Abstract A non-specialist view is that the Archaean crust comprises either tonalite/greenstone belt associations or gneissic terrains in granulite facies. Archaean crustal remnants lie as undeformed pods between ramifying Proterozoic mobile belts. The cratons themselves may have unconformable remnants of undeformed Proterozoic ‘platform’ sediments. Coward, Windley and others have already drawn attention to similarities between the accretionary collage which makes Central Asia and the tectonic patterns of the Precambrian. These similarities are developed and amplified in this paper. Central Asian basins such as Tarim, Junggar and their satellites have developed on stretched continental fragments now accreted within the Asian collage. This stretched lithosphere, having been equilibrated and strengthened, now forms resistant kernels around which the surrounding ramifying accretionary deformation belts have been moulded. Enclosed foreland basins have developed on the continental fragments in response to loading of the adjacent mountain belts, and great thicknesses of mostly Tertiary sediments have accumulated in them. The ‘mobile belts’ which surround the basins have been reactivated by later, distant, collision events with corresponding loading and sedimentation events in the basin. The Black Sea and South Caspian basins are back-arc small ocean basins incorporated within the collage. They also form resistant kernels around which the mountain chains are moulded. Deep erosion levels through these systems might provide broad analogues for Precambrian tectonic patterns, i.e. the Black Sea for the tonalite/greenstone belt terrains, the deep levels of Tarim for ‘reworked’ granulite terrains like John Sutton’s homeground of the NW Highland foreland. Sutton and Watson’s two orogenies are manifested as a ductile shear fabric associated with back-arc stretching (Scourian) reworked in zones after a substantial time interval (Laxfordian). Dykes like the Scourie dykes might be associated with stretching and incipient continental separation, and therefore be close in time with the ductile stretching as, arguably, the Scourie dykes are with the late Scourian (Inverian) deformation in Scotland.