bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Rural Archaeology of Roman Gaul
Authors: Percival John
Published: January 2016

For obvious reasons, any question concerning the rural archaeology of the Roman West is likely to begin and end in France, and the necessity of taking the French evidence on any given topic into account is something of which non-French historians and archaeologists do not need to be reminded. The fact that such evidence is so often unsatisfactory and incomplete is frequently ascribed to inferior excavation techniques or methods of presentation, but although this is all too often the case a large part of the trouble seems to stem from the lack of proper co-ordination with regard to problems and programmes of study. It happens to be a fact that French archaeologists, in this particular field, are not always interested in the same topics, and are consequently not asking the same questions as their English counterparts. The questions and interests that lie at the back of the excavator's mind as he works are bound to colour the content and composition of his final report, and, unless these questions and interests are brought into the open and written down, the value of the material he provides is bound to be limited. Consequently, any publication which, however slightly, sets out the principles and aims of French rural archaeology is to be welcomed.
British Strip Lynchets
Authors: Macnab J. W.
Published: January 2016

One difficulty with the interpretation of strip lynchets has been caused by our traditional viewpoint: we have stood in the valley and looked up at them. In Asia terraces do start at the foot of hills and are constructed upwards. Perhaps unconsciously we have believed that strip lynchets were created in the same way. The uniqueness of these terraces may lie in their construction from the top of the escarpment downwards. Many difficulties are resolved when we stand and look at the terraces from above. Then we observe a flight of steps and perhaps it was down these that agriculture passed from downland to lowland.

It is generally believed that in Britain there were two independent agricultural origins, that primitive farmers first cultivated the light soils of the chalk downlands and western hills, and only later, after a heavy plough had been introduced from abroad by invading peoples, were the heavy soils of the lowlands tilled. Rarely is it believed that lowland agriculture in Britain developed from downland agriculture, that agriculture had undergone continuous development and that one type had merged into the other.
Mycenae, 1968
Authors: Taylour Lord William
Published: January 2016

The principal object of the campaign was to demolish the great baulk that had purposely been left unexcavated from the very beginning to provide a record of the stratigraphy of the site.* This earth was now required by the Restoration Department of the Greek Archaeological Service to secure and safeguard the mud brick walls that were destroyed in a great fire in Late Helladic IIIB towards the end of the 13th century BC. The intensity of the fire had served to preserve these walls in their original state, though off axis, and they are the most complete examples of their kind on any Mycenaean site. The second object of the excavation was to uncover the rest of the plan of the LH IIIB walls which in the western sector of the site are buried below the postdestruction walls of LH IIIB/IIIC. The second objective was only in part accomplished because of the remarkable and outstanding finds that were brought to light, mostly under the great baulk. The work of their recovery sIowed down the excavation considerably. At the east central end of the great baulk a small room, c. 2 m. x 2 m., was uncovered that was filled with a great variety of clay objects in considerable disarray (PL. xra; see plan, FIG. I,I). Outstanding among these were idols from 0.50 to 0.60 m. in height of a kind that had never been found on the Greek mainland before, although somewhat similar examples are known from Gazi in Crete [I]
Neolithic Explanations
Authors: Case Humphrey
Published: January 2016

A prehistorian, like any other historian, should aim not only to describe, but also to explain. . .' Thus Childe's valediction (1958, 6). But we frustrate ourselves unless fiercely selective in explaining traces of small farming (or hunting) communities near subsistence level, with the critical apparatus of contemporary or 19th-century industrial societies; conceptions wholly arising from such societies are likely to be appropriate only to them." Yet we cannot easily avoid these errors, for we are alienated from our material-and not only by time. Schools of archaeology are necessarily urban, draw deeply on traditions of longestablished urban institutions. The conditions of that pre-industrial life which was almost the whole of reality to our ancestors may seem inconceivably remote-and disappointing, distasteful even.
Phaistos: new light on an old palace
Authors: Branigan Keith
Published: January 2016

Keith Branigan, Professor of Prehistory and Archaeology in the University of Sheffield, has written for us a review article on Doro Levi's massive excavation report on his excavations at the palace of Phaistos in Crete: Festos e la Civilta Minoica I, i and II, ii (Incunabula Graeca LX. Institute for Mycenean and Aegeo-Anatolian Studies: Rome, 1976. 864 pp., 86 col. pls., 248 black-and-white pls., 1,214 figs., 39 plans. Lire 250,000; £162). Professor Branigan was one of only two Britons who had the opportunity to supervise excavations at Phaistos under Professor Levi's direction. In his review here, he concentrates his discussion on the problems of the first Minoan palaces, in the light of the Phaistos excavations.
Lucas de Heere's Stonehenge
Authors: Bakker J. A.
Published: January 2016

Dr Jan Albert Bakker, of the Albert Egges van Giffen Instituut voor Prae-en Protohistorie, University of Amsterdam, presents us with what he has called, in a letter to the Editor, ‘an article on sixteenth-century Stonehenge drawings, partly well-known, partly not’. His main concern is with the Flemish painter Lucas de Heere's drawing and description of Stonehenge. Published in 1937 by two Dutchmen, it is perhaps fitting that it has taken a third, in Dr Bakker, to draw the attention of British archaeologists to what they have overlooked for more than 40 years. Dr Bakker, who has excavated and studied hunebeds and their contents in Drenthe, was stimulated by Professor Piggott's ‘Ruins in a landscape: essays on antiquarianism’ to study the authorship and the nature of the L.D.H. drawing of Stonehenge. Dr Bakker would like to express his gratitude to Miss Linda Therkorn, Amsterdam, for assistance in preparing this article in English.
Les Fouaillages and megalithic origins
Authors: Kinnes Ian
Published: January 2016

The island has a fine series of surviving megalithic monuments with passage graves such as La Varde and outstanding examples of ornate statue-menhirs as at Câtel (Kinnes, 1981). There are distinctive local variants, as in the cellular elaboration of the Déhus tomb and the regional style of cist-in-circle monument. In terms of islands as laboratories of prehistory it is instructive to note that these structures survive only where protected from the ravages of agriculture, here on the sterile sand-drift of the north and the rocky promontories of the west coast. Sporadic records and the place-name evidence studied in detail by de Guérin (1921) indicate the extent and unevenness of destruction. Of some 70 monuments thus recorded only 12 survive in any recognizable state, and earlier density at about 1 per sq. km is an important corrective to attempts at territorial analysis based on extant distribution.
Frederik Sehested: a Danish pioneer
Authors: Thrane Henrik
Published: January 2016

No one could wish for a more auspicious initiation into the world of archaeology than Frederik Sehested (PL. LX). He was 20 when the greatest gold treasure in Denmark was found on the family estate of Broholm, and it was largely through the efforts of his mother and himself that the treasure was saved. It must have been a great moment when he accompanied his mother to Copenhagen and witnessed the handing over of the treasure into the hands of the by then famous C. J. Thomsen in the rooms in Christiansborg Castle which housed the still infant Museum of Northern Antiquities. Many years later Sehested (1878) wrote a sober account of the event but the excitement still remained with him and couldn’t be drained from the account. The reader gets a lively impression of the atmosphere on the estate during those spring days of 1838.
The plan of Viroconium Cornoviorum
Authors: Wilson D. R.
Published: January 2016

Most of the Roman city of Viroconium Cornoviorum at Wroxeter (Shropshire) was purchased for the nation in 1973 to protect its remains, which mainly lay in arable land, from further damage by the plough. This part of the city, beyond the limits of the Department of the Environments's Guardianship site, is known very largely from crop-mark photography, tracing the lines of buried foundations by corresponding patterns in a growing cereal crop (Frere & St Joseph, 1983, 162–6). This technique continues to yield results, for ploughing at Wroxeter is regulated rather than prohibited, and never to better effect than in the dry summer of 1975, when excellent marks developed to west and north of the Baths (PLS. XIV, XVI), and in 1976, which afforded new details to south and east of them (PL. xv). At the request of the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings vertical photographs were taken by the University of Cambridge to form the basis of a new plan of the known remains. The potential of air photography for reconstructing such a plan had been shown by Webster and Stanley (1964), using the photographs of Mr Arnold Baker, but much more had been learnt about certain areas both by Mr Baker and by Cambridge University since then.
The future of archaeology in British universities
Authors: Austin David
Published: January 2016

A British academic abroad may find it hard to explain why his country – with a lower proportion of school-leavers going to university than in almost any other western state – sees no good cause to improve matters. For archaeology, the recent past, as is set out here, has been a story of disordered attrition; the future seems a choice between planned contraction or unplanned decay. Behind this British-parochial dilemma is a wider issue: should archaeology be a vocational training or part of broad liberal-science education? And the concern as to the minimum size of a viable archaeology department has implications everywhere, especially where archaeology is taught as one element in a broader historical or anthropological field.
Reburying Australian skeletons
Authors: Webb S.
Published: January 2016

Dr Webb, as a physical anthropologist working in Australia, is one of the professionals whose work would most directly be affected by reburial of human skeletal remains. He gives here, at the invitation of the editor, his impressions of reburial issues in Australia; the opinions expressed here are strictly his own and may not reflect those of his colleagues.
Tutankhamun and the end of the 18th Dynasty
Authors: Fairman H. W.
Published: January 2016

It would be presumption for a non-medical man to comment upon the anatomical findings of Professor Harrison and Dr Abdalla until the facts and the inferences that can be drawn from them have been fully published. This article, then, cannot claim to be more than a commentary and speculation on those facts that are at present available.
The Greeks in history and prehistory
Authors: McNeal R. A.
Published: January 2016

Anyone who tries for long to penetrate the fascinating world of the prehistoric Aegean becomes aware very quickly of a certain malaise in the works of modern scholars. It is now a century since Schliemann first dug at Troy, and the mass of archaeological evidence continues to increase at an almost alarming rate. I say ‘alarming’ because the pace of excavation threatens to outrun our ability to assimilate and control the evidence.
Megalithic lunar observatories: an astronomer's view
Authors: Heggie D. C.
Published: January 2016

Although several studies along broadly similar lines have been attempted by other authors in the past, it will benefit any archaeologist approaching the work of Professor A. Thom for the first time to do so with a fresh mind. What is new about Thom’s approach to this subject, which many astronomers find equally absorbing, is the care that has evidently been bestowed in the measurement of the sites themselves, the attention to detail that characterizes the reduction of this data, and finally the great volume of source material which, in his books and other writings, he has put at the disposal of others. Previous work seems by comparison to have been of lower accuracy and restricted to at most a few sites, of which Stonehenge figures most frequently.
How old is the Berkshire Ridgeway?
Authors: Steane John
Published: January 2016

In a letter to Dr Mead in 1738, Francis Wise discussed the location of Alfred's famous battle-ground of Ashdown and described it as ‘containing large tracts of down and sheep pasture where the great Western road passes at this day, being called the Rudge or Ridgeway’ (Wise, 1738). Sir Richard Colt-Hoare rode along the Ridgeway in 1815 and wrote ‘these ridgeways were the roads made use of by the earliest inhabitants of Britain as lines of communication between their different towns and villages. They generally followed the highest ridges of land on which also we find their habitations: they were not paved with stone and gravel as in later times by the Romans but their basis was the firm and verdant turf’ (Colt-Hoare, 1819). His description is the first itinerary of the route now followed with delight by thousands. He passed Wayland's Smithy, and Uffington Castle, following then with a long and speculative account of the battle of Ashdown. He was not immune to the enjoyment of a view. ‘Hitherto the ridgeway had afforded no attraction with respect to country or view, its chief interest was from a recollection of the important historical events which had transpired on its borders, but on proceeding eastwards the eye was continually amused by an extensive prospect over a rich vale extending to Oxford on the left, with numerous church turrets peeping forth amidst the dense foliage with which the country is overspread. The scenery at the right exhibited an open and cultivated extent of land. A few barrows occurred occasionally alongside the trackway but I did not see any other marks of ancient population.’
What future for Stonehenge?
Authors: Chippindale Christopher
Published: January 2016

Like many researchers since, William Stukeley in the mid-eighteenth century wondered why the site of Stonehenge had been selected for the Britons' most sublime temple. It was chosen, he decided, according to the ancient notion of placing temples 'in clean and distinct areas, distant from profane buildings and traffic' (Stukeley, 1740, 11) (Pl. xxiia). Two hundred years on, Stonehenge is set about with traffic, busy main roads running past on both north and south sides, and profane buildings have appeared—the Larkhill military complex on the northern skyline, and the Stonehenge car-park and visitors' facilities close by on the north-west.

For several centuries now, Stonehenge has been among the most visited of British ancient monuments. Records of tourist day-trips from Salisbury via Old Sarum (still a favourite outing) go back more than 400 years (Folkerzheimer, 1562), and Stukeley (1740, 5) talked of its 'infinite number of daily visitants'.
Structuralism and myth in Minoan studies
Authors: Bintliff John L.
Published: January 2016

Nick Humphrey, of King’s College, Cambridge, in a recent broadcast on Human Evolution, made the following comments (slightly paraphrased from my notes of the radio broadcast): ‘Man, in comparison to the chimp is a forgetful ape. Chimps in experiments have a remarkable visual memory, recalling for example 25 complex patterns. Some humans can do the same, but rarely, and often where there is a brain malfunction as with epilepsy or damage to the parietal lobes. In effect it is characteristically pathological. Why was this facility suppressed? In order to replace this means of storing knowledge with a new way of thought. Not one of counting objects or observations as particular, but instead ordering such data into general models of things and situations, as with the Platonic Ideal forms. This was the birth of symbolic thought.’
Clarence Bicknell: archaeology and science in the 19th century
Authors: Chippindale Christopher
Published: January 2016

The Italian resort of Bordighera, on the Riviera close by the French border, still has a little to show from the time, a century ago, when its British population-at least in the winter ‘invalid season’- ran to more than 3,000 and outnumbered the native Italians. The Hotel T. Windsor (‘T’ stands for tennis; the Bordighera tennis club, founded by the British, is the oldest in Italy) flourishes; prim municipal notices-‘A polite behaviour will be enjoyable for everybody’ and ‘Free bathing, clean holidays’-assert Edwardian proprieties. And tucked away in a side-street among the villas, its pink-washed facade frothing with wisteria, stands the Museo Bicknell, built in 1886 by an English amateur botanist, Clarence Bicknell. His foundation continues as the regional research institute, the Istituto lnternazionale di Studi Liguri. Clarence Bicknell (1842-1918) appears in none of the histories of archaeology, but his work deserves to be remembered. His study of the bronze age rockengravings of Mont BCgo, in the Maritime Alps above Bordighera, was the first adequate work on an Alpine rock-art tradition, and the forerunner of the astonishing discoveries over the last 30 years in Valcamonica (Anati, 1961; 1980), at Sion (Gallay, 1972) and now in the Aosta valley (Daniel, 1983). Bicknell's life and work, beyond its intrinsic interest, is an illuminating case-study in the history of the discipline, during that crucial late 19thcentury period when antiquarianism was everywhere giving way to the new science-based archaeology. Finally, Bicknell-though not in the major league with Buckland or Petrie-in his quiet way deserves a place in the gallery of archaeological characters.
Siticulosa Apulia revisited
Authors: Whitehouse Ruth D.
Published: January 2016

In recognition of the significance of these sites, and those of the classical and medieval periods also revealed by aerial photography, the Apulia Committee was set up under the auspices of the Society of Antiquaries to organize a systematic programme of research. Unhappily this enterprise, begun with great intentions, became an early victim of tragic illness and accident of the chief protagonists and latterly has fallen into the malaise characteristic of old archaeological projects that have lost their initial momentum. All that is available in print is three preliminary reports in ANTIQUITY (Bradford & Williams-Hunt, 1946; Bradford, 1949; Bradford, 1950), some further information in Bradford's book Ancient landscapes (1957) and a few articles by other authors that arose as a result of work sponsored by the Apulia Committee. Of the series of monographs initially envisaged by the Society of Antiquaries, none has yet appeared, though at the time of writing (June 1984) the first-on the neolithic sites-is now advertised (Jones in press). In the years since 1945 there has been considerable work on the Tavoliere, most of it by Italian scholars, Further aerial photography has greatly increased the number of known sites (Odetti, 1975), while excavation and some field survey have gathered information about the nature and chronology of the sites.
The neolithic stone axe trade in Britain
Authors: Cummins W. A.
Published: January 2016

For over thirty years, work has been in progress on the petrological examination and identification of stone implements. This work, initiated in South-Western England, has as its object the determination of ‘early trade routes and other factors of economic and social importance in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age times’ (Keiller, Piggott and Wallis, 1941). During this period, eight regional reports have been published, five dealing mainly with South- Western England (Keiller, Piggott and Wallis, 1941; Stone and Wallis, 1947; Stone and Wallis, 1951 ; Evens, Grinsell, Piggott and Wallis, 1962; Evens, Smith and Wallis, 1972), one with Yorkshire (Keen and Radley, 1971), one with East Anglia (Clough and Green, 1972) and one with Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire (Cummins and Moore, 1973). In these and other publications (e.g. Fox, 1964; Fell, 1964) distribution maps are given for the products of the various axe factories. Such maps show the extent of dispersal of the factory products, but fail, in themselves, to give much information about trade routes and other factors. Group I axes are found in Yorkshire, some 550 km. from their source in Cornwall; Group IX axes are found a similar distance from their factories in Northern Ireland; and Group VI axes are widespread up to 500 km. from their Lake District factory sites.
Hegel in prehistory
Authors: Hanbury-Tenison Jack
Published: January 2016

Mr Jack Hanbury-Tenison is a Field Director of the University of Sydney excavations at Pella, and has combined this with doing surveys of his own in Jordan to pick up settlement patterns in the fourth millennium. In writing a thesis on the Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze I transition in Palestine and Transjordan he says he is trying to steer a course between the anti-empiricism of the New Archaeology and the positivism of the Kenyon school. He says, engagingly, that ‘what got me on to Hegel and Darwin was wondering where people got their loopy ideas from’. This essay is a plea for commonsense, and an understanding of how pastoralists use the landscape today. Hanbury-Tenison is a research student of Magdalen College, Oxford.
William Stukeley: new facts and an old forgery
Authors: Piggott Stuart
Published: January 2016

We print here a slightly revised version of a lecture given by Professor Stuart Piggott to the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society at Devizes on 15 October 1985. It includes new material, particularly relating to the Richard of Cirencester forgery, that has come to light since the publication of his book on William Stukeley, the new edition of which was recently reviewed in these pages (1986, 67–8).
Burkitt's milestone
Authors: Schrire C. , Deacon J. , Hall M. , Lewis-Williams D.
Published: January 2016

Almost sixty years ago, Miles C. Burkitt, Lecturer in Prehistory in the University of Cambridge, visited South Africa at the invitation of the University of Cape Town where his former pupil, A.J.H. Goodwin had recently started work. The purpose of the visit was to show Burkitt the sites and elicit his opinions in preparation for the meeting of the British Association in South Africa the following year (Burkitt, 1962, 37; Goodwin, 1958, 32). It seemed appropriate, at a time when the work of South African archaeologists has been denied a hearing by the Southampton World Archaeological Congress, that we should publish an account of recent work there and current perspectives on Southern African prehistory. The authors of this article are: Carmel Schrire, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University; Janette Deacon, Department of Archaeology, University of Stellenbosch; Martin Hall, Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, and David Lewis-Williams, Department of Archaeology, University of the Witwatersrand.
Archaeological retrospect 10
Authors: Clark J. Desmond
Published: January 2016

Desmond Clark, who has just retired from his Chair at the University of California at Berkeley, and in whose honour a special congress on African prehistory was held in his own department a few months ago, here looks back at his life in archaeology and at archaeology in his lifetime. It is the tenth and last in our series. All ten articles are being republished by Thames and Hudson.
Early British craftsmen
Authors: Piggott Stuart
Published: January 2016

Professor Stuart Piggott published his British prehistory in the Home University Library in 1949, and his Neolithic cultures of the British Isles five years later. Now a third of a century later he reviews five new books dealing with pre-Roman Britain, with special reference to early Celtic art (listed below). His comments on the 1921 and 1939 finds from Grimes Graves are intriguing.
The Wessex culture: a minimal view
Authors: Coles John , Taylor Joan
Published: January 2016

The purpose of this paper is to present some facts that appear to have been under-estimated or overlooked in the consideration of the graves of the Early Bronze Age in the Wessex region, that is, the material remains of the ‘Wessex culture’. We are not concerned in this paper with the evidence or non-evidence for connexions between the Wessex region and Mycenae (Renfrew, 1968), nor do we consider that anything new can be stated about the ‘radiocarbon age’ or the calendar year age for he Wessex graves, particularly in view of the fact that no radiocarbon dates are available for this material. What we intend to show is that the division of the Wessex graves into a traditional Early Bronze Age I and 2, and the duration of these presumed episodes, are open to question.
The Piltdown problem reconsidered
Authors: Oakley Kenneth P.
Published: January 2016

Originally there were two main points of controversy about Piltdown. Did the Piltdown cranium and the Piltdown jaw-bone (mandible) represent one creature, ‘Eoanthropus’ as Smith Woodward inferred; or did they belong to two creatures, the cranium that of a man and the jaw-bone that of an ape, as David Waterston, Gerrit Miller and A. T. Marston believed? The second point of controversy concerned the antiquity of the specimens.
The end of the Greek Bronze Age
Authors: Betancourt Philip P.
Published: January 2016

Many scholars have examined the changes that occurred in Greek life around the twelfth century BC. After a period of great prosperity during Late Helladic III B, there followed an era of war, uncertainty, and cultural disintegration that was part of a general upheaval extending from Italy to the Near East. In Greece the disruption was especially pronounced, and many areas were left relatively unpopulated. The ensuing ‘Dark Age’ witnessed the birth of a profoundly different society.
Sandscaping and C14: the Udal, N. Uist
Authors: Crawford Iain , Switsur Roy
Published: January 2016

A research campaign into the scarcely known history and prehistoric origins of Scottish West Highland and Island settlement, has located an area of ‘fossil’ landscape at Coileagan an Udail (the Udal), N. Uist. The completion of a first stage of 14 years excavation (155 weeks) has provided detailed evidence of continuous occupation from the Iron Age to the eighteenth century AD. Sampling has shown positive indications of a similar picture back through much of prehistory at least as far as the Beaker period and is the basis for the proposed second stage of excavations. This remarkably long (by European standards) sequence of deposition has had its coherence confirmed by a first series of radiocarbon dates. The calibration of these dates and their relationship to crucial artifacts is considered. This article is by Iain Crawford, who has just completed two years as Senior Visiting Research Fellow at The Queen's University of Belfast, and Dr Roy Switsur, Head of the Radiocarbon Dating Research Laboratory University of Cambridge.
Authors: Simek Jan F.
Published: January 2016

The traditional distinction between the Middle and the Upper Palaeolithic is a technical one, the change from flake industries to blade industries. Finding a distinction in more active terms of human behaviour is a rewarding prospect, rather harder to achieve. Here, an attempt is made to find a fundamental distinction in the way groups of humans organized their lives, as recorded in the patterns of scattered stones and bones. The study depends on the meticulous and very detailed records of findspots made by excavation teams led by Jean-Philippe Rigaud, Director of Prehistoric Antiquities for Aquitaine, Bordeaux.
Accelerator dating: the first years reviewed
Authors: Dennell Robin
Published: January 2016

The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit came into operation during 1983, at about the same time as the sister machine at the University of Arizona, Tucson. A conference in October 1985 explored its first two years' work; a review of that conference's proceedings is the occasion to see how much momentum AMS dating is generating.
The Maya lunar season
Authors: MacPherson H.G.
Published: January 2016

Archaeoastronomy in Europe, when it comes to megalithic sites, is still at the perhaps stage: perhaps there was some systematic understanding of the heavens that can be called astronomy, perhaps there was not. In the Americas matters are different, with the ‘long-count’ and other systems showing a clear interest in calendars, and in the timely movements of the heavens. Here the lunar order of the Maya scheme of things is set out.
A secure future for the Roystone Grange Archaeological Trail
Authors: Hodges Richard , Smith Ken
Published: January 2016

The July editorial (pp. 163–4) worried about the place for archaeology in the future of the British countryside, and this issue returns to the subject (p. 355). Here is a first example of the most satisfactory outcome imaginable – the acquisition of an upland farm primarily for archaeological use.
Photography for discovery and scale by superimposing old photographs on the present-day scene
Authors: Prince Gene
Published: January 2016

The precise placing of spots in the landscape from the evidence of old photographs – whether of things themselves of archaeological interest or for re-locating old excavations – is obvious enough in principle, and clearly useful. Here is a practical means to do this, with two examples from historical archaeology in the United States, a context where matters of archaeological interest come more often into the era of photography than they do in some other places.
A Harappan ‘snarling iron’ from Chanhu daro
Authors: Yule Paul
Published: January 2016

The re-discovery and recognition of a snarling iron, a delightfully named metal-workers' tool, adds another aspect to knowledge of Harappan technological skills.
The Río Azul cacao pot: epigraphic observations on the function of a Maya ceramic vessel
Authors: Stuart David
Published: January 2016

Despite decades of extensive study of ancient Maya ceramics, a few basic questions still vex the archaeologist: What were the actual uses of the distinct types of Maya vessels? How can we determine the precise function of some pottery forms? How can we understand the classification the Maya themselves had for their pots? This brief note, using a recently-discovered vessel from Río Azul, Guatemala, as an illustration, will show that such questions can be addressed using combined data from different analytical approaches. Here I also wish to emphasize the notion that some of the most important sources of information on these issues are the hieroglyphic texts painted or carved on numerous Maya ceramics.
New radiocarbon dates and Late Palaeolithic diet at Wadi Kubbaniya, Egypt
Authors: Wendorf Fred , Schild Romuald , Close Angela E. , Hillman Gordon C. , Gautier Achilles , van Neer Wim , Donahue D.J. , Jull A.J.T. , Linick T.W.
Published: January 2016

Vegetable remains are a rarity in Palueolithic contexts. These new determinations on material from southern Egypt establish securely the date of an intensive grass-tuber and fish economy in the Nile Valley towards 20,000 years ago.
Priority scores for archaeological evaluation
Authors: Bowden Mark
Published: January 2016

The new Monuments Protection Programme (Darvill et al. 1987; the November 1987 ANTIQUITY) will depend heavily on scoring systems to assess the relative value of different monuments and areas. Here are some comments by someone else with experience of scoring sites.
A Cypriot model for prehistoric ritual
Authors: Peltenburg E.J.
Published: January 2016

Prehistoric figurines and building models are rarely discovered in clearly defined, non-funerary contexts in the Near East and eastern Mediterranean regions. When they are found in association in a cache of over 50 objects it is a notable archaeological event. Here Dr Edgar Peltenburg, Director of the Lemba Archaeological Project, Cyprus, argues that the cache provides important new light on the evolution of cult places in the eastern Mediterranean.
Glass production and Bronze Age Europe
Authors: Henderson Julian
Published: January 2016

A knowledge of pyrotechnology - the skills of creating and working with high temperatures - attested for later prehistoric Europe first by refined ceramics in the Neolithic, then by copper and bronze metallurgy. But what about the third aspect of pyrotechnology – faience, glass and other vitreous materials? New work reported in this survey shows a place for glass in the European Bronze Age.
An early bronze artefact from Papua New Guinea
Authors: Ambrose W.R.
Published: January 2016

This small tabular bronze artefact, recovered from an occupation layer sealed beneath volcanic ash on Lou Island, is the first bronze artefact found in a dated context in Papua New Guinea, well outside the range of the normal occurrence of bronze in southeast Asia.
Late Upper Palaeolithic artefacts from Lindale Low Cave, Cumbria
Authors: Salisbury C.R.
Published: January 2016

The Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic resettlement of northern Britain, as glacial conditions receded, has a n obvious local interest and raises wider questions for the region. Here is a significant new find from northwest England.
Egypt's first antiquarians?
Authors: Dodson Aidan
Published: January 2016

Under King Sesostris III (Twelfth Dynasty) two sarcophagi of the Third Dynasty seem to have been removed from tombs below the Step Pyramid and buried within the king's pyramid enclosure, probably as a kind offoundation deposit to complement the complex's imitation of Third Dynasty forms. Their extraction is perhaps our earliest evidence for subterranean exploration based on effectively antiquarian motives.
The Proto-Bactrian group of civilizations in the Ancient East
Authors: Masson V.M.
Published: January 2016

The obvious English-language literature on the early civilizations of the Ancient East gives less attention than it might to the northern aspects, towards central Asia. Here, one of the leading researchers in Soviet Central Asia reviews an important new French book on the Iranian plateau and its inter-relations.
History as a family tree, history as an entangled bank: constructing images and interpretations of prehistory in the South Pacific
Authors: Terrell John
Published: January 2016

Twenty years' debate in English and Americanist circles about the fundamental aims of archaeology, and the methods that are to achieve them, has mostly been conducted in a framework of named schools – ‘new’, ‘processual’, and now also ‘postprocessual’ and ‘contextual’ – and in terms of their philosophical good standing (or lack of it).

This paper addresses the fundamentals as they declare themselves in a different region, the Pacific, and sees that the heart of the matter lies more in the nature of history, the history of the Pacific itself, and the history of its study.
Burnt mounds: cooking or bathing?
Authors: Drisceoil Diarmuid A. Ó
Published: January 2016

Burnt mounds, found across northern Europe, are especially frequent in Ireland. Here a new review of the Irish evidence is presented, and issue is taken with Barfield & Hodder's diagnosis, published in ANTIQUITY last year, that the primary function of the burnt mounds was as bathing places.
Cation-ratio dating of rock-engravings from the Olary Province of arid South Australia
Authors: Dorn Ronald I. , Nobbs Margaret , Cahill Tom A.
Published: January 2016

Desert varnish, the distinctive coating on exposed rock surfaces in arid regions, can be dated by cation ratios, providing a rare means directly to date petroglyphs. A first application of the method, much used in north America, is here reported from Australia, where it indicates minimum ages up to 30,000 years old. And it also shows that the style of figures, so often taken as a measure of chronology, is in this instance largely independent of age.
A Roman Iron Age funerary deposit from Præstestien, southwestern Jutland, and the early cultivation of rye in Denmark
Authors: Robinson David , Siemen Palle
Published: January 2016

This report presents new evidence for cultivation of rye in Denmark in the first centuries AD, from a context which suggests that more than simple agricultural subsistence was concerned.
Prehistory for kids
Authors: Merriman Nick
Published: January 2016

A salutary test of the advances made in the communication of archaeology to a non-specialist audience is to go into a children's bookshop and ask for books about prehistory. It can be an unsettling experience. This note looks at what was produced on a visit to a children's bookshop in Cambridge, as it indicates the sort of haphazard collection available to a casual buyer.
The second British sea trials of the reconstructed trireme, 20 July–5 August 1988
Authors: Morrison John
Published: January 2016

ANTIQUITY reported last year on the start of the British project ‘to teach yourself how to sail a classical warship’. The second season's trials, benefitting from the lessons of the first, took place in the summer, and it begins to come clear that the classical reports of the trireme's astonishing performance are well founded.
‘New’ Parthenon fragments in Venice
Authors: Vickers Michael
Published: January 2016

Much of the Parthenon and its sculpture is, visibly enough, no longer standing on the Acropolis. Here is notice of where some bits of it may have gone, and of where and in what form they may now be seen.
Classical antiquities as national and global heritage
Authors: Lowenthal David
Published: January 2016

The current campaign to return to Athens the Parthenon sculptures that have been in the British Museum since the early 19th century highlights the profoundly dual nature of Greek architectural and sculptural heritage, as emblems of both Greek and global attachment. Classical relics in particular have become symbols of Greek attachment to the homeland; underscoring links between past and present, they confirm and celebrate Greek national identity. Other elements of Greek heritage – language, literature, religion, folklore – likewise lend strength to this identity, but material remnants of past glories, notably temples and sculptures from the times of Phidias and Praxiteles, assume an increasingly important symbolic role (Cook 1984; Hitchens 1987).
Logicism: a French view of archaeological theory founded in computational perspective
Authors: Gallay Alain
Published: January 2016

Theory in archaelogy has largely been an anglophone enterprise, and perhaps too inbred for its own good. The main French school, known particularly from the work of Alain Gallay and Jean-Claude Gardin, was well represented at a CNRS—NSF conference on ‘Symbolic, structural and semiotic approaches in archaeology’, held at Indiana University, Bloomington (IN) in October 1987, where a small group of American, British, French and Swiss archaeologists met to confront their theoretical views. Here Alain Gallay sets out the fundamentals of the ‘logicist’ position.
Eneolithic stone sculpture in south Turkmenia
Authors: Masson V. M. , Korobkova G. F.
Published: January 2016

This report of a tradition of Copper-Age stone sculpture from the Caucasus introduces a wider discussion of the place of stone sculpture in the artistic traditions of early Asiatic civilizations. It underlines once more the special place of evidence from the Soviet Union, the northern periphery of the regions of early states.
Heritage conservation in the Canary Islands, Spain: the Guayadeque Archaeological Park and other proposed parks
Authors: Eddy M. R.
Published: January 2016

The Canary Isles, scattered in the Atlantic off the Sahara coastline of southern Morocco, have a remarkable archaeological heritage. Initial settlement, for which mummified bodies from caves are important evidence, relates to the Berbers of the Maghreb, and the islands' distinctive culture was not overwhelmed until the European impact of the 15th century AD. Explanation is given of the special value of Canarian archaeology, and of the efforts now being made more properly to protect it.
Excavation as theatre
Authors: Tilley Christopher
Published: January 2016

Everyone who has dug up anything knows the excitement of bringing an ancient object to its first light for centuries. Everyone who has directed an archaeological excavation knows the excitement of finding sense in the pattern of many ancient objects revealed. Why is it, then, that the publication of that pattern in a site report is a more wearisome business when—if ever—it take place? Is that just the nature of the business, or is there more to be revealed?
American historical archaeology and the search for ‘meaning’
Authors: Connah Graham E.
Published: January 2016

Graham Connah, who has himself just published a historical archaeology of Australia, reviews a large new book in American historical archaeology, and examines the particular approach that is expressed in its title, the archaeological ‘recovery of meaning’.
Understanding early medieval pottery distributions: cautionary tales and their implications for further research
Authors: Schofield A. J.
Published: January 2016

In field survey, some periods announce themselves by an abundance of artefacts, for example Roman ceramics in the Mediterranean and prehistoric flints in northern Europe. Others are elusive; among the least conspicuous in England is the early medieval period, when ceramics would seem to have figured little in material culture. When such wares did exist, tempered with soft material like grass, they are often destroyed by the plough and weathering Here the evidence, and its lack, is assessed, and means proposed to deal with it.
Scales of historical anthropology: an archaeology of colonial Anglo-America
Authors: Little Barbara J. , Shackel Paul A.
Published: January 2016

The belief that the great issues of social existence can be well addressed by studying the minutiae of domestic life is a theme in the influential work of some recent French historians, as it is in James Deetz's little classic of historical archaeology, In small things forgotten. And it chimes with the ‘post-processual’ concern to see how people structured their lives and how those structures reflect and and are reflected in relations of power and control. These issues are here explored in the domestic possessions of 18th-century Marylanders.
Styles and principles in archaeological publication: Chester reviewed
Authors: Millett Martin
Published: January 2016

Big urban excavation campaigns are not easy to publish. The quantity of primary data is overwhelming and, even when only the essentials are published, a hard choice has to be made. By period? By area? By theme? In whole volumes? Or slice-by-slice in instalments or ‘fascicles’? The issues are here explored in reviewing a batch of publications from Chester, in the series, ‘Excavations at Chester: Grosvenor Museum Archaeological Excavation and Survey Reports’.
‘Lapita colonists leave boats unburned!’ The question of Lapita links with Island Southeast Asia
Authors: Bellwood Peter , Koon Peter
Published: January 2016

‘Not another trendy and incomprehensible title,’ some will sigh. No, the title means what it states, albeit with metaphorical flourish. The Lapita cultural complex of Melanesia and western Polynesia, an entity beloved of a generation of Pacific prehistorians and ever a hot source of debate, can now be shown to have retained at least some links with contemporary populations far to the west of its known distribution. This is significant, not least because some scholars identify the immediate source zone for Lapita as having existed somewhere in the islands of Southeast Asia. At the same time, the obsidian quarried by Lapita artisans from Talasea on the Melanesian island of New Britain can be shown to have been among the most far-traded commodities of the Neolithic world.
Llangorse: a 10th-century royal crannog in Wales
Authors: Campbell Ewan , Lane Alan
Published: January 2016

Crannogs, artificial island settlements built of stone and timber in lakes, are a feature of Scotland and Ireland from later prehistoric times to the medieval period. They have been absent from England and Wales until the recognition that is reported here of the Llangorse site–known and puzzling for a century–as a first Welsh crannog, and a special one.
The articulated cuirass in Qin dynasty China
Authors: Bishop M. C.
Published: January 2016

The discovery of the Qin dynasty terracotta army at Mount Li near Xianyang has provided an interesting insight into the equipment of 3rd-century BC Chinese soldiers, and also opens up a number of issues of interest to students of armour from other regions and periods in the ancient world, particularly concerning the use of evidence.
Lundenwic: the archaeological evidence for middle Saxon London
Authors: Cowie Robert , Whytehead Robert
Published: January 2016

Where London was in the Roman and later medieval periods is clear enough: largely in the walled city, now under the modern financial district that is the City of London. But what of the period between? New evidence is assessed on this longstanding problem.
Storage, sedentism and the Eurasian Palaeolithic record
Authors: Soffer Olga
Published: January 2016

What is the connection between storage and sedentism in hunter-gatherer societies? What is the pattern of ethnography? What other patterns show themselves in Late Palaeolithic Eurasia, in those late hunter-gatherer adaptations that are precursors of Holocene food production? And is material storage a necessary and a sufficient condition for hunter-gatherer sedentism?
Stonehenge from without
Authors: Wrigley C. C.
Published: January 2016

Mr Wrigley (Reader Emeritus in History, University of Sussex) presents himself as a witness to British prehistory ‘from without’, because he is a ‘historian ofsorts’ rather than archaeologist. Surprised to see prehistorians turning to ethnography and contemporary social theory, more than the history of intervening centuries, he offers here a different perspective.
The steppes in the Late Palaeolithic
Authors: Praslov N. D. , Stanko V. N. , Abramova Z. A. , Sapozhnikov I. V. , Borzijak I. A.
Published: January 2016

A set of papers on the human settlement of the steppes, epoch by epoch, is not complete unless it pays attention to the last glaciation, when periglacial steppe adaptations show remarkable cultural development, especially in the famous mammoth-bone houses. The subsistence basis depended - as a coincident paper in this issue (pages 719-32 above) shows – on an unusual and unusually early development of food storage, with all that implied for social evolution.

Pressure of present commitments did not allow the writing of a new single paper on this time-period. Instead, we print here a collected set of five short contributions, by N.D. Praslov and colleanues that indicate well the evidence and the range of Soviet approaches to it. We thank Olga Soffer and George Frison for allowing us to draw on the outlines of papers given at the joint USSR-USA meeting on the Upper Palaeolithic-Palaeolndian held in the USSR in August 1989.
The Scythian period in the northern Black Sea region (750–250 BC)
Authors: Marčenko Konstantin , Vinogradov Yuri
Published: January 2016

Several cultural features distinguish the northern Black Sea region from the rest of the Antique world. The region is rare or unique in that it was the scene of direct contact over a long period, not only between communities at different stages or levels of socio-economic development, but between communities of different economic and cultural types: nomadic pastoralists on the one hand and and sedentary plough agriculturalists (both autochthonous and immigrant Greek) on the other.