Abstract: The earliest reported discovery in South Asia of human skeletons associated with Mesolithic cultural materials occurred in 1880–1881 at Mahara Pahar, Uttar Pradesh, India (Allchin, 1958; Carlleyle 1883, 1885). In the full century that has elapsed since the date of Carlleyle’s survey, the Mesolithic skeletal record has increased considerably (Kennedy 1980). Today skeletal biologists may turn to research materials from South Asia that are commensurate in size and preservation quality with Mesolithic series from Europe, Africa, and the Levant. South Asian collections are datable within a temporal range extending from the terminal Pleistocene times of ca. 12,000 years b.p. (before present) to the periods of establishment of Neolithic communities in the northwestern sector of the subcontinent by the seventh millennium b.c. and by some 4000 years later in peninsular India. Thus, they are contemporary with other Mesolithic skeletal series recovered from sites outside of South Asia. Also, certain economic and technological aspects of the hunting—gathering Mesolithic life-style persisted until historic times in some tribal areas in India. Distribution of the Indian Mesolithic is attested to by the archaeological evidence scattered across the South Asian landmass from Afghanistan in the west and eastward to Assam, from the Kashmir Valley of the Himalayan ranges southward to island Sri Lanka.

Abstract: Excavations of neolithic sites in the Aegean are summarized. The essential characteristics of the Aegean Neolithic are discussed with particular reference to settlements: a series of ‘cultural units’ resulting from this discussion are analysed, and their chronology compared.

Abstract: (1984). Chronological and Regional Variation in the Late Mesolithic of Eastern Denmark. Journal of Danish Archaeology: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 7-18.

Abstract: Best known as a major prehistoric ceremonial centre, the Avebury region has also yielded a wealth of information regarding the origins, ecology and development of neolithic farming systems in the chalklands of southern England. This paper draws the various strands of evidence together, considers interpretative problems such as pollen survival, the status of bracken, the significance of forest regrowth, etc., and concludes by reconstructing the interplay between man and his environment during this crucial stage of economic development. Some form of mesolithic participation in early cereal cropping and barrow building is identified, and indeed, in being valley-based from the outset, neolithic settlement and land use patterns form a continuum with what had gone before. The spread of agriculture is seen to have had adverse consequences, not least of which were concomitant bracken invasions. In adapting to these more difficult secondary environments important social and economic changes occurred within the local farming communities.

Abstract: A summary of the main approaches to the study of megaliths reveals how recent processual work that relates them to general principles fails to deal with the specificity of their variability, and their particular historical context. A systematic comparison between central and western European megaliths and central European long-houses in the 5th and 4th millennia reveals eight points of similarity. It is suggested that the tombs represent a transformation of the houses. This may be understood in relation to a transformation in the productive base and social organisation of the period. The specific form of the houses is related to the marking out and naturalisation of the position of women, and the importance of lineages at a time when labour was the key factor in the productive system. When the scarcity of land becomes predominant over the scarcity of labour, the emphasis changes from the domestic context of the home to the mediating properties of the supernatural expressed in the tombs, for control over the lineage. The evidence for Central and Atlantic Europe is compared. The history of research on the megalithic monuments of western Europe provides a clear illustration of the deleterious effects of the split between historical and processual approaches in archaeology. In this paper, some of these effects will be illustrated, but then, using essentially the same material, an alternative approach will be examined. A perspective that treats the evidence as ideologically informed representations can resolve the previous dichotomies and indicate the potential in the study of prehistoric social relations.