Evidence from the Channel Islands supports the view that long-distance transport of megaliths in the European Neolithic cannot be substantiated. Analysis of the stones at La Hougue Bie, however, shows that megaliths were regularly moved over shorter distances, and suggests that the distribution of megalithic sites within a region cannot be explained simply as a function of the availability of building materials. This view modifies the purely materialistic conclusions of Thorpe & Williams-Thorpe in their recent demolition of the Stonehenge bluestones myth (ANTIQUITY 65: 64–73).

Mr J. C. MANN holds that ‘each civitas of Gaul (and of Britain) was presumably a city, and like all true cities, each will have consisted of a single physical city surrounded by its territorium, the whole under the control of its magistrates, council and assembly, the last no doubt usually of little importance.’ I, on the other hand, following Jullian and Stevens, have suggested that the civitas was the whole tribal area, its capital (caput) normally ranking merely as a vicus where the government happened to have its seat. This, Mr Mann suggests, is a myth, which he doubts whether a Roman lawyer would understand.

The evidence admittedly is not all that it might be; yet as the question is important for a correct understanding of the development of local government in Roman Britain (and elsewhere), I may venture to take it up once more, especially as Mr Mann’s note appears to me to be erroneous in one or two particulars, and to exhibit the triple weaknesses of a too narrowly legalistic outlook, an inadequate account of historical development, and a neglect of some of the relevant facts.

New evidence for the movement of Neolithic basalt adzes across the Taiwan Strait may indicate the beginnings of regular Austronesian voyaging. This seafaring tradition culminated in the Polynesian colonization of the Pacific.

The English reviewer for Nature (Renfrew 1990) declared that Bruce Trigger's new history of archaeology will become the standard account of our subject's history, and the French reviewer for ANTIQUITY also has a warm view (this issue, page 960). Having looked to the past, what does Trigger see for the future of archaeology in North America, as the reaction comes to the view of archaeology as, primarily, science that has dominated these last decades?

For the purpose of discussion the platform and the alignment must be regarded as two separate sites which might in the future prove to have been related. Taken together the metal objects from the two sites represent a remarkable collection, not only by their context and numbers but also by the range of metals represented. Whilst the majority of the objects are in copper alloy (almost certainly bronze) there are also objects in iron, a white metal (some definitely tin, others, lead) and a single gold object.

Hallstatt and La Tène are the names given to the first and second phases of the pre-Roman Iron Age. They are derived from the sites where objects characteristic of the respective cultures were first identified, neither Hallstatt nor La Tène having any claim to be considered as the cradles of the cultures named after them. The former lies in Upper Austria. La Tène (‘the shallows’) is situated in Switzerland at the eastern end of the lake of Neuchatel.

The upper limit for the chronology of the Hallstatt Period is a vexed point. If by Hallstatt we mean a period when iron was in general use, it can hardly have said to have begun before the ninth century B.C. ; if we regard it as denoting the time when Villanovan and other contemporary influences first made themselves felt in Central Europe, it can hardly have begun later than c. 1000 B.C. Reinecke would even put it back as far as c. 1200 B.C. The lower limit is somewhat easier to define. Generally speaking it came to an end c. 550-500 B.C. ; but in some districts it persisted until c. 400, while in north-east Germany and other remote areas, the La Tène culture cannot be said to have succeeded it until c. 150 B.C., or even later.

Once upon a time (so tradition says) a region of extreme fertility lay between the Scilly Islands and Cornwall. This land was called Lyonesse; and where now roll the waters of the Atlantic there once stood prosperous towns and no less than a hundred and forty churches. The rocks called the Seven Stones, seven miles west of Land's End, are said to mark the site of a large city. This country was overwhelmed by the sea, and the sole survivor, one Trevilian, escaped destruction only by mounting a swift horse and fleeing to the mainland.

Such, stripped to the bone, is the famous legend of Lyonesse. Had it any real basis in fact, or is it merely an invention of the “dreamy Celt”? There are good reasons for believing that the substance of the legend is true, that within prehistoric times there did actually exist land which is now covered by the sea, and that it has been gradually overwhelmed. In one respect only does the modern critic disagree with tradition. He believes that Lyonesse was the Scilly Islands themselves, not a completely vanished region between them and Cornwall; and that what is now an archipelago of islands was a single large island, surrounded perhaps by a few rocky islets.

EVER since, in 1893, Paolo Orsi published and described a group of these objects from the necropolis of Cava della Signora, Castelluccio, they have E been generally regarded as of the highest importance for the study of W. Mediterranean prehistory. Orsi himself immediately recognized the parallel with those which had then been recently unearthed by Schliemann at Troy, and since his time the validity of this parallel has been generally admitted by archaeologists. All who have since then treated of the chronological problems of Sicily and the Western Mediterranean lands have accepted them as imports from Troy and a basis for synchronisms between the cultures of the Eastern and Western basins. Despite this, however, no study has as yet been published of these objects in which the Trojan and Sicilian groups have been treated together and closely compared. In 1939 a useful critical analysis of the evidence relative to the three Trojan plaques was published by Bittel, but he did not go on to make a similar study of the Sicilian ones.

What were the ‘black stones’ about which Charlemagne wrote to King Offa of Mercia just before AD 800? How do these special blocks fit into the broader pattern in re-using Roman columns in early medieval buildings?

In 1996 ‘Internet Archaeology’, the first peer-reviewed e-journal for Archaeology, published its first edition (Heyworth et al. 1997). Later the same year the Archaeology Data Service, the first digital archive for archaeology, was established (Richards 1997). Ten years on, this paper examines the rapid changes which have taken place in electronic publication and looks forward to the next ten years. It examines the pressures on traditional journal publication, and discusses the potential impact on Archaeology of the next Internet revolution, the Semantic Web.

A decorated pair of trousers excavated from a well-preserved tomb in the Tarim Basin proved to have a highly informative life history, teased out by the authors – with archaeological, historical and art historical dexterity. Probably created under Greek influence in a Bactrian palace, the textile started life in the third/second century BC as an ornamental wall hanging, showing a centaur blowing a war-trumpet and a nearly life-size warrior of the steppe with his spear. The palace was raided by nomads, one of whom worked a piece of the tapestry into a pair of trousers. They brought no great luck to the wearer who ended his days in a massacre by the Xiongnu, probably in the first century BC. The biography of this garment gives a vivid glimpse of the dynamic life of Central Asia at the end of the first millennium.

The sites of the first modern humans who occupied what is now Britain have been reduced to a handful by subsequent glaciation and the rise in sea level, and their assemblages have been further depleted because early excavators ignored the microliths. Confronting the challenges of this exiguous material, the author succeeds in painting a vivid picture of Aurignacian hunters following prey down the now submerged Channel River Valley, colonising the preferred hilly zones at the west of Britain. The presence of two types of bladelet manufacture suggests a lengthy or repeated period of subsequent occupation.

One of the most characteristic features of Sardinian architecture, playing an important part in the scenery of the island, is provided by the ancient, forbidding and imposing megalithic structures which the local inhabitants, in the original prehistoric and pre-Indo-European tongue, call nurakes, nuraghes, nuraxzk, nuraccis, nuragis, nuracus, etc., according to district and dialect. We generally know them by the Italian form of the word, nuraghi (singular nuraghe).

Built of large blocks set without mortar in more or less regular horizontal rows, the nuraghe, in its simplest form, appears as a round tower with battered sides. Its height depends upon the number, from one to three, of the storeys it contains, and may sometimes, as at the nuraghe Santu Antine at Torralba in the province of Sassari, reach as much as 20 m., with walls from 2 to 5 m. thick (PLATE VIId).