Three carved wooden images have come to light in Jamaica, the most important find of Taíno carvings for two centuries from that island. Their discovery prompts a reconsideration of Taíno zemís, and their placing into the known context of the Caribbean region, with its South American links.

San Vincenzo al Volturno is an early medieval monastery in the high province of Molise, southeast of Rome, and site of most substantial excavations over the last 15 years. The publication of portrait wall-paintings from the crypt of its great church, San Vincenzo Maggiore, is occasion to examine the place of the individual in that religious society.

The events to do with peopling the New World archaeologically represented by ‘Clovis’ and ‘Folsom’ have been — tantalizingly — beyond the range of radiocarbon calibration. Now calibration extends further, one can ask if the aburptness of Clovis, of Folsom, and of the transition between them are realities. A calibrated chronology for those sites where the stratigraphic security is best shows these in truth are rapid human affairs.

The ANTIQUITY prize-winning article in the last volume addressed writing, its varying nature and role in early states. Now that the decipherment of Maya writing is well advanced, we can know more of the records of kingship. From them we may discern the concepts and beliefs that defined the authority of these holy lords, as we seek the source of the power of rulers like ‘Sun-faced Snake Jaguar’.

Fine painted pottery is the archaeological trade-mark of the Greek presence overseas. Since other materials of exchange in the Classical world — soft things like grain, oil and slaves — are less archaeologically visible, a fresh look at issues in the archaic Greek economy revolves once more around patterns in the ceramics.

The later Palaeolithic sites of Moravia, the region of the Czech Republic west of Prague and north of Vienna, continue to provide remarkable new materials. To the art mobilier for which Dolní Věstonice and Pavlov have been celebrated, there has recently been added the technologies of groundstone and ceramics — and now woven materials, interlaced basketry or textiles, again of a kind one expects only from a quite later era.

When Francis Pryor excavated the settlement complex on the dry gravels at Fengate, east England, he was a full-time archaeologist. Now that he is working at the adjacent wetland site of Flag Fen, he has also become a sheep-farmer. That practical experience leads him to a new view of what created the pattern of these planned later prehistoric landscapes.

Among the industrial crafts introduced into the Hispanic New World was the growing of grapes, and the making of wine at a grand scale. The technology and the artefacts of wine-making in Spain were, in their turn, largely those of the Roman world. These continuities, and their changing contexts, are evident in this study of the wine-making bodegas of a Peruvian valley.

Long-running discussions about when Europe was first colonized have recently been fuelled by new discoveries from the Iberian peninsula, which reports hominid occupation by 800,000, or even by 1.8 million years ago. The proceedings of the important Tautavel workshop (1993), published as The earliest occupation of Europe (Roebroeks & van Kolfschoten (ed.) 1995), are now central. This new assessment takes forward ANTIQUITY'S notice by Roebroeks & van Kolfschoten of 1994 (68: 489–503).

Do gender roles, or expectations about gender roles, affect what kind of study is pursued by the individual researcher? Has excavation been rather a man's business? And if so, have other kinds of study — regional survey, for example — rather become women's business? These issues are explored as they are illuminated by the research careers of two eminent Australian contemporaries.

The present system of English resource management relies on legal protected status given to a pre-designated group of monuments. When it is replaced by an adversarial debate between social values, hosted by the planning system, archaeology will need to arm itself with a definition of ‘archaeological value’. The new management system would favour research rather than monumentality as the principal asset of the heritage.

This paper presents the recent discovery of extensive and intensive middle Bronze Age exploitation of the marshland along the northeastern bank of the River Thames and its tributaries within a wider regional context. It also develops a site location model, and explores reasons for the presence of these sites.

A lake-sediment sequence from Marcacocha in the central Peruvian Andes provides a well-dated and continuous vegetation record from an area rich in Inca and pre-Inca remains over the last 4000 years. Climatic changes in this record at AD 1–100 and AD 900–1050 seem to be broadly contemporaneous with major arid events from Lake Chichancanab, Mexico, affecting the Maya civilization and corroborated by the Quelccaya and Huascaran ice cores in Peru.

Allen (1994) and Allen & Holdaway (1995), noticing the pattern in early radiocarbon dates from Australia, have advanced the notion their limit records the human settlement of the continent. A critical analysis of context and content in those carbon determinations leads to a different view. The results may be disconcerting for every region which builds its late Pleistocene chronologies on radiocarbon!

The late Mesolithic sites of Téviec and Hoëdic, located on what are now small islands off the Breton coast, provide evidence for elaborate burial practices, and may be precursors of the megalithic tradition of Brittany and western Europe in general. This paper briefly summarizes what is known of the sites and examines patterning in the distribution of grave inclusions. Differences as well as similarities between the sites are found. When examined carefully and critically, older excavation reports can yield much new information.

The brochs, great stone towers of Iron Age Scotland, are famously puzzling. Who inhabited these strongholds (if habitations they were)? New fieldwork at the broch of Dun Vulan, on South Uist in the Western Isles, prompts reappraisal of the geographical and social context of the brochs, by developing untapped sources of social evidence.

The impact of the human presence on the fauna of a Pacific island is often immediately archaeologically visible in the slaughter of its land birds seen in the bones. The impact on vegetation is less distinct archaeologically, and many of the Pacific cultigens have soft tissues which rarely preserve. So a study of prehistoric agriculture on one of the high Micronesian islands largely involves pollen and charcoal.

The repertoire of site-types for later English prehistory has not changed for a generation. Now, from East Chisenbury on Salisbury Plain, a new type is defined, a midden of refuse so large and strange it re-defines the concept of ‘rubbish’ and its ‘disposal’.

Fontana Nuova di Ragusa, a small rock-shelter in southeast Sicily, was thoroughly excavated by Bernabò Brea in 1949. In the far south of Europe — Sicily is nearly on a latitude with Africa — it has continuing importance as marking a southern geographical limit of Aurignacian settlement, and as proof of humans crossing the strait into island Sicily.

Building floor plans are frequently recovered by archaologists. A common first sorting of the shapes of small domestic buildings is between round houses and rectangular houses. What do these differences mean? Why do social groups change their building form from one to the other? An ethnoarchaeological study from northern Cameroon illustrates how four ethnic groups in a single community use building shape to blur or define group boundaries for political self-interests.