The culture-historical development of Neolithic and Bronze Age communities under Eurasian steppe conditions is indissolubly linked with the establishment and development of early forms of productive economy, and displays a number of distinguishing features, which are the product of both natural and historical factors.

Within the USSR, the steppe extends from the mouth of the Danube to the upper reaches of the Ob and the Altai mountains (Milkov 1977). To the north, the steppes naturally grade in to the forest zone to form a belt of transitional foreststeppe landscape. To the south, the steppe is bounded by the coast of the Black Sea, the foothills of the Caucasus and beginning in the Lower Volga region the semi-deserts and, further south, deserts of Soviet Central Asia.

The familiar term “pseudoarchaeology” allows us to categorise and comfortingly dismiss a diverse group of alternative presentations of the past, and reinforce our own professionalism as scholars and scientists. Glyn Daniel regularly denounced the ideas of a “lunatic fringe” in Antiquity editorials, and contributors to a recent unforgiving book analyse “how pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past” (Fagan 2006). Other terms like “alternative” or “cult” archaeologies describe the same phenomena, and it is appropriate to consider elements of pseudohistory in the same argument. The conventional image is of a clear gap between the knowledge gained through our scholarly and scientific research and thinking, and the illusory pasts and falsehoods created by others. But such a binary division does present problems.

Many thousands of metal objects are retrieved from arable fields every year, by casual discovery or by treasure-seekers with metal-detectors. What is the status of this material? Here a senior archaeologist and a metal-detectorist get together to demonstrate scientifically the hostile context of the ploughsoil and the accelerating damage it is inflicting on the ancient material it contains. Their work raises some important questions about the ‘archive under the plough’: is it safer to leave the objects there, or to take advantage of a widespread hobby to locate and retrieve them?

The site where the torcs were found is just above the 100-ft contour (30.5 m.) on high land 3.2 km. east of the town centre (TM 13684273). The torcs were lying on the west flank of a hill overlooking a tributary of the Belstead Brook; this tributary has now been filled in and underlies Bridgwater Road. The hill is pasture land adjoining Fir Tree Farm and, being steepsided, is unlikely ever to have been ploughed. It was decided to cut back the hill at its foot to provide larger gardens for the houses of Holcombe Crescent. The flank was removed by bulldozing in 3-m. swathes, the width of the machine. When Mr Tricker walked past the spot he saw an almost vertical cliff some 4-5 m. high; the bulldozer, which was removing the second swathe, was working, as a safety precaution, about a metre from the edge; the spine of earth which was left was falling down the slope, loosened by the vibration. Projecting from this loose earth, some 2 m

Deposits of human and animal bodies in a monumental Akkadian building at Tell Brak (ancient Nagar) superficially suggest random killing and disposal. But here the authors produce evidence that these represent the deliberate sacrifice of valued creatures. Among the human remains were those argued to represent a specialist acrobat, while the donkey remains reflect the association of the building with the breeding of the much-debated onager-donkey hybrid that preceded the horse.

A study of the Middle Palaeolithic stone tool technology from assemblages in South India reveals diverse reduction strategies, including preferences exercised in the choice of row material and blanks for tool manufacture. Various behaviour patterns are identified which have significant implications for the relatively little known Indian Middle Palaeolithic

Archaeologists increasingly realise that prehistoric peoples had their own ideas about time. The concept of linear, measurable time emerged in learned Europe largely in the first millennium. Here the author tracks how, with the broadening of literacy in sixteenth-century Britain, dates start appearing on numerous items of popular culture. The dated objects in turn feed back into the way that people of all social levels began to see themselves and their place in history.

Flints scattered in the earliest stratum of Mandrin, a rock shelter in the Rhône valley, were clustered by k-means and Principal Component Analysis to reveal areas dominated by particular tools or waste products. These areas suggest the way in which Palaeolithic people managed their domestic space.

One way to understand how a landscape captures memories is to study places where documents have also preserved them. The author does this to remarkable effect in the island of Rarotonga, showing how the great road Ara Metua and its monuments and land boundaries were structured and restructured through time to reflect what was to be remembered. Students of the pre- and proto-histories of all continents will find much inspiration in the pages that follow.

With the use of grain comes a variety of parasitic fungi – some benign, others dangerous and even toxic. Here are surveyed some of the fungi to which ancient and modern grain is subject, and some of the consequences for human populations. More specifically, several parasitic fungi, Claviceps, purpurea, C. Paspali, Ustilago maydis and U. esculenta, have infested cereal grains and grasses in ancient and recent times and may have served as a source of human foods or medicine.

The principal object of the campaign was to demolish the great baulk that had purposely been left unexcavated from the very beginning to provide a record of the stratigraphy of the site.* This earth was now required by the Restoration Department of the Greek Archaeological Service to secure and safeguard the mud brick walls that were destroyed in a great fire in Late Helladic IIIB towards the end of the 13th century BC. The intensity of the fire had served to preserve these walls in their original state, though off axis, and they are the most complete examples of their kind on any Mycenaean site. The second object of the excavation was to uncover the rest of the plan of the LH IIIB walls which in the western sector of the site are buried below the postdestruction walls of LH IIIB/IIIC. The second objective was only in part accomplished because of the remarkable and outstanding finds that were brought to light, mostly under the great baulk. The work of their recovery sIowed down the excavation considerably. At the east central end of the great baulk a small room, c. 2 m. x 2 m., was uncovered that was filled with a great variety of clay objects in considerable disarray (PL. xra; see plan, FIG. I,I). Outstanding among these were idols from 0.50 to 0.60 m. in height of a kind that had never been found on the Greek mainland before, although somewhat similar examples are known from Gazi in Crete [I]

The relationship between antiquity, archaeology and national imagination in Greece, the sacralisation of the Classical past, and the recasting of the Western Hellenism into an indigenous Hellenism have been extensively studied in the last 15 years or so (see e.g. Hamilakis 2007, 2009). In fact, Greece has proved a rich source of insights for other cases of nation-state heritage politics. The new Acropolis Museum project was bound to be shaped by the poetics of nationhood right from the start, given that its prime referent is the most sacred object of the Hellenic national imagination, the Acropolis of Athens. This site is at the same time, however, an object of veneration within the Western imagination (you only have to look at the UNESCO logo), a pilgrimage destination for millions of global tourists, with all its revenue implications, and an endlessly reproduced and modified global icon (in both senses of the word).

Since Plato announced that the course of history returned upon itself in 72,000 years, since Polybius discerned a “circular movement” by which the history of states came back, over and over again, to the same point, the theory of historical cycles has been a commonplace of European thought. Familiar to the thinkers of the Renaissance, it was modified by Vico in the early eighteenth century and again by Hegel in the early nineteenth; and a complete history of the idea would show many curious transformations and cover a long period of time. Here no attempt will be made to summarize this story; the subject of the present paper is the latest and, to ourselves, most striking exposition of the general theory, contained in Dr Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West.