The long houses of the Linear Pottery Culture and its immediate successors are usually interpreted in functional terms, but they have certain anomalous features. This paper considers the processes by which they were built, lengthened, abandoned and replaced and suggests that they may have charted the development of the households who lived inside them. The buildings in Linear Pottery settlements were generally orientated towards the areas of the origin of the communities who lived there.

Till 1948 the coherent record of farming in Northern Europe began with the neolithic culture represented in the Danish dysser (‘dolmens’) and most readily defined by the funnel-necked beakers, collared flasks and ‘amphorae’ found therein. As early as 1910 Gustav Kossinna had remarked that these distinctive ceramic types, and accordingly the culture they defined, were not confined to the West Baltic coastlands, but recurred in the valleys of the Upper Vistula and Oder to the east, to the south as far as the Upper Elbe and in northwest Germany and Holland too. He saw in this distribution evidence for the first expansion of Urindogermanen from their cradle in the Cimbrian peninsula. In the sequel Åberg filled in the documentation of this expansion with fresh spots on the distribution map and Kossinna himself distinguished typologically four main provinces or geographical groups—the Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western. Finally Jazdrzewski gave a standard account of the whole content of what had come to be called Kultura puharów lejkowatych, Trichterbecherkultur, or Tragtbaegerkulturen. As ‘Funnel-necked-beaker culture’ is a clumsy expression and English terminology is already overloaded with ‘beakers’, I shall use the term ‘First Northern’.

The orgin of this vigorous and expansive group of cultivators and herdsmen has always been an enigma. Not even Kossinna imagined that the savages of the Ertebølle shell-mounds spontaneously began cultivating cereals and breeding sheep in Denmark. As dysser were regarded as megalithic tombs and as megaliths are Atlantic phenomena, he supposed that the bases of the neolithic economy were introduced from the West together with the ‘megalithic idea’. But the First Northern Farmers of the South and East groups did not build megalithic tombs. Moreover, in the last ten years an extension of the North group across southern Sweden as far as Södermannland has come to light, and these farmers too, though they used collared flasks and funnel-necked beakers, built no dolmens either. In any case there was nothing Western about the pottery from the Danish dysser, and Western types of arrow-head are conspicuously rare in Denmark.

Fontana Nuova di Ragusa, a small rock-shelter in southeast Sicily, was thoroughly excavated by Bernabò Brea in 1949. In the far south of Europe — Sicily is nearly on a latitude with Africa — it has continuing importance as marking a southern geographical limit of Aurignacian settlement, and as proof of humans crossing the strait into island Sicily.

The Gravettian is considered one of the first pan-European cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic, spreading from Portugal to Russia between 28-20000 years BP and characterised by backed blades and points. The Noaillian is a local variant in southern Europe (Northern Spain, Southern France and Italy). In France Noaillian is supposedly evolving into the Rayssian which is replaced later by recent Gravettian. By reconsidering the formation processes of some key stratigraphic sequences, the author demonstrates that the Rayssian is an idiosyncratic culture that does not have abrupt-backed bladelets, and that runs chronologically in parallel with the others. A case study, based on new work at the site of La Picardie (Indre-et-Loire), suggests that we should expect to define different contemporary regional groups during this long period.

The Lapita expansion took Austronesian seafaring peoples with distinctive pottery eastward from the Bismarck Archipelago to western Polynesia during the late second millennium BC, marking the first stage in the settlement of Oceania. Here it is shown that a parallel process also carried Lapita pottery and people many hundreds of kilometres westward along the southern shore of Papua New Guinea. The key site is Hopo, now 4.5km inland owing to the progradation of coastal sand dunes, but originally on the sea edge. Pottery and radiocarbon dates indicate Lapita settlement in this location c. 600 BC, and suggest that the long-distance maritime networks linking the entire southern coast of Papua New Guinea in historical times may trace their origin to this period.

During the improvement of the climate of Europe which followed the retreat of the ice at the close of the last glacial period the continent suffered re-invasion by successive waves of immigrating plants at rates determined partly by their natural climatic range and partly by their relative capacity to spread by seeds or by vegetative means. Of this migratory flora the trees are conspicuously important, firstly in that they dominated by their life-form the other components of the vegetation, and secondly in that, being wind-pollinated, they produced vast quantities of pollen which were carried by the wind over wide distances and incorporated in any deposits then forming. In peat and in estuarine and coastal silts particularly, conditions largely inhibited bacterial decay of the spores, the outer membranes of which remain recognizable in microscopic examination. Systematic analysis by the methods introduced by Von Post has now been applied over a large part of Europe and very considerable resemblance is evident in the migratory sequence of forest-types over the whole continent. Since the post-glacial climatic optimum, the climate of the continent has suffered further fluctuations and these are also characterized by regular and well marked changes in the forest-cover of the land as indicated by the fossil pollen-content.

Introduction

Ships and the sea were an omnipresent theme of Greek and Roman art and life. Shipwreck was a well-recognized risk, and an essential ingredient of ‘lost and found’ stories in novels and comedies. Conversely, safe arrival in harbour, the successful end of a journey, was a frequent motif, especially of Roman art. These ideas were obviously underpinned by economic facts: the need for metals, the sea-girt nature of Greece, Rome’s central position in the Mediterranean, and the constant threat of food shortage in the cities of the Mediterranean world generally, necessarily involved transport and trade by sea.

Into this scene has stepped, still less than 50 years old, a new character, namely underwater archaeology. Since 1945, over 1000 ancient and medieval shipwrecks have been reported in the Mediterranean, and the roll continues to grow at an unslackened pace. This rapid increase in archaeological resource has been due, of course, mainly to the widespread use of compressed-air diving gear for sport, so that most of the known wreck sites lie in inshore waters, and in popular diving areas. However, recent developments in offshore position-fixing and in underwater communications and robotics have made it possible to explore much deeper sites; the deepest so far to have been surveyed under archaeological direction (by A.M. McCann) is a late Roman wreck at 800 m deep between Sicily and Sardinia.

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.

We reported last year on the course of TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) and its annual conferences over several years. This further report reads the meaning of the post-modernist agenda which dominated the most recent TAG conference.

Guided by modern miners of the region the authors track down pre-Inca mining sites in the Southern Nasca Region of Peru. In the hinterlands away from both modern and ancient roads they find a surprising number of small sites serving the pre-Inca industry, principally in the Nasca period. Drawing analogies from modern practice they are able to distinguish the ancient sites dedicated to exploration, extraction or production.

Northern Australia is one of the very few regions of the world where an established tradition of rock-art has continued and extends into present-day knowledge. Excavation of deposits under the painted surfaces allows the age of the paintings to be estimated, by linking across to these deposits and their dateable contexts. One can begin to assess the antiquity of those systems of knowledge and of ‘signifying’.

The threatened city of Venice, plauged by rising sea levels and subsiding ground, has been the subject of recent archaeological investigation. Studies of buried archaeological sites yield new evidence on trends in sea-level change for the Lagoon of Venice and provide important insight into how early habitation responded to such change.

The Spitalfields project, now moving from the field to laboratory analysis, takes the archaeological study of human burial into new areas. The preliminary results, reported here, have importance for the archaeology of Christian death and – beyond that – for wider questions in mortuary study and inference from skeletal remains and their disposition.

The authors have provided some of Antiquity's most stunning frontispieces since we introduced them in 2006. We asked them to show how aerial archaeology has developed in Jordan over some 90 years, tell us about the techniques and approaches used and its potential here and in other desert and mountainous lands.

In 1933 it can hardly be alleged that Prehistory is a useless study, wholely remote from and irrelevant to practical life. In one great country at least, interpretations of supposed facts of Prehistory, imperfectly apprehended by an untrained mind of undoubted genius, have revolutionized the whole structure of society. No one who has read Mein Kampf, or even the extracts therefrom in The Times, can fail to appreciate the profound effect which theories of the racial superiority of ‘Aryans’ have exercised on contemporary Germany. In the name of these theories men are being exiled from public life and shut up in concentration camps, books are being burned and expression of opinions stifled just as, in the name of religious ideas, they were during fifteen long centuries of darkness.

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.

A number of relatively recent works concerned entirely or incidentally with early horse gear call attention to the fact that various features of this are still imperfectly understood. At the same time, new discoveries have shed new light (Anderson, 1961; Childe, 1954; Hančar, 1955; Jope, 1956; Karageorghis, 1962, 1965, 1967; Nagel, 1966; Potratz, 1966; Salonen, 1956). J. A. H. Potratz, notably, despite great familiarity with bit material, fails to recognize the functional or genetic implications of some of its details.