A decade ago, the crammed burial-vaults under Christ Church, Spitalfields, a fine English Baroque church in east-central London designed by Hawksmoor, were archaeologically excavated. This pioneering work in the post-medieval archaeology of our own culture's burial practice has not been followed up. Why?

The Fenland Research Committee, founded in 1932, guided research in the low wetlands north of Cambridge in east England. Its work marked a turning-point in the developing prehistory of Sir Grahame Clark, a change so profound it is here called a ‘new archaeology’. A leading approach now as ‘ecological archaeology’, it is here shown to have its conception in certain goals, definitions, concepts, and assumptions — and in the field circumstances which promoted a then-new approach to prehistoric materials.

Most of what is heard in the West of Chinese archaeology is about the physical stuff — the astonishing string of major finds; some, like soldiers from the Terracotta Army of the First Emperor's tumulus, have been exhibited outside China. All archaeological material is excavated, described and explained by reference to some frame of ideas. This essay on the thinking of a leading Chinese archaeologist of our day, Su Bingqi, is accompanied by an article of his in translation.

This article, first published in Zhongguo jianshe [China Reconstructs 1987(9)], became particularly well known when it was selected for the ‘Language and literature paper’ in the 1988 national university entrance examinations. This English version is translated and footnoted byu Wang Tao.

Sir John Beazley (1885-1970), founder of the modern and archaeological study of Classical vases, was a master of method. Is the Beazley method just that, a well-judged method fitting to the material under study? Or does that considered method in truth amount to a considered theory, held and used by a consciously most untheoretical archaeologist?

The later Palaeolithic sites on the East European plain are celebrated for their solid buildings constructed of mammoth bones. Were these permanent settlements, occupied all the year round? Or were they seasonally occupied, in a land where winters are harsh? Stratigraphic explorations at Mezhirich, and excavation of the empty space between the buildings, leads to a decisive interpretation.

Just over 50 years ago, the most magnificent treasure of late Antique silver ever found in Britain was brought out of hiding in a sleepy village in rural Suffolk. The late Roald Dahl, the children's writer, may have held the answer.

Half a century on, the principals in the Mildenhall affair are deceased. Paul Ashbee, senior prehistorian of East Anglia, has no direct evidence, but material recollections from near to the time. His account, drawing on those memories, notices aspects different to those which are stressed by Richard Hobbs (above), a researcher of a younger generation looking at the written record.

The prodigious quantities of refuse recovered from excavations at Runnymede Bridge, Berkshire, England — and at other late prehistoric British sites — highlight those archaeological entities we call ‘rubbish’ and ‘middens’. What is a ‘midden’? General thoughts on an archaeology of refuse are applied to the specific case of these 1st-millennium BC sites in southern England in an attempt to comprehend their origin and scale in terms of the period's social geography.

Modern belief in the veneration of a single Great Goddess in the European Neolithic is often accompanied by the notion that those cultures of ‘Old Europe’ were woman-centred in society as well as religion. What is the long history which precedes these contemporary notions? What is the complex history of their political development? A chain runs from Classical times to Marija Gimbutas (Meskell 1995) and our own day.

In December 1995, ANTIQUITY published contrary reports on the age of the animal and other figures engraved on open-air schist surfaces of the Côa valley in northern Portugal. João Zilhão (1995) contended that the figures, Palaeolithic in their look, are indeed of Palaeolithic age: they belong with the other Iberian sites where Palaeolithic petroglyphs survive on open-air surfaces. Robert Bednarik (1 995), using his own and others' physical-science studies, contended they were certainly under 3000 years old: the Palaeolithic presumption — and stylistic dating as a method — is false. We here print together two studies concerning the age of the Côa Valley rock-surfaces, and of the figures they bear.

Panel faces in teh Côa valley, Portugal, were available for engraving during the Upper Palaeolithic, according to 36Cl exposure ages of 16,000 to 136,000 years.

Radiocarbon ages for the Côa petroglyphs are very similar to those obtained by Watchman (1995). Fundamental problems in the use of radiocarbon dating at Côa include evidence for the addition of younger carbon in an open system, and evidence of contamination from older sources of carbon. Radiocarbon measurements, therefore, cannot be used to decide whether the engravcings are or are not of Palaeolithic age.

Much of Australian prehistory lies under water. Although confined to the continent's extreme southwestern corner, field studies described in this report show that this submerged prehistoric component is very real, with numerous archaeological sites and former land surfaces awaiting investigation on the floors of Australia's lakes, rivers and estuaries, and on its submerged continental margins.

The archer's bow is a machine whose purpose is to impart stored energy effectively and accurately to propel the arrow. A mathematical modelling of different bow types shows how their engineering characteristics define their performances.

We live, most of us, in agricultural societies; our food comes from the farm. We make gardens, many of us, and we eat some of the plants that we grow there. That farming is not the same as gardening we see in the responses of western observers when they made contact with societies whose food came more from the garden than the farm. A gardener's view of food makes its own story.

‘Animals were wild, and then some of them were tamed and so became domestic.’ The archaeological definition of ‘domestic’ is a fundamental, alongside the means by which the domestic is to be recognized in the archaeological record. Setting that relationship with human beings which we call ‘domestication’ alongside other relations between species clarifies the issues.

Ground-penetrating radar and other geophysical techniques are known to produce useful data when deposits are crisply structured, as in the case of sub-surface masonry walls or large ditches. New studies of Californian coastal sites find the methods are effective in tracing the less sharp distinctions that define clay and sand house floors within these large and dense hunter-gatherer middens.

A ‘heritage manager’ who wishes a quiet and an orderly life may hope their heritage place is culturally dead; whatever meaning it once had, now it is an archaeological site, an ancient monument, a tourist attraction. But many sites are not dead. Chaco Canyon, the celebrated complex in the desert of the US Southwest, is of continuing value to Native Americans of its region; and the place has become a focus for New Age ceremony — itself in part inspired by Native American knowledge.