Issue is taken with the arguments offered by Neeley & Barton to explain interassemblage variability in the Epipalaeolithic. The techno-typological attributes they discuss do, indeed, mark cultural/temporal traditions and there are no grounds for viewing them as representing stages within a reduction sequence.

In 1989, ANTIQUITY published the ambitions and methods of a remarkable project to automate and computerize the recording and analysis of artefacts from a very large salvage program in the western United States. Here is a follow-up that explains why the methods did not realize the ambitions, and questions whether those ambitions were well chosen.

Bradley & Gordon, writing in ANTIQUITY in 1988, reported a distinct pattern in the distribution and dates of the many human crania that have been found in the River Thames. Issue is taken with that view, and the insight it promised in relating human remains to the prehistoric British interest in watery places

The bluestones of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain continue to attract controversy. New dates on Stonehenge material using the Chlorine-36 method have been reported as evidence that the bluestones were moved from their Welsh sources by human transport, not by glaciation. Here Olwen Williams-Thorpe and colleagues, who have argued for the glacial transport theory, show that the Chlorine-36 dates have been misinterpreted.

In this concluding discussion the editors explore and summarize issues in the human story of the book's Transitions.

Two further points in Neeley & Barton's 1994 paper are explored.

In 1989 and again in 1992, Antiquity reported evidence for early rice cultivation in central Thailand. A brief supplement clarifies the story.

A complement to a paper early in this year's volume of ANTIQUITY reports experience with searching for blood-residue traces with the services of a commercial testing laboratory.

In the December 1994 issue, we published a view by Meltzer, Adovasio & Dillehay of Pedra Furada, the large cave-shelter in northeast Brazil whose deposits may show a precocious human occupation of the New World. This further comment addresses natural and human agencies there, and how the research community can choose between several interpretations becoming available.

In this final contribution on the identification of the birds painted in the Palaeolithic Grotte Cosquer as Great Auks, it is noticed that the birds need to be seen within a Palaeolithic hunter–gatherer's view of the world, which is not the same as that of a modern natural historian or taxonomist.

An issue in the status of the flaked stones from Pedra Furada, Brazil is whether they are artefacts or fractures naturally made on falling stone. An experiment by other researchers is pertinent.

Joy McCorriston's paper in the March 1994 ANTIQUITY, on acorn-eating and agricultural origins, used California ethnographies as analogues for the ancient Near East. This reply explores some issues of analogy and explanation that go beyond the important specifics of the matter.