The studies in this wide-ranging volume focus on the analysis of stone artefacts and industries and on the ways these can be used to throw light on human behaviour from the earliest times. They have a broad chronological and geographical spread and pay particular attention to the information that may be sought at different levels of investigation, from the detailed examination of individual objects to regional or even continental perspectives. Papers on two parallel lines of enquiry - prehistoric art and the physical development of the early hominids in Africa - demonstrate the wider...

First printed in 1982, this is the third and final volume to be published as a result of the British Academy Major Research Project on the Early History of Agriculture, carried out in the Department of Archaeology in Cambridge under the direction of the late Eric Higgs. After his death in 1976, the Project was drawn to its conclusion by his associates, and this book is effectively a summary of the results of the Project. The first two volumes, Papers in Economic Prehistory and Palacoeconomy, argued that the development of agriculture was a much more gradual and widespread phenomenon than had...