazil, a large and remarkable rock-shelter, whose Pleistocene deposits have been interpreted as containing clear evidence of human occupation.

This paper offers a considered view of Pedra Furada from three archaeologists with a wide range of experiences in sites of all ages in the Americas and elsewhere, but who also share a special interest and expertise in the issues Pedra Furada has raised: Meltzer from long study of the peopling of the Americas and the frame of thinking within which we address that issue (Meltzer 1993a; 1993b); Adovasio from his intensive excavations and analysis of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, the prime North American pre-Clovis candidate (Adovasio et al. 1990; Donahue & Adovasio 1990); and Dillehay from his work at the Monte Verde site in Chile, a site in which extraordinary preservation has produced a rich archaeological record with radiocarbon ages in excess of 12,500 years b.p. (Dillehay 1989a; in press). At the invitation of the Pedra Furada team, the three travelled to Brazil last December to participate in an international conference on the peopling of the Americas, and see first-hand the evidence from Pedra Furada.

A reappraisal of the artefactual and chronological evidence for the earliest occupation of Europe — with proper attention to its limitations and its reliability — makes for a short chronology. The first solid traces of hominid activities in this part of the world are around 500,000 years old.

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.

The tangled dynastic history of Tonga, celebrated kingdom of western Polynesia, offers a rare chance to study the place of monumental burial-places in a chieftains’ society. Disentangling the story, at a remove of not many centuries, is not a simple business.

Granito del foro is a distinctive igneous rock, in fact a granodiorite rather than a granite, long known and named for its use in buildings of the Roman Forum. Exactly what is it? Where does it come from? Where else was it used and not used? What does the granito del foro say about ownership and empire?

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.

While the caves round Oban, on the west coast of Scotland, are famous for their Mesolithic artefacts, they have also produced Bronze Age finds and numerous burials. Radiocarbon dates on human bones from one cave show these to be Iron Age, suggesting the Obanian assemblages are composites accumulated over millennia.

Take six early Chinese cities from the key Eastern Zhou period, study their shape and topography, see how their development represents both migration into the urban centres and the established structures of the ruling class.

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.

Ireland is important in the early metallurgy of northwest Europe, for it has given us a large majority of the Early Bronze Age artefacts from the whole British Isles. Is there tinore to have been mined in early Ireland to produce this bronze or must it have come from elsewhere?

The commensal rats — notably the black rat Rattus rattus and the brown R. norvegicus — are among mankind's most destructive and dangerous enemies, and have spread relentlessly with humans across the globe. A decade after an important ratty meeting at the Natural History Museum, London, in 1981, this noxious rodent pest is again reviewed.

The story of a city that was built close by a river must be a watery one. Here is an archaeological and geomorphological study of a medieval Thai city that experienced flooding and sedimentation throughout its life.

‘What must it have been like to be here in ancient times?’ — where ‘here’ is inside one of the Great Zimbabwe enclosures or a Mesoamerican ball-court. An architectural approach to built spaces may make coherent that felt experience, here applied to the Loughcrew chamber-tombs, classic built spaces of Irish prehistory.

Northern Australia is one of the very few regions of the world where an established tradition of rock-art has continued and extends into present-day knowledge. Excavation of deposits under the painted surfaces allows the age of the paintings to be estimated, by linking across to these deposits and their dateable contexts. One can begin to assess the antiquity of those systems of knowledge and of ‘signifying’.

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.