Despite the ‘archaeology’ in its name, industrial archaeology is a world of its own which barely figures in ANTIQUITY or the other general archaeology journals. A consistent trend in recent archaeology has been an interest in landscapes and the physical contexts of settlement, studies by survey rather than excavation of rich spot sites for their own sake. That landscape is usually rural, and its industry – mills, olive presses, or building-stone quarries – of a pastoral nature. Here, an approach is presented in that same spirit, as the archaeology of a more fully industrial landscape.

Les Trois-Frères, in the French Pyrenees, is one of the classic sites of palaeolithic cave-art, and of Abbé Breuil's recording of it. A new survey, and new recording methods, are giving a different and a fuller picture of its art.

Curwen, writing in ANTIQUITY 60 years ago about prehistoric agriculture in Britain (Curwen 1927), found his best evidence for the fields of earliest times came from the hut-circles and enclosures of Dartmoor. Andrew Fleming has done the same in studying the large-scale land divisions made by the Dartmoor reaves. Until his work these prehistoric boundaries were thought to be of medieval date – understandably as they demonstrate not the piecemeal and local enclosing of little fields but planned land division on a medieval scale. In this paper Fleming extends his view out from Dartmoor to the wider pattern of land division on the grand scale at early dates, and to its social implications.

Next year will mark the twentieth birthday of the ‘New Archaeology’, whose founding texts – Binford & Binford's New perspectives in archaeology in the USA and Clarke's Analytical archaeologyin Britain – both appeared in 1968. Nearly two decades on, some fundamentals are not yet resolved, which may indicate – as Lester Embree argued in the last number of ANTIQUITY – that archaeology is a harder science than most.

In March 1987, Paul Mellars and Chris Stringer organized a conference in Cambridge on ‘The Origins and Dispersal of Modern Man’. This review, prompted by the conference, gives a viewpoint on the body of ideas currently circulating, based mainly on recent publications by the participants, and some others whose work is too significant to ignore.

The sources of tin in the ancient Near East have been a long-standing puzzle. Anatolia is a key area, for it has copper in vast quantities, and silver. Since no substantial or workable deposits of tin seemed to exist in Turkey, an external source for tin bronzes in Anatolia has seemed necessary. The new finds reported here change that picture, as they reveal a major source of the metal in the Taurus mountains, on the south coast of Anatolia.

A British academic abroad may find it hard to explain why his country – with a lower proportion of school-leavers going to university than in almost any other western state – sees no good cause to improve matters. For archaeology, the recent past, as is set out here, has been a story of disordered attrition; the future seems a choice between planned contraction or unplanned decay. Behind this British-parochial dilemma is a wider issue: should archaeology be a vocational training or part of broad liberal-science education? And the concern as to the minimum size of a viable archaeology department has implications everywhere, especially where archaeology is taught as one element in a broader historical or anthropological field.

For all an archaeologist's or anthropologist's professional training in how ancient societies organize themselves with ‘appropriate technologies’, it is not easy to grasp how very different those ancient civilizations were from any society we have experienced. Nowhere is this clearer than in Mesoamerica, where cities and empires had no need of the ‘basics’ of urban life as we know it. One of those ‘basics’ is wheels, discussed here in the sole, small context in which they are commonplace in pre-Columbian America.

The Spitalfields project, now moving from the field to laboratory analysis, takes the archaeological study of human burial into new areas. The preliminary results, reported here, have importance for the archaeology of Christian death and – beyond that – for wider questions in mortuary study and inference from skeletal remains and their disposition.

Japanese archaeology, in both its practice and its substantive results, has its own character. The scale of archaeological activity, especially in salvage work, is massive. The intellectual framework of study has its special concerns and aims. The cultural sequence has some exceptional features. Here the pattern of Japanese archaeology is set out with particular reference to the major new synthesis, Pearson's Windows on the Japanese past (1986, Ann Arbor (MI): Center for Japanese Studies, $26 paperback).

In the new opening-up of China to the outside world that has taken place in the last decade, archaeology and history has a major role. A walk on the Great Wall seems obligatory for visiting monarchs and presidents, while the jade princesses have themselves come to Europe. The excavation of the ‘terracotta army’ exemplifies the scale of active archaeological research, and its exposure to public view. But why is there such concern for the past, and its artefacts, in China today?