Classification has been a fundamental tool in archaeology since the birth of the discipline, particularly in artefactual analysis. All artefacts, including field monuments, have a limitless variety of characteristics and their reduction into a system of classification necessitates the selection, summarization and simplification of those characteristics regarded as diagnostic in order to clarify groupings of related monuments which might otherwise be obscured by concentration on detail. While some doubt has been cast on the value of the classification of henge monuments as an internally coherent group (and the discovery of many more sites has certainly done little to consolidate that coherence) it can still be argued that a strictly defined class of henge is a useful contribution to our understanding (Harding 1987). Other classes of monument of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC which seem to have ceremonial/funerary functions have also been defined, such as enclosed cremation cemeteries, recumbent stone circles, postcircles, ring cairns, ring ditches and so on. It is widely agreed that there are complex relationships between these various types and their myriad hybrids, or at least that comparisons can be made between various constructional elements.

In 1990 a stone covered pit containing a Trevisker Ware vessel was found eroding from the cliffs at Harlyn Bay and excavated. The vessel contained cremated bone from several individuals with some animal bone, quartz pebbles, and a small bronze pendant. A radiocarbon date on the cremated bone fell in the range 2120–1880 cal bc and is a valuable addition to the small number of securely-dated Early Bronze Age burials in Cornwall with metalwork associations. This early date also makes a major contribution to the debate on the sequence of Trevisker Ware as the vessel, of gabbroic clay, has a band of incised chevron decoration. Lipid residue analysis showed traces of ruminant dairy fat. This paper examines the significance of unmounded burial sites in Cornwall and also assesses the importance of Early Bronze Age burials around Harlyn Bay which have produced an unusually wide range of artefacts.

Results of investigations into the palaeoecological setting of the stone-circle/ring-cairn prehistoric complex on Cefn Gwernffrwd, Mid-Wales are presented in two radiocarbon-dated pollen diagrams. Mesolithic and Neolithic environments of the locality are briefly discussed. The conjectured archaeological age of the complex is then considered and compared with the palaeoecological evidence. The latter indicates construction of the complex in two separate episodes in the Bronze Age. Initial construction was probably in the Overton period (3650–3400 bp); later major local disturbance in the Penard period (3000–2800 bp) may be associated with construction of the ring cairn. These dates may slightly underestimate the age of human activities as they are based on fine particulate peat fractions of horizons in which the effects of activities are evident. The indications of a previously forested environment may have implications for the astronomical significance of the ‘alignment’ at the complex. Blanket peat initiation on the plateau was apparently connected with the Bronze Age impact on forest in this locality.

The chance find of a discrete pit containing an Early Bronze Age funerary deposit was made at Stanbury, West Yorkshire, during the spring of 2007. A large Collared Urn, which was inverted, contained the cremated remains of a young male, together with a stone battle-axe, a bone belt-hook and pin, a pair of copper alloy earrings, and an accessory vessel. The burial was accompanied by two further Collared Urns, one of which was near complete. The two radiocarbon dates obtained have allowed a fairly tight date range of 1960–1780 cal BC to be proposed. This combination of pyre and grave goods is apparently unique, while a number of the items are exotic to Pennine Yorkshire.

It is doubly appropriate that the Prehistoric Society should celebrate its jubilee in Norwich. The Society was born in the Castle on 23 February 1935 of a parent conceived improbably enough in the Public Library at a meeting held on 26 October 1908 to inaugurate an East Anglian Society ‘for the study of all matters appertaining to prehistoric man’. The question I want you to consider in this address is how the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia developed so rapidly to the point at which it achieved national status as The Prehistoric Society. Let me begin by removing one misapprehension. My hands are not dripping with East Anglian blood nor have I just wiped them clean. The Prehistoric Society was not the outcome of a revolutionary putsch. It stemmed from nothing more dramatic than a recognition that the Prehistoric Society had long ceased to be East Anglian. When we met at Norwich Castle for our Annual General Meeting in 1935 and passed the resolution which eliminated the words ‘of East Anglia’ from our title we were merely recognizing a fact, that we had long ceased to be East Anglian in anything but name. There were no dissentient votes.

The two men who between them set the Prehistoric Society on its feet came from different but complementary backgrounds. W. G. Clarke was Norfolk born and bred and earned his living as a working journalist in Norwich, while cultivating a wide-ranging interest in natural history and prehistoric archaeology.

The WSW–ENE alignment of the Greater Stonehenge Cursus appears to have been prefigured by the line of Mesolithic post-holes found in the Stonehenge car park. If this is not a coincidence, a means of transmission must be hypothesised since the posts could not have survived the 4000 years separation. The fact that a significant number of henges in western lowland Britain adopt the same broad alignment hints at a very long-lived mental template. That, it is argued, is likely to have been celestially triggered and tied to seasonal rhythms. Simple luni-solar calculation (akin to that determining events as disparate as the ancient Olympic festival and present day Easter) rather than precisely measureable astronomical events, would create such azimuth clustering. The focus on April sunrises or October sunsets argues for an association with the pastoral cycle.

Decorated cists have been identified at three burial cairns in Kilmartin Glen, Mid Argyll. The paper provides a new analysis of the cover slab at Nether Largie North, which features a series of pecked axeheads. Previous studies suggested that they replaced an array of cup marks, but the evidence of photogrammetry suggests a longer sequence and a more complex scheme. The same approach was taken to the decorated cists beneath the Nether Largie Mid cairn and a comparable structure at Ri Cruin. Additional depictions were identified. The carvings within all three cists are organised in similar ways. They date from a period in the Early Bronze Age when metal was imported from Ireland. At the same time, the reuse of older structures suggests a new concern with the past.

Baltinglass is a multi-chamber Neolithic passage tomb in Co. Wicklow, Ireland, excavated in the 1930s. This paper presents the results of a radiocarbon dating programme on charred wheat grains and hazelnut shell found underlying the cairn, and on cremated human bone found within and near two of the monument’s five chambers. The results are surprising, in that three of the six determinations on calcined bone pre-date by one or two centuries the charred cereals and hazelnut shells sealed under the cairn, dating to c. 3600–3400 cal bc. Of the remaining three bone results, one is coeval with the charred plant remains, while the final two can be placed in the period 3300/3200–2900 cal bc, that is more traditionally associated with developed passage tombs. A suggested sequence of construction is presented beginning with a simple tomb lacking a cairn, followed by a burning event – perhaps a ritual preparation of the ground – involving the deposition of cereal grains and other materials, very rapidly and intentionally sealed under a layer of clay, in turn followed by at least two phases involving the construction of more substantial chambers and associated cairns. What was already a complex funerary monument has proven to be even more complex, with a history spanning at least six centuries.

The submerged forest or peat bed on the Durham coast situated between Hartlepool and West Hartlepool and extending along the shore southwards towards Seaton Carew and northwards beneath the sand dunes has been known for many years. The main portion of it occupies a depression between two outcrops of Magnesian Limestone, the easterly one forming the isolated mass of rock on which the old town of Hartlepool is built and the westerly one being the edge of the main outcrop of the same rock on which West Hartlepool stands. To the south the Triassic red sandstone which is faulted down beneath a covering of boulder clay appears on the shore at Longscar Rock and Seaton Carew.

Notable advances have taken place on the continent of recent years in the study of bronze types of the Late Bronze Age, and of their distribution both in time and space. In Britain, too, progress has been made. We have some while since distinguished a Late Bronze Age II (roughly equivalent to Hallstatt B) from a Late Bronze Age I (roughly Hallstatt A), and latterly even begun—though still dimly—to envisage a Late Bronze Age III, which would be the counterpart with us of a true Hallstatt period (Reinecke's Hallstatt C and D, or Montelius VI).

In regard to swords we recognize the intrusive Carp's-Tongue variety, characteristic of the opening of our Late Bronze Age II, and certain native weapons that are contemporary with it. We have also long been familiar with the later Hallstatt bronze swords of Gündlingen type. But the series as a whole has not yet been studied, and its origins are vague and ill-documented. It is the object of this paper to offer a reasoned starting-point for the sequence of development in Britain, so that we may be the better equipped to determine which of our sword-types can properly be assigned to our own Late Bronze Age I, and even, possibly, to throw some light on the chronology of the period.

Prehistory, in Great Britain, is usually taken to denote the whole story of human activity in our country before its invasion, or before the invasion of any given part of it, by the Romans in the 1st century A.D.; it may also denote the totality of research upon, and interpretation of that story. The adjective Prehistoric was first popularized in the 19th century by Sir John Lubbock, the first Lord Avebury, and it and its cognate substantive Prehistory have been found so convenient, that we take their use for granted. Yet to a strictly logical mind they are tiresome and problematic words. Since what is Prehistoric must precede in time what is Historic, Prehistory should precede History; and History, to Lubbock, was evidently History in its restricted sense of the story of human activity known to us from written documents. But History can mean more than that: even the original Ancient Greek word historía did not mean history only in Lubbock's sense—the word for that was syngraphé—but rather, anything found out by enquiry. Thus to-day in the 20th century, when the range covered by documentary history has been enormously extended, both in time and space, by archaeology and anthropology in all their branches, we can speak also, as Elliot Smith did in his book of twenty years ago, of Human History as covering all the human story—all of What Happened in History, as Professor Childe's book called it in 1942—without restriction. In other words, History in the broad sense includes Prehistory, which must yet precede History in the narrow sense. We, as prehistorians, are of course quite used to this; and we seldom notice the patient smile on the face of the logician.

An iron sword of anthropoid-hilted type (pl. XXIV, 1, 3) was found in 1944 at Shouldham in West Norfolk, some five miles east of the margin of the Fens, and since 1949 has been on loan to Norwich Castle Museum. It is here published by kind permission of the owner, Mr W. R. O. Woodward. The sword was discovered while gravel was being dug in an arable field about 200 feet south-east of the site of the medieval church of St. Margaret, which fell into ruins after the Reformation. The sword was found at a depth of 1 foot 6 inches lying across the chest of an extended human skeleton inside the boundary of the medieval churchyard, as graves of that period were found adjacent though they had not disturbed this pre-Christian inhumation. There is no indication either on the ground or on air-photographs that a barrow had formerly existed, and the burial is probably to be regarded as an isolated interment.

The overall length of the sword, to the end of the branching arms, is now 21⅜ in. (54 cm.), but this has been slightly diminished by corrosion. The straight-edged blade is 16⅜ in. (44 cm.) long and the hilt measures 3¼ in. (8 cm.). At both ends of the hilt curving arms of round cross-section branch outwards to end in knobs, now of unequal size owing to differential rusting. The surface of the grip bears traces of transverse ribbing, perhaps imitating that found in bronze on other examples of the type.

The exact way in which ancient man made stone implements has occupied the interest of many prehistorians. One way of helping to solve this problem is by trying to make implements oneself. Although several investigators have done isolated and rather sporadic work along these lines, there seem to be few accounts of any systematic series of experiments. The most complete descriptions known to me are those by J. Reid Moir (hand-axes and Levallois flakes) and Sir Francis Knowles (Neolithic arrow-heads). Although M. Coutier's experiments have been filmed, no written account of them seems to be available.

As I have been experimenting for some years with the making of various types of stone implements, some of my results can now be described; only one short reference to this work has been published so far. My objects in making these investigations have been to find out as much as possible about the way in which Palaeoliths were made, and about the conditions under which the work was done. Information about conditions was obtained by doing the flaking ‘in the field’ rather than in a laboratory or workshop, that is to say, the stone was usually worked at the place where it was found in quarries or natural exposures. The main conclusion derived from this aspect of the investigation was that until early man learned to mine for flint, for instance, he would find very little suitable raw material in country covered by grass, trees or bushes, and my work proved that if artificial gravel pits and chalk quarries were not used, the best sources of stone were in river beds or on the shores of lakes or the sea.

The recent discovery of decorated stones in the cruciform Passage Grave of Barclodiad y Gawres, in Anglesey, has made a notable addition to the volume of megalithic mural art known in Britain. The examples of such art described in the present paper increase the number still further. In his discussion of the chamber tombs of England and Wales, Daniel mentions the Calderstones as a possible former burial chamber. At that time (1950), the six Calderstones were arranged in a circle and stood in a small enclosure outside the Menlove Avenue entrance to Calderstones Park, Liverpool (fig. 1). This arrangement was, however, comparatively recent; the original monument was destroyed early in the nineteenth century. The markings were first published in 1864. In 1883, J. R. Allen made measured drawings of the stones, showing the disposition of all the markings known at the time. The same drawings were used by Stewart-Brown in 1911. Allen's drawings recorded only those portions of the stones above ground; examination of the areas then below ground level has revealed a number of new markings.

There is a considerable literature concerning the prehistory and palaeontology of cattle, both at the infra- and inter-species levels. In spite of the wealth of published material, however, deficiencies remain. The majority of the publications concern small areas of study, and few general syntheses are available; the few syntheses which do exist, such as those of Reed (1961) and Zeuner (1963) do not do justice to the information at present available. Most of the detailed work is concentrated in North-West Europe, and developments in many fields, particularly those of evolutionary genetics and economic prehistory, have rendered obsolete many of the premises underlying published hypotheses. This is true for nearly all discussions of animals in their relationships with prehistoric man, but a general reassessment of the situation is available (Higgs and Jarman, 1969) while Payne (1969) has treated the sheep-goat group in particular. The work concerning cattle may conveniently be divided into two overlapping groups. First there are those studies which are primarily concerned with palaeontological considerations, with the description of specimens from a taxonomic and ecological point of view. The second group comprises investigations into the relationship between man and cattle and because of the prevailing climate of thought has concentrated overwhelmingly on the domestication of cattle and their subsequent exploitation. Thus the ‘Man and Cattle’ Symposium (Mourant and Zeuner, 1963) contains papers concerned with the history of the relationship from the Neolithic to the present day. Mesolithic and Pleistocene cattle are not discussed in any detail, and are only mentioned as a standard of comparison by which changes may be recognized. This assessment of the relative potential importance of the evidence is the product of the preferred hypothesis of the time, and before discussing the evidence offered for the domestication of cattle and their later history, it is important to understand the formative influence of the theoretical framework underlying the data.

The Newgrange passage tomb is examined for evidence of ‘Neolithic science’. Claims that it incorporated an astronomical alignment, and was constructed using Pythagorean geometry and the megalithic yard are reviewed as are scientific interpretations of its art. A new analysis of the tomb's structure reveals that it was based on a simple geometric shape measurable by a 13.1 m unit of length. The locations of particular motifs and decorated surfaces are shown to conform to the spatial relationships evident in the tomb's form. These are defined in terms of oppositions between left and right, front and back, inside and outside, visible and hidden, as well as making reference to symbols found in the art of the neighbouring passage tomb at Knowth.

These features are interpreted, not as evidence of a specificically scientific discourse in the Irish Neolithic, but as the elaboration of elements common to the passage tomb ritual discourse. Competition for political control, in the context of mortuary practices, resulted in the increasing formalization and rigid interpretation of passage tomb symbolizm, and the ritualization of new areas of knowledge.

Archaeological fieldwork preceding housing development revealed a Mesolithic site in a primary context. A central hearth was evident from a cluster of calcined flint and bone, the latter producing a modelled date for the start of occupation at 8220–7840 cal bc and ending at 7960–7530 cal bc (95% probability). The principal activity was the knapping of bladelets, the blanks for microlith production. Impact-damaged microliths indicated the re-tooling of hunting weaponry, while microwear analysis of other tools demonstrated hide working and butchery activity at the site. The lithics can be classified as a Honey Hill assemblage type on the basis of distinctive leaf-shaped microlithic points with inverse basal retouch.

Such assemblages have a known concentration in central England and are thought to be temporally intermediate between the conventional British Early and Late Mesolithic periods. The lithic assemblage is compared to other Honey Hill type and related Horsham type assemblages from south-eastern England. Both assemblage types are termed Middle Mesolithic and may be seen as part of wider developments in the late Preboreal and Boreal periods of north-west Europe. Rapid climatic warming at this time saw the northward expansion of deciduous woodland into north-west Europe. Emerging new ecosystems presented changes in resource patterns and the Middle Mesolithic lithic typo-technological developments reflect novel foraging strategies as adaptations to the new opportunities of Boreal forest conditions. While Honey Hill-type assemblages are seen as part of such wider processes their distinctive typological signature attests to autochthonous, regional developments of human groups infilling the landscape. Such cultural insularity may reflect changing social boundaries with reduction in mobility range and physical isolation caused by rising sea level and the creation of the British archipelago.

This paper sets out the results of radiocarbon, histological, and contextual analysis of human remains from non-mortuary contexts in Middle and Late Bronze Age Britain. In the latter period in particular, human bone (much of it fragmentary and disarticulated) has frequently been recovered from settlement contexts and from other locations, such as waterholes, across the wider landscape. However, the source and post-mortem trajectories of such finds are poorly understood. The results of our analyses indicate that some of these finds come from primary burials while others were the result of post-mortem processes such as excarnation. Certain fragments appear to have been curated for lengthy periods of time but there is much less evidence for deliberate curation of bone than there is in Early Bronze Age graves, although other forms of manipulation, such as cutting and shaping of bone fragments, have been recorded. In contrast to the Early Bronze Age, where it has been argued that curated bones may have belonged to venerated ancestors, some of the individuals from the sites discussed in this paper had suffered violent deaths, suggesting that bones selected for manipulation, curation, and deposition may have belonged to a variety of different categories of person.

The Neothermal Dalmatia Project is an Anglo-Yugoslav collaborative project whose aims are to define and explain changes in physical environment, settlement pattern and social structure in north Dalmatia over the last 12 millennia. The Project's fieldwork included archaeological field survey, analytical survey, trial excavation of Neolithic, Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman sites, soil and land use mapping, ethnographic survey of modern villages and hamlets and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions (pollen, sediments, sea-level change, etc.). Within the long-term constraints of a limestone-dominated study region, the short-term events and medium-term agrarian and demographic cycles of the Dalmatian social groups have been studied in an inter-disciplinary manner. In this article, an attempt is made to examine the environmental and archaeological data within the frameworks of four explanatory models: the Land Use Capability (LUC) Model, the Cyclic Intensification–Deintensification (CID) Model, the Communal Ownership of Property (COP) Model and the Arenas of Social Power (ASP) Model. In the LUC model, reconstructions of past land use capabilities are used to derive postdictions of the most likely settlement patterns for successive periods (Neolithic–Roman); a high degree of postdictive success is met. In the CID model, Bintliff's model of cyclic variations in agricultural intensification and private land-holding is refined and tested against survey and excavation data. In the COP model, Fleming's model of communal land ownership is tested against similar data, with contrasting results. Finally, the ASP model is used to explain the expanded range of arenas of social power which develops from a place-based worldview in the early farming period. The conjoint use of these four explanatory models, which operate at different scales of duration, provides a broader basis for understanding changes in the prehistory of north Dalmatia in the Neothermal period than had previously been constructed.

During the last few years the importance of the flake cultures of the lower Palaeolithic has been recognised by prehistorians, and great advances have been made towards the correlation of these industries with the various biface cultures, and in the working out of their stratigraphical sequence.

The position of the Clactonian has been firmly established, and the long neglected Levalloisian industry is now assuming its proper place of importance. Much confusion has been caused in the past by the misleading nomenclature of these two industries. The Clactonian was often called Abbevillian (Chellian), or Acheulian, and the evolved Clactonian, Mousterian. The Levalloisian was believed to be a part of the Acheulian, and was also frequently miscalled Mousterian. These two flake cultures, sometimes dovetailing with, and sometimes running parallel to the biface industries, culminate in the Mousterian, when they join, via the Tayacian, with the Acheulian biface technique to form a polymorphic culture; the local variations of this usually combine at least two of the techniques. These variations are in a great respect governed by the quality and size of the blocks of material available for making artifacts.