The staple food crops of Saxon and Norman England included rye, barley, oats, millet, beans, and peas. Wheat also was not unknown. In fact, a few carbonized grains have been found upon Neolithic sites. But, even as late as the thirteenth century, wheaten bread in more than one region of England was a luxury food, enjoyed by the mass of the agricultural population only on boon days or religious festivals. The porridges and cereal soups, or flat-baked cakes and small loaves, which accompanied the peasants’ daily cheese, sausages or herring, were usually made from a coarse meal composed of rye, or rye mingled in some proportion with wheat, barley, oats or beans.

T was Boucher de Perthes and some of his precursors who originated the idea of an age of worked stone : previously the only stone implements recognized as such were polished axes, arrowheads and a few particularly well-made flint knives. On the other hand it is generally agreed that, besides worked stone, which as a rule is all that has survived, fossil man must have used wood for many of his weapons and implements ; though with the exception of a pointed stake from Clacton (preserved in peat with remains of Elephas antiquus) nothing made of this material is known until we come to the neolithic piledwellings. Mainly as the result of the excavations of Lartet and Christy in the Dordogne (1863) it was learnt that hard animal substances such as bone, ivory and deer's horn, which were preserved by the limestone matrix of caves and rock-shelters had also played a large part in the industrial activities of man. This already advanced industry must have been far removed in time from the first utilization of bone, for it shows a technique that is highly developed—a technique in which the splitting of bone is first associated with and then superseded by sawing with gravers and smoothing with scrapers. There can be no doubt therefore that the stilettos, spear-heads, etc., of the Later Palaeolithic period must have had more ancient prototypes of worked bone. In fact the only Middle Palaeolithic examples known today of bone-working by means of attrition and scraping are few in number—rib-bones sharpened by rubbing, occasional awls similarly sharpened—and the two large spear-points from the Upper Mousterian of Castillo (Spain) and La Quina (Charente, France).

The American Northwest Coast, famously rich as an environment for hunter-gatherers, is not an easy landscape to inhabit. Field survey of the Tebenkof Bay region, Kuiu Island, southeast Alaska, identifies the pattern of site positions. Mathematical modelling explores which considerations directed the placing of settlements in that landscape.

In our efforts to reconstruct the life of vanished peoples and cultures we often find ourselves making comparisons with the implements and customs of modern primitive peoples. This practice seems, with due safeguards, reasonably sound, for similar cultural conditions may produce similar cultural phenomena. Our comparative material is usually sought among the backward races of the tropics, less frequently in parts of Europe that are off the beaten track; but it is not generally realized that we have in Britain itself a populous region which, owing to its remoteness, did not emerge from the Iron Age until the end of last century. By ‘the Iron Age’ we mean that simple state of culture that is found in peasant communities in southern Britain between, say, 500 B.C. and A.D. 1000, extending in a variable degree into the Middle Ages. This stage of cultural development is distinguished from more advanced stages by the prevalence of selfsupporting communities which are necessitated by difficulty of communications, and in this respect the culture of the Hebrides as late as the middle of the nineteenth century was more like that of the pre-Roman Iron Age in southern England than any succeeding phase.

Excavations at Flixborough, Lincolnshire (1989–91) revealed an important Anglo-Saxon settlement. Here the various interpretations are discussed, ranging from monastic to ‘magnate’.

Standardisation is not simply an indicator of economic factors, such as mass-production or craft specialization but can have roots which may be technical, social or political. Here the fabric, forming technique and dimensions of conical cups in the Bronze Age Aegean are studied by comparing products from the islands of Kea and Melos. While the fabric and forming technique on both islands are standardised and emulate Cretan models, the degree of standardisation of the pottery shapes varies between the two sites. This is explained by their having different social contexts of production.

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.

The only previous report of parasite eggs from archaeological excavations in Britain is that of Taylor (1955), but their occurrence in ancient deposits and human remains in other parts of the world has been known since 1910, when Ruffer reported Schistosoma haematobium eggs in the kidneys of two Egyptian mummies. Szidat (1944) found eggs of the roundworms Ascaris and Trichuris and structures resembling eggs of the tapeworm Diphyllobothrium latum in the bodies of a girl and a man recovered from a bog in East Prussia. Pizzi and Schenone (1954) recovered eggs of the roundworm Trichuris trichiura and cysts of the protozoan parasite Entamoeba from the frozen body of an Inca child found in a tomb in the Andes. T. trichiura eggs were also observed by Helbaek (1958) in the stomach contents of a corpse recovered from a peat bog in Grauballe, Denmark.

A further report on what is being snatched away of the antiquities of Mali. The usual story the world over is of export to cash-rich western collectors, and this is something different, the archaeological site as quarry of recycled materials that are treated by another scale of values.

The object of this paper is to show that certain Early Bronze Age sites in the Iberian Peninsula are actually colonies established by people coming from the Eastern Mediterranean.

The term ‘colony’ is used here in contrast to the term ‘culture’. It is selected because, besides being the term used by Siret, who believed that Los Millares was a Phoenician colony, and the Leisners (Factorei), it is the term which best describes these sites. The following account will demonstrate that they were solitary, heavily-defended settlements situated in a culturally foreign environment. Their best parallels are to be found in the East Mediterranean area, where, from very early times politically independent city states which owed their existence to either a rich hinterland or to trade and commerce, are known. These sites in the Peninsula may, in fact, be regarded as primitive examples of the types of colonies established later by the Phoenicians and the Greeks.

The discovery of a grave of the late second millennium BC containing an extinct South American fox, Dusicyon avus, at Loma de los Muertos raises intriguing questions about the relationship between wild canids and humans. This sub-adult individual appears to have been buried in a human mortuary context in a comparable manner to adjacent human burials. It may have been kept as a pet and been considered part of the human social group. The ability of pets, especially canids, to leave the animal world and enter into a special relationship with people may be related to the cosmology of South American hunter-gatherers.

Playing mancala-type games was an addictive pastime of antiquity and leaves its archaeological imprint on steps and ledges in the form of rows of little scoops. Here the author examines the traces of the game at Palmyra and shows that the Roman game of the third century (with five holes a side) was superseded when Palmyra's Temple of Baal was refashioned as a fort in the seventh century or later. The new Syrian game, with seven holes a side, was played obsessively by the soldiers of an Arab or Ottoman garrison on the steps and precinct wall of the old temple.