Electron spin resonance (ESR) provides a dated sequence for a classic site in a classic Palaeolithic region, a sequence that covers that difficult period for absolute dating which has often proved too old for radiocarbon and too young for other radiometric methods.

The sling, a feared weapon in early antiquity, in time lost its force to the cutting weapons, especially the cutting weapons of the horseman, and to the shot arrow. The sling itself perishes, and the sling-shot may not be an easy object to recognize in the excavation trench. Evidence for the sling – that is, the sling-shot – in the Aegean Bronze Age is here reviewed.

An important addition to knowledge of the medieval topography of Glastonbury, Somerset.

The name of ‘Venus’ for the carved female figures of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe is an inappropriate nick-name, for we cannot be certain that they are goddesses of love nor patterns of ideal women. When analysing these figures, their shape seems to be very similar to the morphology of modern women.

Since the beginning, studies of Indo-European have seen it as a large phenomenon necessarily having a large, usually single cause. Yet apparent pattern can arise from chance causes that need have no great historical order. In a minimalist view, set out here as a theoretical hypothesis, the pattern of Indo-European can simply arise from a kind of social Brownian motion, in which a large pattern invents itself out of countless little perturbations between adjacent language communities

Issue is taken with the identification of marks on the Trundholm horse, from the later Bronze Age of Denmark, as depiction of a chamfrein.

For a century, pictures painted and carved on to rock surfaces have been a vital and alluring strand of prehistoric evidence. Yet their dating remains a fundamental problem. The last few years have seen an interest in direct dating of rock-art, both painted and engraved, using the small-sample capabilities of the accelerator radiocarbon technique. Here. issue is taken with the security of one of the new methods, the cation-ratio technique for dating engraved figures in arid regions where a ‘desert varnish’ forms - a method whose results have already been published in Antiquity in 1988 and again in the present issue (pages 246–55 above).

The site of Bronocice provides a valuable chance to explore aspects of economic changes in the later Neolithic of central Europe, thanks to its large sample of animal bones, and to a remarkable trace of haulage on a horn-core.

A new examination of the polish on Late Palaeolithic tools from the Nile identifies some kind of siliceous sheen, but shows no ‘sickle gloss’. This is consistent with the demonstration that cereals were not in precociously early cultivation in Egypt.

In another – and perhaps the last – of the sequence of contributions to Antiquity on the subject of the invention of prehistory in various lands, the example of Italy is explored. Again, the basic inspirations, especially from geology, are the same; and again the particular form of Italian prehistory also reflected, and may yet reflect, the special conditions of the nation's cultural and intellectual life in the 19th century.

Another contribution to discovering the history and origin of words for ‘prehistory’ comes from Sweden, a critical land for 19th-century archaeological ideas.

The ‘fertility symbols’ of Palaeolithic Europe run from unambiguous female effigies to shapes that may not be human at all. A view is taken of some of the forms that makes them into Mars rather than Venus.

Two material points are taken up in the matter of megalithic movement.

Some of the advantages of first-order radiocarbon dating techniques have recently been described to readers of Antiquity (Glover et al. 1990). The value of the technique is further illustrated in this note, where a similar approach has been used to date shell samples from coastal sites in southeastern Australia.