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Ethnohistoric accounts indicate that the people of Australia's Channel Country engaged in activities rarely recorded elsewhere on the continent, including food storage, aquaculture and possible cultivation, yet there has been little archaeological fieldwork to verify these accounts. Here, the authors report on a collaborative research project initiated by the Mithaka people addressing this lack of archaeological investigation. The results show that Mithaka Country has a substantial and diverse archaeological record, including numerous large stone quarries, multiple ritual structures and substantial dwellings. Our archaeological research revealed unknown aspects, such as the scale of Mithaka quarrying, which could stimulate re-evaluation of Aboriginal socio-economic systems in parts of ancient Australia.

Across Atlantic ice: the origin of America's Clovis culture(Stanford & Bradley 2012) is the latest iteration of a controversial proposal that North America was first colonised by people from Europe rather than from East Asia, as most researchers accept. The authors, Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, argue that Solutrean groups from southern France and the Iberian Peninsula used watercraft to make their way across the North Atlantic and into North America during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). According to Stanford and Bradley, this 6000km journey was facilitated by a continuous ice shelf that provided fresh water and a food supply.AcrossAtlantic ice has received a number of positive reviews. Shea (2012: 294), for example, suggests that it is “an excellent example of hypothesis-building in the best tradition of processual archaeology. It challenges American archaeology in a way that will require serious research by its opponents”. Runnels (2012) is equally enthusiastic.

The comments of Stanford and Bradley (above) do not address our criticisms and obfuscate the topic at hand with irrelevant data (e.g. the south-to-north movement of fluted points through the Ice Free Corridor), nonexistent data (e.g. ‘under the water’ or ‘destroyed sites’), and questionable data (e.g. Meadowcroft and Cactus Hill are by no means widely accepted, nor are Stanford and Bradley's ‘eight LGM sites’ in the mid-Atlantic region). Before touching on some of these points, we direct the reader to several recent articles (e.g. Morrow 2014; Raff & Bolnick 2014) that provide new evidence or arguments inconsistent with a trans-Atlantic migration, including the fact that DNA from the Clovis Anzick child (Montana) shows no European ancestry (Rasmussenet al. 2014). Although Stanford and Bradley describe their Solutrean ‘solution’ (Stanford & Bradley 1999) to the Pleistocene colonisation of North America as ‘testable’, their position is that the idea is correct until falsified. They propose that their colleagues have yet to provide sufficient ‘critiques’ or ‘challenges’ to discount it (see also Collins 2012; Collinset al. 2013). Yet they are the ones proposing a hypothesis inconsistent with overwhelming multidisciplinary evidence, and they ignore results of tests that do not support their claims.