Using the World Wide Web is not unlike visiting an unfamiliar place to look at the archaeology. You want to know if there is anything interesting to see, so you start in the library, looking for information; you read books and articles from journals; perhaps you contact colleagues who can tell you about the place; you want to know how to find the sites and to get to them; and once you are there, you want to visit the museums as well as the monuments, and to locate people who are working there, whether they are from academic institutions, government archaeological bodies or local societies. You will want to check that access arrangements have not changed since the last published information; you also want to ensure that as far as possible the information you have is accurate, so that you do not waste time looking at sites which are not relevant to your interests.

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.

Unlike many regional archaeologies the study of Egypt has always had widespread appeal, from archaeologists to Afrocentrists, orientalists to occultists. According to one web-site, ‘Egypt dominates the history of the world.’ This ever-popular fascination has spilled over into the electronic media since the inception of the Internet. Thus, Egypt proves to be a telling casestudyin net politics and potentialities. Simply typing the word ‘Egypt’ into a Web searcher elicits over 1 million sites, and the content of that material runs the gamut from scholarly resources closely matching those known in print to fringe sites and sci-fi web pages. This makes electronic Egypt an intellectual and ethical minefield for the uninitiated, especially as there proves often little to differentiate between this panoply of sites in terms of presentation and professionality. It palpably illustrates the homogenization of knowledge on the net and prompts us to consider the construction of archaeology and archaeological knowledges.

An ingenious derivation for the La Tène dagger with anthropoid hilt shows how craftsmen gave an agreeable character to a working weapon. The dagger remained every bit as effective, but the splayed person on the hilt added a touch of playful luxury to the serious business of stabbing. By way of a modern anthropoid corkscrew, the author lures us away from an obsession with symbolism and encourages us to look for a more down-to-earth ‘psychological functionality’ in decorated objects.

Some five months have elapsed since I was invited to write this paper and, as seems always to be the case, the continued rapid change in applied computing and available technology has transformed my view of the potentials offered by CD-ROM (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory) as a publishing medium. The paper I now offer is substantially different in content; the conclusions, however, are the same.

Tangas are small convex triangular pottery covers found in large numbers in the Amazon delta. Their suggestive shape has long been attributed to use as a cover or shield for the female Mound of Venus, for protection, modesty (‘cache-sexe’ is the French term) or embellishment. Here the author offers a typology and searches for correlations between the shapes, sizes and patterns of the tangas and the date, location, purpose and status of the women who wore them. He emphasises that in spite of this advance, better understanding requires new information from properly designed excavations; 85 per cent of known tangas have been acquired by looting, purchase or low-precision digging.

Does a unique eroded prehistoric carving on one of the sarsen uprights at Stonehenge link the most famous of English megalithic monuments to Brittany?