Cambridge Archaeol J 14 (1)

The wave-of-advance model has previously been applied to Neolithic human range expansions, yielding good agreement to the speeds inferred from archaeological data. Here it is applied for the first time to Palaeolithic human expansions by using reproduction and mobility parameters appropriate to hunter-gatherers (instead of the corresponding values for preindustrial farmers). The order of magnitude of the predicted speed is in agreement with that implied by the AMS radiocarbon dating of the late-glacial human recolonisation of northern Europe (14.2--15.5 kyr BP). The authors argue that this makes it implausible for climate change to have limited the speed of the recolonisation front. It is pointed out that a similar value for the speed can be tentatively inferred from the archaeological data on the expansion of modern humans into the Levant and Europe (42--36 kyr BP).

an attempt to develop a highly theorized archaeological epistemology in relation to the question raised in the title of the special section

a discussion of intentionality and selection in the knapping of stone tools, and its application to lithic assemblages

Responses to 2004/124, and a reply from the authors, including

Response to the critique put forward by Patricia Helvenston and Paul Bahn in a privately published paper, `Desperately seeking trance plants', and of the model proposed by J D Lewis-Williams and T A Dowson in 1988 and by Lewis-Williams in 2001 to account for mental imagery as perceived by people in `certain altered states of consciousness' that they believed inspired Palaeolithic cave art.