A new and handsome find, a decorated bone comb from Tell Abraq in the United Arab Emirates dated about 2100–2000 BC, provides another link between eastern Arabia and the distant Bactrian lands.

Like the Sardinian nuraghi, which they closely resemble, the stone-built towers on the Balearic Islands known as talayots have been the subject of considerable research in recent years. The present paper analyses a series of radiocarbon dates from the Son Ferrandell Oleza settlement and discusses the implications for Balearic prehistory.

The modernizing of China brings up once more the twin needs to sweep away that which is old and bad, and to hold on to that which is old and good. A report illustrates the particular issue and some outcomes.

During the late Holocene, Aboriginal rock painters in north Queensland selected and combined various natural inorganic and organic materials in paint recipes – possibly to increase the longevity of their paintings. The organic materials make direct radiocarbon dating possible.

New radiocarbon determinations from northwest France further contribute to the proposition - 25 years old now – that the megaliths of the region are astoundingly early in the west European Neolithic sequence.

It has been suggested that the bright green fluorescence shown by the hair of Lindow Man II is due to the use of copper-based pigments for body decoration. However, scientific analysis shows that this fluorescence is due to a natural reaction of the hair keratin with acid in the peat in which the body was buried.

How were the fine stone jars and vessels of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia made? An experimental test of materials and techniques explores the methods of early drilling.

Shellfish-gathering is the stuff of many a hunter-gatherer economy. It is technically hunting – the beasties are animals – but they conveniently sit in the mud and on the rocks ready to be gathered. A new means of studying growth-rings in clam shells gives insight into shellfish-gathering and the seasonal pattern of life-ways in southern New England.

In Europe the tradition of building in wood, which has roots reaching back into antiquity, is now mostly lost. Wooden architecture does, however, survive in parts of Eastern Europe, particularly in Romania. In addition to their architectural interest, the buildings contain a rich legacy of folk-art.

Rings and buttons and beads cut from the marine shell, Spondylus gaederopus, are among the most distinctive exchange items of Neolithic Europe. From sources on the coast of the Mediterranean, these highly valued objects were widely distributed across central Europe. A re-examination of the nature and contexts of shell objects and manufacturing waste at Dimini, a key late Neolithic site on the coast of northern Greece, explores their social role within a Spondylus-working community.

The surviving author of ‘The myth of long-distance megalith transport’ (ANTIQUITY 65: 64–73) stresses the support given by megalithic sites in the Channel Islands to the exposure of this persistent myth.

Old carpets, as informative material objects, are therefore the proper stuff of archaeology. Aspects of the carpet world offer food for thought as to how entities we recognize among the debris of antiquity come to be recognized and valued. Here James Mellaaart's recorded paintings from Çatal Hüyük, which ‘surfaced’ a generation after the dig was completed, have now come to have an unexpected role.

An analysis of the Roman coins lost on different types of site within Roman Britain shows strong chronological and geographical trends, as well as providing a critique for the current classification of sites.

A fragment of Cassis rufa shell, in modern times a species of the Indian Ocean, was reliably reported from the deep Mousterian deposits excavated at the beginning of the century from the Grotte du Prince, Monaco. Because its known habitat is so distant and exotic, there has always been question about the specimen's authenticity. A radiocarbon determination shows it to be recent, and no evidence for long-distance movement of shell in the European Middle Palaeolithic.

Recent decades have seen remarkable finds of metal objects from Irish soil – and equally remarkable consequences when some of those objects have surfaced on the open antiquities market.

It is more than 70 years since O.G.S. Crawford, founder of ANTIQUITY, was given air photographs from southern England which led him to realize their potential for archaeology. Leo Deuel's book Flights into yesterday was translated into Czech in 1979, providing a first impetus to the new programme of work in Bohemia presented here, a programme made possible by the new freedom to fly and photograph that followed the revolution of 1989.

A further statistical study of the weights of distinctive objects from the Scandinavian Bronze Age finds, again, a system of standardized units, and looks as far as Egypt for an identity of pattern.

The Excavation Index, a national index of excavations compiled by the Royal Commission, makes it possible to generate some statistics on the changing pattern of English archaeology, as reflected in the number and periods of sites dug.