Late last year, the British Museum showed a new Thracian treasure from Rogozen in Bulgaria (Fol et al. 1986), including over 150 silver-gilt vessels and a superb discovery in itself. Here the evidence of Rogozen is taken as another clue in finding the origin of perhaps the most famed single find from later prehistoric Europe.

The traditional distinction between the Middle and the Upper Palaeolithic is a technical one, the change from flake industries to blade industries. Finding a distinction in more active terms of human behaviour is a rewarding prospect, rather harder to achieve. Here, an attempt is made to find a fundamental distinction in the way groups of humans organized their lives, as recorded in the patterns of scattered stones and bones. The study depends on the meticulous and very detailed records of findspots made by excavation teams led by Jean-Philippe Rigaud, Director of Prehistoric Antiquities for Aquitaine, Bordeaux.

The Ladby ship-burial, excavated in Denmark during 1935, was the precursor of Sutton Hoo, excavated in 1939. Both were ‘ship-moulds’, with the timber vanished but the shape of the vessel left in the earth and marked by its nails. While the British excavated Sutton Hoo and back-filled its barrow, the Danes left Ladby in place and on public display. Now Martin Carver's team is working again at Sutton Hoo though not on the ship-barrow itself; and the Danes have revisited Ladby, where they have made further discoveries in the barrow and made new provision for the ship-mould's continued preservation.

South American archaeology is a field which ANTIQUITY all too rarely embraces, and we are glad to have this report (originally planned for volume 59, 1985) on a new project studying trans-Andean contacts between the Pacific coast and the Amazon jungles.

In June 1985, the National Museum of Ireland obtained possession of a major hoard of nine bronze objects decorated in an 8th-century style, which were discovered in advance of drainage works in Co. Meath. Its location and contents raise important questions about the genesis of the brilliant art of the 8th and 9th centuries in Ireland. The Keeper of Irish Antiquities begins their publication with some remarks on the unhappy way some of the recent hoards have come to light – concerns that are underlined by yet another episode of looting on a ‘treasure’ site in Surrey.

Navan, Co. Armagh, is one of the major ritual sites of Irish and of European prehistory. Its 2.5 square km encompass the bronze- and iron-age Navan ‘fort’, the bronze-age ritual pond of the King's Stables, the bronze-/iron-age Haughey's fort, and the iron-age ritual lake of Loughnashade – and, surely, other sites not yet detected. It figures largely in the early history of Ireland as the ancient capital of Ulster. For years, a limestone quarry has been eating into the archaeological landscape; its erosion was finally halted last year, thanks to the vigour with which the Friends of Navan fought the archaeological case. Here, one of the founder Friends sets out the issues, and what kind of victory was won.

The homogeneity of settlement across the löss lands of central Europe, and the speed with which an agricultural economy was adopted, are among the more remarkable features of the neolithic colonization of temperate Europe. Now petrographic evidence indicates long-distance transport of stone across that huge area, and confirms that this early pattern comes to an abrupt halt at the transition to the later Neolithic.

Although ‘archaeology and the public’ is very much a matter of current concern, there is still very little actual information about what – if anything – the ‘public’ out there actually thinks of archaeology. The public of Kingston on Hull have been asked.

As any parent knows, a metal saucepan turned upside down makes an admirable drum. This simple observation has implications for the evolution of one of the more splendid kinds of ancient bronze artefact.

The last British minister of education refused ever to use the phrase ‘social sciences’, since these studies were so soft – by comparison with the real hard sciences like physics – they did not count to him as sciences at all. Archaeology, sometimes accepted as a social science, is often placed in the ‘arts’ departments of universities, a conventional word which nevertheless may suggest the creative arts, rather than an attempt at rigorous empirical research. Yet, ever since Sir John Lubbock (1865: 2) said of the new prehistory of the 1860s, ‘a new Science has, so to say, been born among us’, the aspiration of archaeology to the status of a ‘real science’ has been a recurring theme within the subject. Meanwhile, its place in the academic pecking-order stays dismally low. Here a philosopher takes a fresh look at what sort of science archaeology adds up to.

Excavation of Etton, the first British neolithic causewayed enclosure with waterlogged deposits, cleared the interior by the end of 1986. As well as making a cautionary tale as to how different two halves of a seemingly homogeneous site may be, the final areas force some re-thinking of just what this, and other, causewayed enclosures actually were.

The first of a new series of archaeological inventories for Ireland has been published. Christopher Taylor – himself a senior officer of the English commission with the equivalent role – goes beyond Louth to give a personal view of the whole business of published monument inventories.

Pottery is so ubiquitous among the material we have surviving from later periods that it is easy to think that ancient people occupied a world which was as stuffed with broken sherds as the layers we excavate; and ceramics seem especially important when they are as handsome and archaeologically informative as classical vases. Starting with a single sherd from Populonia, David Gill takes a different view of pottery, and its commercial transport, in the classical Mediterranean.

The building of a replica classical warship, the Athenian trieres, is the most ambitious project of experimental archaeology so far. The ship is building in a Piraeus yard to a design worked out from original sources and using the experience of the partial replica illustrated in ANTIQUITY in 1985 (Morrison & Coates 1985; and for the full story Morrison & Coates 1986, reviewed in this number). But how authentic is the replica? The project leaders set out here how their trireme will differ from the real thing. The result, they believe, is a craft which will faithfully copy a new and well-built ship. But it does use some modern materials; it should last much better than did the classical ships; and it will carry some wholly modern gear. It is no part of their experiment to see how fast an ancient ship rotted or how nastily an Athenian crew drowned when the rotting was complete.

The wooden vehicles of ancient Egypt provide valuable opportunities to see directly the ancient methods of wooden engineering, rather than inferring them from the metal elements alone. Here, one critical element in wooden-vehicle design – the pre-stressing of the wheels – is explored.

The first calibration curve, published by Suess in 1967 (Suess 1967), was a wiggly thing arrived at by a process Suess called ‘cosmic schwung’. Later curves used more formal statistical methods, including Clark's published in ANTIQUITY (Clark 1975), which came to be one of the most used. It would be good to have the new standard curves available in ANTIQUITY, but they are far too bulky. We recommend the now-indispensable calibration issue of Radiocarbon (Stuiver & Kra 1986), which takes 230 large-format pages to set them out as tables, graphs and a computer program.

Gordon Pearson is the British end of the Anglo-American axis, with Minze Stuiver at the University of Washington, largely responsible for the new calibration. He summarizes what the calibration does and how best to work with it.

This paper is a guide to working with the Radiocarbon calibration issue in particular, as well as calibration curves in general. It therefore follows the conventions for calibrated and uncalibrated dates that are presented there, rather than ANTIQUITY's normal convention.

The first and obvious strength of AMS and other small-sample radiocarbon techniques is in the tiny quantities of material they destroy, opening the way for 14C determinations on little and precious objects – fabric and pictures, for examples – from which no curator will sacrifice a large chunk. In this case, the object is a more substantial thing, but the point still applies; and the size of its timbers has made possible a completely independent and confirming date by dendrochronology.

This paper follows the normal ANTIQUITY convention of b.p. for uncalibrated dates.