Two new examples of decorative art have turned up at the Gravettian site of Předmostí, dating to the twenty-sixth to twenty-fifth millennium BP: rectilinear grid patterns are executed on one side of flat bones, probably of reindeer. The authors speculate that the two pieces may have come from a single larger decorated object. The grids themselves join a growing repertoire of patterns known from Upper Palaeolithic society, but their role remains enigmatic: counting, calendars or ornament? Art or science?

I am interested in the daily activities of the non-Blites to understand ancient Mesopotamian society.Analysing the activities performed within thehouses of the non-6lites is the first step in definingthe social and economic differentiation amonghouseholds and, in turn, a better understanding ofthe role of these households within ancient communities.1 analyse activity areas using a relativelynew method - micro-debris analysis - which analysessmall artefactual and ecofactual remains(Fladmark 1982; Rosen 1989; Matthews 1995).In my dissertation, 365 sediment samples (10litres each) were taken from over 20 structures.The rationale for sampling deposits and countingand weighing the small remains found withinthe earthen matrix is based on a model of depositionalforces. Site formation theorists suggestthat macro-debris left by daily activities are usuallydisturbed and often discarded far from theloci of the original activity. Whereas the large findsmay be scavenged, discarded, or curated in periodsof abandonment, smaller debris is often sweptinto corners or trampled into the surface of afloor. These small items are more likely thanlarge items to remain where they were droppeddue to the difficulty in removing small debriswith traditional cleaning methods (Schiffer 1983;Dunnell & Stein 1989). My research focused onthe analysis of artefacts under 1 cm in dimensionfound in occupational surfaces and featuresin order to define activity areas at severalEarly Bronze Age (c. 3100-1900 BC) sites insoutheastern Turkey

The author detects a new undisciplined movement in academic writing. (though we still apply all the strictures here. Ed.).

A circle of pits from the Welsh borders is another addition to the curious catalogue of British ceremonial monuments of the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age, and provides – as often before – intriguing clues as to how it was structured and used.

After years of discussion and argument, the fate of Stonehenge and its landscape has been decided. As Professor Geoffrey Wainwright (former Head of Archaeology at English Heritage) describes, there is at last political will to ensure a better future for the monument.

Exploratory expeditions in 1834, sponsored by the newly independent state of Guatemala, researched on sites such as Copan, Iximche and Utatlan. The political, literary and social climate was such that a pre-Hispanic past was eagerly sought. This paper offers an intriguing insight into early Latin American archaeology.

Aerial photography is so fundamental an instrument of modern archaeology that we often take it for granted. But its methods are surprisingly specific and its most important experimental theatre was probably the territory of the Levant—and especially the rocky terrain of Jordan. The author, a prominent aerial archaeologist of our own day, takes time off to review the achievements of the pioneers, serving officers who established routes over the desert to deliver mail between Egypt and Iraq. The fabulous ancient landscape they discovered could only be appreciated through the low-level window provided by these slow-moving rickety machines and their intrepid pilots. In these days of jet travel, the precious basalt landscape is in danger of slipping off the agenda again—both for researchers and conservers.

Australia has usually played a supporting role in the story of human evolution — regarded as a place at the edge of the inhabited world where modern humans arrived relatively late and then remained largely isolated from subsequent developments. However, new dates for a human burial at Mungo, New South Wales (Thorne et al. 1999) may not only force revision of views about the peopling of Australia, but also have a wider impact on ideas about modern human origins.

Albania, isolated from Europe for nearly half a century, was closed to absolute archaeological dating during that time. New dates from an unusual large cave-site in southern Albania go beyond the single first radiocarbon date published for the country in ANTIQUITY in 1991, and permit the establishment of a radiocarbon and archaeomagnetic sequence.

In this paper the Professor of Archaeology at University College Cork has undertaken a radical re-evaluation of the traditional paradigms of Irish prehistory, which were formed in the 1940s. He makes full use of the results of recent pipeline excavations and radiocarbon dates to show that early settlement in Ireland need not always be associated with monument or artefact types belonging to narrow chronological horizons.

The East Anglian Fenland comprises some 1,300 sq. miles (205 ha) of flat and monotonous terrain which is today cultivated on an intensive scale. Beneath this rich farmland lies a complex sequence of post-glacial deposits, reflecting periods of marine and fresh-water flooding, interspersed with phases of relative dryness (Godwin, 1978). During the Iron Age, the sea covered the northern Fenland with a thick blanket of silt, accounting for the dearth of finds of this time; but by c. AD 50 the sea was receding and the land had begun to dry out. Settlement soon followed. It is likely that a fort of the post-Boudiccan period was briefly in garrison at Grandford, north-west of March, but the principal remains are those of salt-making sites and of small farms. During the reign of Hadrian, however, both the scale and the nature of settlement changed dramatically. AS the authoritative survey of the region makes clear (Phillips, 1970), the 120s and 130s witnessed a sharp increase in the number of sites, including the foundation of many villages. At the same time a network of canals, designed to disperse water at times of flood, was constructed (Simmons, 1979), as well as a series of straight-line roads and drove-ways. Although there was no formal division of the land by centuriation, as had been customary in areas reclaimed earlier for the settlement of veteran—the Po Valley and Lake Velinus near Rieti provide obvious Italian examples—the hand of government is nevertheless explicit in the size of the undertaking. While we lack direct evidence, there can be little real doubt that the Fenland was taken over as Imperial land and placed in the charge of a procurator (Salway, 1970).

The mechanisms by which agriculture spread across Europe in the Neolithic, and the speed at which it happened, have long been debated. Attempts to quantify the process by constructing spatio-temporal models have given a diversity of results. In this paper, a new approach to the problem of modelling is advanced. Data from over 300 Neolithic sites from Asia Minor and Europe are used to produce a global picture of the emergence of farming across Europe which also allows for variable local conditions. Particular attention is paid to coastal enhancement: the more rapid advance of the Neolithic along coasts and rivers, as compared with inland or terrestrial domains. The key outcome of this model is hence to confirm the importance of waterways and coastal mobilities in the spread of farming in the early Neolithic, and to establish the extent to which this importance varied regionally.

John webb, in his preface to Inigo Jones's posthumously published Stonehenge, in 1655 says : ‘This discourse of Stonehenge is moulded off and cast into a rude Form, from some few indigested notes after the late judicious Architect, the Vitruvius of his Age, Inigo Jones’. Upon these notes, Webb undoubtedly dined not wisely but too well and I trust I shall not be accused of doing the same with Colonel Hawley's many and well digested notes. I have one advantage over Webb in that I have seen Stonehenge, and I very much doubt whether he had.

In describing the stones, I shall begin at the centre and work outwards, taking as centre the point where a line drawn from stone 91 just inside the bank to stone 93, and a line from hole 92 in the middle of the supposed barrow to hole 94 in a similar barrow in the NW quadrant, cut each other and the axis of Stonehenge. It is from this point as centre that all the black circles on the plan are drawn. The axis is a line through the centre, which divides the stones and earthworks into two equal parts.

Dr Venclová is well known to readers of ANTIQUITY as the excavator of the site of Mšecké Žehrovice in Bohemia, find-place of the most famous example of Iron Age human representation. What she presents here is a provocative theory — that the Mšecké Žehrovice stone head represents a Celtic druid!