Abstract: Ethnographic data has been used to show that ‘most differences between hunters and farmers are a matter of degree, and there is no sharp dividing line between the two means of subsistence’ (Orme 1977, 46). The early Neolithic of southern England, as defined from the archaeological record, is likely to reflect the adaptations of a mature techno-economic system to an environment already much altered by the activities of late Mesolithic groups and immigrant pioneer ‘agriculturalists’. Case has shown the need for a long period of pioneer activity during which contact with indigenous groups would have taken place and hunting and gathering provided an essential supplementary means of subsistence (1969). By the later Mesolithic, internal population growth and the spread of closed forest, which affected the availability of food resources, may have created internal pressures on the mobile hunter-gatherer subsistence base (Jacobi 1978, Evans 1975). Zones of particularly rich resources, such as the Kennet and Thames valley, may have provided conditions which allowed a reduction in group mobility. Attempts may also have been made in other areas to increase the resources available by limited forest clearance, more controlled use of plant resources, and an increase in the exploitation of coastal environments (Jacobi 1973 and 1978, Mellars 1976, Clarke 1976). Thus, during the crucial period of contact both systems were under stress, and it is no longer valid to attempt to identify a Late Mesolithic with a purely hunter-gatherer economy which was rapidly replaced by a homogeneous group of sedentary agriculturalists with a distinct artifact assemblage.

Abstract: Five years ago, the dean of Indian prehistory, H. D. Sankalia, wrote, " . . . in a sense Indian prehistory is where the European was in 1860" (180, p. 13). If that was an excessively critical assessment of the state of the art in 1974, it certainly cannot be applied to Indian prehistory-or protohistory -in 1979. Today there are few world areas of comparable size where knowledge of the ancient past is growing so rapidly and over so broad a geographical and chronological spectrum. Far from being similar to European prehistory of 1860, Indian prehistoric and protohistoric research incorporates some of the latest advances in archaeological science. Questions that until recently could hardly be asked -about absolute chronologies, ancient environments, and human adapta­ tions-are today finding answers. Some of the salient developments within the past few years that are summarized in this paper include: the first excavation of a site in which every major stage of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic are represented (Bhim­ betka, Madhya Pradesh); excavation of open-air habitation sites of the Lower Paleolithic; the emergence of a blade-and-burin complex of Late Pleistocene age with associated bone implements and the earliest art of India; discovery of what may be the first human skull of Pleistocene date known from South Asia; the first excavation of Mesolithic dwellings and an extensive Mesolithic cemetery; evidence for animal domestication dating