Rock art in an inland cave on the island of Lifou, New Caledonia, has been radiocarbon dated. A cluster of early paintings date to 2500 years ago, soon after the arrival of the first settlers, who must have quickly gone inland probably in pursuit of fresh water, available near the cave. They left their mark on the cave in the form of numerous hand stencils. During the first millennium AD, later generations of artists used the same cave, drawing birds and a circular sign for water still recognised by the present community.

During the years of expansion following World War I1 which culminated in the 1980s, the problems of preserving and maintaining the archaeological heritage became increasingly apparent within the memberstates of the Council of Europe. Ancient monuments and sites were being disturbed or destroyed by vast development schemes for roads, gas pipelines, urban centre renewal, intensive exploitation of natural resources, etc.

A new survey and spatial analysis enables the author to argue that inland examples of Easter Island’s famous stone statues were not in transport to the coast but mark out ancient territories proposed by ethnologist Katherine Routledge in 1919.

The analysis of flake production at the late Lower Palaeolithic site of Holon (Israel) suggests that the introduction of the Levallois method was an abrupt event related to a shift in the design of tools.

The authors demonstrate that a temple examined at the Classic Maya site of Aguateca, Guatemala, was still in the process of construction when it was attacked and abandoned at the beginning of the ninth century AD. Study of the ruin has provided valuable information on Maya building methods and processes, as well as guidance on how unfinished buildings may be identified.

A quarter of a century ago Antiquity carried an article by A. J. Arkell (194.4) on 'Archaeological Research in West Africa'. This was the text of a memorandum submitted by request to the Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (the Elliott Commission), which recommended that in the then Gold Coast, now Ghana, the existing Achimota College should continue its originally envisaged development into a full university college and that the University College of Ibadan should be founded in Nigeria. Not only did these developments take place, but both institutions have since become autonomous degree-granting universities ; in addition two more universities have come into being in Ghana and four in Nigeria. Three of the universities in Nigeria and one of those in Ghana concern themselves with archaeology.

One hundred and thirty-two years after a first survey of their archaeology appeared, the Phoenicians remain the forgotten people of the ancient Mediterranean world. The October 1995 Cádiz conference provides occasion to review Phoenician studies then and now.

Several burials excavated during 1960 at Ingombe Ilede in southern Africa were accompanied by exceptional quantities of gold and glass beads, bronze trade wire and bangles. The burials were indirectly dated to the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries AD, prior to the arrival of the Portuguese on the East Coast of Africa. New AMS dates on cotton fabric from two of the burials now relocate them in the sixteenth century. This was a dynamic period when the Portuguese were establishing market settlements along the Zambezi, generating new demands for trade products from the interior, and establishing trade networks with the Mwene Mutapa confederacy. These new dates invite a reconsideration of Ingombe Ilede's relationship to Swahili and Portuguese trade in the middle Zambezi. This article is followed by four responses and a final comment by the authors.

MacKie, the foremost Scottish scholar to address himself in recent years to the study of brochs, has said, with characteristic firmness, that ‘brochs are among the most striking of all the prehistoric monuments of Europe’ (1975, 72). Certainly this is so, and ever since the first real awakening of interest in Scottish antiquities around the midnineteenth century the broch has always been felt to be Scotland’s archaeological show-piece. Yet, close on a hundred years after Alexander Rhind set the ball rolling with his excavations at the broch of Kettleburn, Wick, Sir Lindsay Scott was forced to admit that ‘No ancient sites have been more excavated than those of the broch and, unfortunately, none with less result’ (1947, 3). In the 30 odd years since Scott, the full excavation reports of only three brochs have appeared. With this consideration it is perhaps less surprising to see so little space devoted to brochs in Cunliffe’s recent major review of the British Iron Age (1974a, 219–22; 2nd ed. 1978, 235–8) and their total omission from British prehistory (1974b) is marginally less startling; such summary treatment is a result of a dearth of the right kind of information, which itself derives from the whole approach to brochs throughout most of the history of Scottish archaeology.

The authors deconstruct the basis for dating the Palaeolithic cave paintings of France and find it wanting. Only five per cent are directly dated and the remainder belong to a stylistic framework that has grown organically, and with much circularity, as new paintings were brought to light. Following a constructive bouleversement, the authors recommend a new chronometric foundation based on chains of evidence anchored by radiocarbon dates. The story so far is striking: it brings many of the themes and techniques thought typical of the later painters into the repertoire of their much earlier predecessors.

González-Ruibal et al. raise challenging issues that seem frightening in their implications. In both their specificity and their wider theoretical contexts, I had previously given these issues little thought, and some I had not even recognised. I share fully the authors’ concern that archaeologists must seek ways to engage people influenced by ‘reactionary populism’, people who “are diverse, fragmented and complex”, and who may be “greedy, patriarchal, xenophobic or uninterested in the past” (González-Ruibal et al. above). The authors find fault with the multi-vocal, multi-cultural approaches of epistemic populist archaeologies that tend to exclude most of those who fit this description. I could object to some of the details of the authors’ critiques of epistemic populism and heritage studies, but their core arguments are mostly correct and powerful. At the same time, at least within a North American context, I think that archaeologists have generally reacted to the various populist pressures of the past century and that we have already started to do what the authors suggest.

In the 2nd century AD Pausanias (i.2.4-15.1) walked through the agora at Athens describing some of the statues and naming the artists; at least 35 of the statues were of bronze, yet not a single one survives intact today (Mattusch 1982: 8-9). Thinking only of the extant marble sculpture does an injustice to the civic art of Athens. This problem is commonplace; almost any classical site has numerous stone bases for bronze statues which have long gone into the melting-pot. Yet so often in modern scholarship stone sculpture is given a privileged position. Although modern histories of Greek art pay much attention to the marble sculpture of the Parthenon, ancient authorities were not so impressed; Pausanias (i.24.5-7) provides the briefest of descriptions to the marble sculpted pediments and omits to mention the frieze. For many scholars today the frieze has become an example of what ‘unlimited money can do’ (Ashmole 1972: 116), yet, as R. Osborne has recently pointed out, it merely helped the viewer to process to the east end of the temple where he or she would have been confronted by the great chryselephantine cult-statue of Athena: ‘this is what the temple was built to display, this is the object towards which worship is directed, and this is what the procession was all about’ (Osborne 1987: 101). And this is what Pausanias describes in detail, the great work of art and expression of Athens’ wealth which no longer survives.