The physical scale of buildings like the Baths of Caracalla give the clearest indication of the importance of bathing in the classical order of things – though whether what Romans did in the bath was always clean and decent may be an open question. But what about the prehistory of bathing, and particularly of bathing in steam? An answer is given here which links the historical and ethnographic record to burnt mounds, among the more common and puzzling types of north European site.

Two-and-a-half years ago, in September 1991, a mummified body was discovered in a high snowfield on the Italian-Austrian border. It dates to about 3200 BC. Several sources and accounts, mostly in German, now exist of ‘Ötzi the Iceman’, but there is no collected report in English. We invited Lawrence Barfield, himself a specialist on the region and period, and co-author of one of the first Ötzi books, to review these accounts of a great prehistoric discovery.

The later prehistoric rock-engravings of Mont Bégo, in the Maritime Alps on the French–Italian border, provide a rare possibility of grasping the meaning of a group in prehistoric art. Two elements in their limited repertoire of forms are daggers and halberds, which also occur as physical objects or as images in the contemporary sites of adjacent north Italy; their contexts show they are, in that area, associated with the status of adult males in society. That same interpretation is applied to the Mont Bégo figures, and this is found congruent with other motifs — especially ploughs and cattle — in the repertoire. It may explain also the other common motif, a geometrical form interpreted as a map of a prehistoric farmstead, by associating it with plough agriculture and land division. The insights developed from the study for what ‘meaning’ amounts to in the study of prehistory are set down.

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