Special issue devoted to papers from the 1985 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference. Subjects include: the crucial matter of separating theory generation from theory testing; I.T. and Bayesian statistics and their possible impact within archaeology; mathematics as an aid to explanation without the necessity for deriving absolute laws of behavior; the study of hunting behavior, yields, and some aspects of assemblage formation; mathematics and the study of relationships, the improvement of data collection and manipulation, and the modelling of systems dynamics; food deposits on the interior of pots; the evolution of a Swidden horticultural system; the influence of computers on archaeological theory in both direct ways (via new data) and indirect ways (from new patterns of thought); databases, data models and archaeological theory. -- AATA