Archaeology encompasses the study of human artefacts, and the largest of those artefacts is the landscape–at least in those many countries where human settlement is old and enduring in its impact. The landscape is also the domain of natural history. Yet human history and natural history are often treated as if they inhabited separate lands, and are addressed in different terms. Here is the point of their union, through a questioning of recent approaches to archaeology.

About half a century ago ANTIQUITY published the seminal papers of Cecil Curwen on querns. We now return to the theme of flour production and David Peacock uses a computer to analyse a major collection of rotary mills.

We include here books which have been received for review, or books of importance (not received for review) of which we have recently been informed. We welcome information about books, particularly in languages other than English, of interest to readers of ANTIQUITY.

An inaugural lecture is often the occasion to stand back from the specifics and the technicalities, to see the place of our subject in a larger order of things, and to look forward to its proper future. This is what Martin Carver, the second Professor of Archaeology in the University of York, looked at and saw in his inaugural last year.

We include here books which have been received for review, or books of importance (not received for review) of which we have recently been informed.

The graphic rock-paintings of southern Africa, with their lively and colourful scenes, have long been one of the glories of the continent's archaeology. The last years have seen them become intellectually quite as graphic, as fragments of San ethnography and ethnohistory have been found to provide a commentary that allows aspects of their symbolism and meaning to be explored. This paper goes beyond, to see what can be iluminated without benefit of commentary.

As the great antiquity of human settlement in Australia becomes clear, so does the distinctive character of human adaptation in the continent. In particular, the Holocene transformation of the Australian climate led to patterns of human ecology with some characteristics of their own, and some common to regions where the Holocene changes led on to agricultural societies. Here is a case-study in that Australian history.

Crannogs, artificial island settlements built of stone and timber in lakes, are a feature of Scotland and Ireland from later prehistoric times to the medieval period. They have been absent from England and Wales until the recognition that is reported here of the Llangorse site–known and puzzling for a century–as a first Welsh crannog, and a special one.

Theory in archaelogy has largely been an anglophone enterprise, and perhaps too inbred for its own good. The main French school, known particularly from the work of Alain Gallay and Jean-Claude Gardin, was well represented at a CNRS—NSF conference on ‘Symbolic, structural and semiotic approaches in archaeology’, held at Indiana University, Bloomington (IN) in October 1987, where a small group of American, British, French and Swiss archaeologists met to confront their theoretical views. Here Alain Gallay sets out the fundamentals of the ‘logicist’ position.

During the last two decades the Broad Spectrum Revolution, a proposed food-getting adaptation of the terminal Pleistocene, has been generally accepted as an explanatory factor in the accomplishment of food production in Early Holocene Southwest Asia. A survey of faunal and other prehistoric data from the Levant is employed here to argue that wide-ranging exploitation of plants and animals had been persistent in the region from at least the Middle Palaeolithic, and that the issue of taxonomic diversity is unrelated to trends toward food production at the end of the Pleistocene.

What is one to do with megaliths, now that their classification into evolutionary sequences – the mainstay of megalithic study over so many years – seems to offer insufficient insights? Yet in some regions of Europe the great stone monuments provide the major physical evidence from their period. Here is a study of one of the megalithic zones, which seeks to find new insights by asking new kinds of questions.

Clearly the pattern of space in buildings can be expected to relate to the way that buildings are used to structure and reproduce social relations. As an archaeologist, wishing to infer social structure by its reflection in the building pattern, one may hope the relation may be reasonably direct. Here the formal geometrical method of access analysis is used to elucidate the pattern in a distinctive kind of prehistoric settlement form, and thence to elucidate the social structure which both produced it and was structured by it.