The social organization of prehistoric British societies has been a busy interest recently, with the hypothesis that the Neolithic was characterized by lineage societies, very likely egalitarian in character, whose dead were placed into communal ‘tombs for the ancestors’. But how secure is the evidence for burial in chambered or unchambered long barrows over many generations? Hazleton provides the key example, for it is the first neolithic burial-site to benefit from the full resources of AMS dating and the new calibration.

The physical size of China – with a land area 20 times the size of France and a third larger than the continental United States – is matched by an archaeological record that is longer than most and as intricate as any. This review article discusses four massive volumes of abstracts, which provide a summary guide to Chinese archaeology.

Ian Hodder's book, Reading the past (1986), was reviewed in the last number (Gardin 1987). Here a further comment is offered on Hodder's proposal for a ‘contextual archaeology’.

The July editorial (pp. 163–4) worried about the place for archaeology in the future of the British countryside, and this issue returns to the subject (p. 355). Here is a first example of the most satisfactory outcome imaginable – the acquisition of an upland farm primarily for archaeological use.

Radiocarbon dating began in archaeology with ancient Egypt, for it was to the securely dated materials from Egypt that Willard Libby naturally turned when his new radiocarbon method needed verification from reliable historical sources. With this paper the reverse process begins: verifying and correcting the conventional chronology for Egypt and neighbouring regions by calibrated radiocarbon.

This paper compares calibrated radiocarbon dates against historical dates in a manner not well covered by ANTIQUITY's usual convention. So in this paper only uncalibrated radiocarbon dates are denoted by ‘b.p.’, historical dates are denoted by ‘BC’, and calibrated radiocarbon dates by ‘Cal BC’ or simply ‘BC’ when the meaning is clear from the context.

Dr Webb, as a physical anthropologist working in Australia, is one of the professionals whose work would most directly be affected by reburial of human skeletal remains. He gives here, at the invitation of the editor, his impressions of reburial issues in Australia; the opinions expressed here are strictly his own and may not reflect those of his colleagues.

With the European settlement of Australia yet to reach its bi-centennial, historical archaeology in the country is young, both in what it studies and how long it has been established. A special interest, explored here, is the range of patterns of European settlement which results from the varied national traditions of the settlers.

Preceding papers in this section have underlined how much more there is to effective use of radiocarbon dating than the taking of some samples, their running in a laboratory, and the calibration of the individual dates that result. Here is a summary of where we are and where we may, with calibration, be going.

The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit came into operation during 1983, at about the same time as the sister machine at the University of Arizona, Tucson. A conference in October 1985 explored its first two years' work; a review of that conference's proceedings is the occasion to see how much momentum AMS dating is generating.

One of the livelier issues in world prehistory on which there is a distinctive view from Australia and Sahul is the variety of pathways to intensification and a social complexity, not necessarily following expectations that derive from precedents in the Zagros or the Mayan forests. This may be more than a function of different ecologies or potential domesticates, for this paper, developing evidence from Victoria already known from Harry Lourandos's work, Sees the crucial impulses as more social in origin than environmentally determined.