Wood was one of early man's most valuable and important raw materials. It furnished him with shelter, heat and a range of tools and weapons necessary for his survival. It was perhaps the first material to be employed for tools, even before stone was actively worked, yet wood hardly figures in the minds of many archaeologists, and it plays no part in the traditional, outmoded but convenient Three Age system of European Prehistory: Stone-Bronze-Iron. Yet there is hardly a tool or weapon used by Stone Age, Bronze Age or Iron Age man or woman which did not have a wooden part, and it is the purpose of this paper to point out the wealth of information that is available, or could be obtained, from studies of wooden artifacts.

The reason for neglect of such studies is obvious. Wood is perishable; it decays if left exposed, it is easily broken, it burns to nothing, it rots in the soil, it loses its surface in moving water. Its survival for long periods of time is exceptional, and requires certain conditions of deliberate or accidental burial. Yet wood as a fact and a feature of prehistoric economy cannot be disputed. Without the survival of wooden remains, our knowledge of the Neolithic and Bronze Age lake-side settlements in Switzerland would be quartered, and our information about the Iron Age villages at Glastonbury and Biskupin would be substantially reduced. Only in circumstances where conditions are exceptionally favourable has wood survived in an identifiable state, and in these situations it can tell us much about economic life. Grahame Clark expressed the view long ago that ‘less attention (should be) paid to amassing residual fossils from sites unfavourable to the survival of the organic materials which play so important a part in the economy of simple societies, and more to exploring sites where these materials are likely to survive’ (Clark 1940, 58).

The excavation of a multi-tumped oval barrow led to the discovery of a post-barrow flint industry, which utilized flint nodules incorporated in the mounds, thus damaging the original profile of the monument. 16,030 pieces of worked flint were recovered, 10,539 from the industrial levels. The material was analyzed by computer making use of programmes already developed for daily use by the M3 Archaeological Rescue Committee.

The excavation of this site on the southern outskirts of Ramsey (nat. grid ref. SC452936) was undertaken as a rescue operation when a building estate was to encroach upon the large mound which formed a conspicuous feature in the field. The Manx Museum and National Trust acknowledges the co-operation of the Planning Committee of the Isle of Man Local Government Board in stipulating as a condition of planning approval that opportunity must be given for scientific examination of the site. The excavation (necessarily accommodated with other commitments, and briefly delayed through snow) took place within the period December 1968 to April 1969.

Early References to the Site. As well as a strong local tradition that the mound was a burial place, references to the site occur in the local antiquarian literature. The earliest appears to be that in Oswald's Vestigia (1860, 57–58), where he notes the inspection of this site by the Rev. W. Kermode of Ramsey at the time when it was first given over to the plough, c. 1850. Kermode remarked that the ‘mound of considerable dimensions … had on the top the usual kist vaen,—a rude stone grave, consisting of a few upright stones with a large heavy slab resting on the top; within were found some very small pieces of unbaked pottery, with a black substance which was probably charred human bones.’ From the north–south orientation of the cist he surmised that it might have been a Viking grave.

This paper discusses the landscape pattern made by the reaves—second millennium bc land boundaries—of South Dartmoor. The upper moorland of the South Moor was probably used as common grazing by 6–7 major sociopolitical units. Each possessed its own grazing land, normally in a valley zone near settlement enclosures. Each group had a ‘parallel system’ of reaves used partly for cultivation. 2 or 3 groups shared the Hameldon Ridge, in similar fashion. The paper discusses gateways, gang junctions, alterations to reaves, and the question of their original height, concluding that stock was probably watched, so that reaves were primarily boundaries, although some may have been built as barriers. The contour reaves, which separate the common grazing land from that in the valley zones, seem to have been less important, and perhaps built later, than the reaves between the sociopolitical groups, and the contour reave zone seems to have been chosen quite often by the builders of stone rows. There were subdivisions within the private grazing areas. It is concluded that the pattern of several territorial groups, clustered round an extensive, probably common resource, is well-known in second millennium British prehistory, and deserves further study.

In recent years there has been a refreshing move away from simplistic interpretations of Palaeolithic art: few scholars still adhere to the view of ‘art for art's sake’ or ‘totemism’, although many are reluctant to abandon the formerly dominant theory of ‘hunting magic’. The approach of Laming-Emperaire (1962) and Leroi-Gourhan (1965) is undoubtedly more realistic, in view of what is now known about the highly complex thought-processes which lie behind present-day ‘primitive’ art; but interpretation of cave art's content is unlikely to advance very far, and is largely a waste of time.

There has been a similar move away from the study of Palaeolithic art as a single line of continuous evolution, as this view ignores the factors of artistic ability and individuality; moreover, the stretching of the period by absolute dating has underlined the rarity of the phenomenon. I have argued elsewhere (Bahn 1977a, 251) that Palaeolithic art represents a large output by a relatively small number of individuals. It is obvious that no one single explanation will suffice to account for any aspect of an art which assumed a wide variety of forms and which lasted for tens of thousands of years.

Pitt Rivers' excavations in Cranbourne Chase not only provided his successors with a lavish series of reports but also with a remarkable body of artefacts. These finds are now housed in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum. The research programme which is centred upon the re-excavation of South Lodge Camp will include a new assessment of the Bronze Age material in this collection. This work discussed here is the first stage in this project (cf. Barrett and Bradley 1978).

The Bronze Age sites investigated by the General include the well known enclosures of South Lodge Camp, Martin Down and the Angle Ditch, as well as a series of round barrows (Pitt Rivers 1888 and 1898). These excavations were extensive. The enclosures were trenched across much of the interior, the ditches were emptied and substantial parts of the surrounding banks were removed. Large scale excavation was also undertaken on many of the barrows, although the first mounds to be dug were examined by a single trench or by a central shaft. These earlier barrow excavations were among the first to be undertaken by Pitt Rivers on his Wessex estates.

The Linear Pottery Culture (LPC), dated from the mid-fifth millennium bc, is generally held to have originated to the north of the Hungarian Plain (Case 1976, 48) and has a distribution stretching westwards to the Netherlands. One of its distinctive type fossils resides in the consistent forms of its houses (fig. 1).

The archaeological evidence for reconstruction consists almost entirely of ground plans (examples in Modderman 1958–9, 1970) although we can also consider house models of ancestral and derivative cultures. Modderman (1970, fig. 12) has shown that LPC houses in the Netherlands can be divided into single-unit, bipartite, and tripartite structures (fig. 1). Their alignment is generally consistent so that in the case of tripartite structures we can speak of northwest, central, and southeast sections. The ground plans are made up of five longitudinal rows of postholes. We may define wallposts (rows 1 and 5) and inner posts (rows 2–4). The end sections were more heavily constructed than the central unit; although the number of posts decreased in later periods a tripartite division was often maintained. Transverse lines of posts were frequently slightly offset and the inner postholes in the central unit of earlier structures often form a Y-configuration, with the top of the Y invariably on the northern side.

This paper is a study of the location of several causewayed camps in central southern England. We first discuss their contemporary environment, the cultivation technology of the early neolithic farmers, and the implications of this technology for land use. We conclude from soil studies that all except one of the sites examined were in pastoral situations, although the seasonality of the pasture varied between the sites. On the basis of the location studies and our earlier arguments, we put forward a model of early neolithic land use in the area as an alternative to the traditional brandwirtschaft model.

It is thirty years since the first publication (Wright and Wright 1947) of the collection of artifacts found over a period of years from the site at North Ferriby, which yielded the three boat-relics now identified as of the Early or Middle Bronze Age. With the increasing recognition of the importance of the boat finds themselves, the latest information on which has recently been published in a National Maritime Museum Monograph (Wright 1976), it is timely to review and, where necessary, revise the descriptions and attributions of the other artifacts obtained from the clays in which the boats were sealed, and also a small number of finds from the underlying fen-woodland peat. The customary and essential caveat needs to be entered that in beds of this kind propinquity of one find to another, whether in the horizontal or vertical plane, is no guarantee of association. Nevertheless, as will be seen, revised identifications and attributions of some of the objects have resulted in a pattern which is much more consistent both in itself and also with the recent evidence for the age of the boats than the somewhat confusing picture which emerged from what seemed to be reasonable deductions in 1946–7.

As a result of surveys carried out by the Bulgarian-Soviet archaeological expedition, Eneolithic copper mines were discovered in southern Bulgaria in October 1971. The most interesting of these mines, Aibunar, constitutes, without doubt, one of the rarest discoveries in the history of mining not only of Europe, but also of other parts of the Old World. In the same year, Jovanović published news of finds, unique for the Balkan peninsula, of characteristic Vinač pottery found together with a zoomorphic figurine at the Rudna Glava mine in north-eastern Serbia. On the basis of these finds, he suggested an Eneolithic date for the mine. However, the remains of ancient shafts at Rudna Glava were very small, and extensive and historically well-documented mining activities of the Classical Antiquity and the Medieval period made the dating of the extant areas of ancient mining very problematic.

In contrast to this, from the moment of its discovery, the large amounts of Eneolithic pottery of Karanovo VI—Gumelnitsa type and antler tools, which were found in the mine at Aibunar, and in particular the well-dated shafts were startling. Interest in Aibunar was further increased by the discovery of seven settlement sites in an area of 15 km around the mine, with Eneolithic layers containing more than 100 pieces of oxidic copper ore. Spectral analysis showed that these pieces of ore came from Aibunar.

The Causewayed Enclosure at Orsett, Essex, was trial trenched in 1975 to determine the state of site preservation and confirm its postulated Neolithic date and site sequence. The enclosure consisted of three incomplete circuits of discontinuous ditch with an associated timber palisade slot lying inside and concentric to the middle ditch. Within the interior was an oval post hole structure of a contemporary date. Quantities of Mildenhall style pottery and flint artifacts of the mid third millennium b.c. were recovered from the primary ditch silts and other features. A small quantity of Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age wares came from the secondary ditch silts and the interior.

Later phases on the site were represented by unenclosed Early Iron Age occupation, a Middle Iron Age sub-rectangular enclosure and Saxon ring-ditch burials.