New excavation at Blombos Cave, in the southern Cape of South Africa, and new radiocarbon dates for its sequence further illuminate the chronology of pastoralism in southern Africa, and the relations between pottery-using and shepherding.

Mortimer Wheeler famously tied together the worlds of ancient Rome and ancient India by finding Roman ceramics stratified into levels at Arikamedu, in south India. Late Roman pottery from far down the East African coast now permits the same kind of matching link from the Mediterranean to a distant shore, this one in the Swahili world.

This complement to Van de Noort's 1993 contribution to ANTIQUITY extends the pattern in early medieval barrows seen on the British Isles and neighbouring portions of the European continent out to its central and towards its eastern zones.

A newly discovered deposit of camel bones from post-medieval, Turkish Period Hungary contributes additional information on the role of camels in the Carpathian Basin. By offering an opportunity for reviewing osteological evidence from Hungary, these remains complement our recent knowledge of the history and exploitation of camels in Europe, as recently reported in ANTIQUITY for the western limit of Europe.

ANTIQUITY's recent report on direct radiocarbon dates for human bone from Welsh caves had them concentrated in two distinct Postglacial periods. The larger pattern for Britain as a whole is also striking.

Eisele et al. in ANTIQUITY (1995) reported discouraging results from experiments to see if blood traces reliably survive on stone tools. Here, issue is taken with aspects of that study, and new research is reported from the celebrated buffalo-jump at Head-Smashed-In, southern Alberta. The great bone-bed there, consisting almost exclusively of bison bones, gives rare opportunity to study remains of a known single species under the genuine conditions of an archaeological site, rather than a supposing simulation.

A skull excavated from a 2nd-century AD pit in the Roman city of St Albans shows evidence for violent injury and displays cut-marks which seem to indicate deliberate defleshing. The find appears to be without close parallel in Roman Britain.

The head of the Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art takes issue with comment on archaeometallurgical work at Oxford made in ANTIQUITY earlier in the year.

Our interpretation of Bronze Age metalwork is based, for the most part, on common-sense ideas of what is functional and what is not, which items were intended to be recovered, which were gifts to other worlds. A more considered source of analogy than our limited experience is available at a certain distance. Remote in terms of measured miles, the analogy is nevertheless effective in expanding current definitions of how ritual is expressed through material culture.

A further contribution concerning the moving of the great stones used in megalith-building in later prehistoric Europe.

In ANTIQUITY for 1993 Barber & Crone reported their excavations at Buiston, one of the crannogs of southwestern Scotland, whose archaeology was in a remarkable good state despite the draining of its watery site. This further account, in reporting on botanical materials from the site, is able to develop a better knowledge of the plants around the crannog, and of their human uses.

One of the larger — and more expensive — present programmes of study in archaeological science explores the provenance of prehistoric bronzes from the Mediterranean. What are the bases of research? What will the findings tell us about the real place of metal as it moved in the ancient world?

In September 1994 the European Association of Archaeologists held its inaugural meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a sovereign nation formerly part of Yugoslavia. As was to be expected in such a place and at such a time, questions of ethnicity and identity were much in evidence. Here a classic case-study in defining an ancient European entity is explored from a fresh starting-point in contemporary Australia; it was first developed in the Ljubljana session on ‘Contemporary myth of the past’.