The bronze spearhead at the end of a long shaft is traditionally seen as a thrusting or throwing weapon, as seen in the movies. By examining the damage on a group of Late Bronze Age spearheads from Britain, and replicating their use in combat, the author shows that the spear was an even more versatile weapon — for throwing, thrusting and slashing (with a short shaft). The research puts a spotlight on the formidable skills developed in a Bronze Age life-time.

The opening of the new Acropolis Museum in June 2009 was one of the most important museological events of our century so far. Nick James paid it a visit (Antiquity 83: 1144–51) and we have pleasure in offering three more reactions from different viewpoints.

In December 1834 Athens became the capital city of the newly founded Hellenic Kingdom. King Otto, the Bavarian prince whose political and cultural initiative shaped much of what modern Greece is today, sought to design the new city inspired by the heavily idealised model of Classical Hellas (see Bastea 2000). The emerging capital was from the outset conceived as a heterotopia of Hellenism, a Foucauldian 'other space' devoted to Western Classicism in view of the Classical ruins it preserved. The Acropolis became, naturally, the focal point of this effort. At the same time, however, and as Greek nationalist strategies were beginning to unfold, Classical antiquity became a disputed topos, a cultural identity of sorts contested between Greece on the one hand and the 'Western world' on the other (see Yalouri 2001: 77–100). Archaeological sites thus became disputed spaces, claimed by various interested parties of national or supra-national authority wishing to impose their own views on how they should be managed — and to what ends (Loukaki 2008). The Acropolis was duly cleansed from any non-Classical antiquities and began to be constructed as an authentic Classical space, a national project still in progress. As Artemis Leontis has argued in her discussion of Greece as a heterotopic 'culture of ruins', the Acropolis of Athens, now repossessed by architectural renovation and scholarly interest, functions 'as a symbol not of Greece's ancient glory but of its modern predicament' (Leontis 1995: 40–66; see also McNeal 1991; Hamilakis 2007: 85–99).

The relationship between antiquity, archaeology and national imagination in Greece, the sacralisation of the Classical past, and the recasting of the Western Hellenism into an indigenous Hellenism have been extensively studied in the last 15 years or so (see e.g. Hamilakis 2007, 2009). In fact, Greece has proved a rich source of insights for other cases of nation-state heritage politics. The new Acropolis Museum project was bound to be shaped by the poetics of nationhood right from the start, given that its prime referent is the most sacred object of the Hellenic national imagination, the Acropolis of Athens. This site is at the same time, however, an object of veneration within the Western imagination (you only have to look at the UNESCO logo), a pilgrimage destination for millions of global tourists, with all its revenue implications, and an endlessly reproduced and modified global icon (in both senses of the word).

Most of the opposition directed at the new AcropolisMuseum (herafter NAM), both beforeand since its opening in June 2009, has turned out to be politically motivated, mainly from the Left in Greece, mainly from the Right in Britain (the Daily Telegraph called it 'a hideous visitor centre in modern Athens'before it was even built [Wilson 2006]). Dimitris Plantzos comes at the museum from a different angle, but he too is determinedly on the attack. A first sign of this is his total silence about the protection and exhibition of the archaeological site underlying the museum, one of its major positive (and innovatory) features.

There can be no doubt that isotopic studies have made a huge contribution to archaeology in recent years, so much so that isotope archaeology is now seen as an essential subdiscipline of archaeology in much the same way as isotope geochemistry is a key subdiscipline of geochemistry. Ignoring for current purposes the contribution made by the measurement of a particular radioactive isotope of carbon (14C) since 1950, we can date the beginnings of isotope archaeology to the mid 1960s with the first measurements of lead isotopes in archaeological metals and slags by Brill and Wampler (1965, 1967). This was followed by carbon stable isotopes in human bone collagen in the late 1970s, building on previous work measuring σ13C in archaeological bone for radiocarbon determinations (Vogel & Van der Merwe 1977; Van der Merwe & Vogel 1978). Other isotopes followed rapidly, such as nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and hydrogen for archaeological, palaeoecological or palaeoclimatological purposes and, more recently, the heavier radiogenic isotopes of strontium and neodymium for determining the provenance of organic and inorganic materials (Pollard & Heron 2008).

When David Clark asked me in 1970 to contribute a chapter on Southeast Asia for hisnew book, Models in archaeology, I faced a dilemma. What could one say about an areathe size of Western Europe of which virtually nothing was known? So I entitled mychapter 'Initial model formulation in terraincognita' and speculated on the basis ofthe handful of sites that had been excavated (Higham 1972). Nor was the prognosisfor the area at all promising. The war inVietnam was spilling over into Laos andCambodia. China remained a looming voidto the north, Burma was not receptiveand Malaysia did not welcome foreignarchaeologists. Only Thailand shone likea welcoming beacon.

The survival of organicmaterials in the waterless fringes of the Takla Makan and Lop Deserts in the Tarim basin in Xinjiang (north-western China) has fascinated us for a century, since Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein and Albert von Le Coq found the remains of settlements and cemeteries at the Great Wall's lonely outposts and along the routes between China and Central Asia known as the Silk Road. The finds date from the Bronze Age to the later firstmillennium AD. In the 1980s and '90s, it was shown that the most striking of them, the Tarim 'mummies', belong to both Mongoloid and Caucasoid peoples (Mallory&Mair 2000). The archaeology here of public and domestic life is full of the kinds of surprises and contradictions that we are learning to expect—if not accept—with 'globalisation'. Development in the region is now prompting new discoveries but also looters, so the research is urgent.