An abbot's tomb is a major find at San Vincenzo al Volturno, advancing our knowledge of a great Italian abbey-church of the 9th century described in ANTIQUITY 70 (1996).

An essential ingredient of the lovely blues in ancient Egyptian materials — faience, glazes, frits — is copper. How did the knowledge of that copper use arise? There is a telling congruence with Egyptian techniques in drilling stone artefacts, and the characteristics of the powder drilled out as waste.

Does a unique eroded prehistoric carving on one of the sarsen uprights at Stonehenge link the most famous of English megalithic monuments to Brittany?

The intricacy and variety of classical ‘small finds‘ again combine with the dangers — so archaeologically helpful and satisfying — of Roman sea-faring to point directly to how Roman surgeons carried out their skills.

The human settlement of Australia falls into that period where dating is hard because it is near or beyond the reliable limit of radiocarbon study; instead a range of luminescence methods are being turned to (such as thermoluminescence at Jinmium: December 1996 ANTIQUITY). Ngarrabullgan Cave, a rock-shelter in Queensland, now offers a good suite of radiocarbon determinations which match well a pair of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates — encouraging sign that OSL determinations can be relied on.

Comment is offered on the ‘post-processual’ approach to excavation in the field advocated in the September Antiquity.

A piece of pumice among drift material on Nadikdik Atoll, Marshall Islands, in far Micronesia had a large chunk of flakeable obsidian attached. As the atoll had been devastated by a typhoon and associated storm surge in 1905, the piece must have arrived by sea within the last 90 years. This and similar incidences of raw materials distributed by ocean drift show how sea-borne dispersal cannot be excluded offhand in the occurrence of obsidian in far-flung places, commonly attributed to human transport.

For centuries, the right place to look, when in search of the best archaeological knowledge, has been in some kind of printed book. There will once have been a manuscript, and if the book never materialized, a manuscript may substitute, but what usually matters is the better truth that has the authority of print.

In a now-standard joke, a wizard of a yet-newer information display system is described: hugely flexible in size and in format and in what it can present, made of cheap and common materials, wholly recyclable, and — best of all — requiring no screen or display device of any kind whatsoever. At some point you realize the miracle being described is a book. But the book is for many purposes deservedly obsolescent, and archaeological research is in truth already in the age beyond the printed book. Specialist illustrated publications have high fixed costs in the print, and low circulations mean there are too few copies to spread the costs over. When the first new technology of cheap reprographics came in a generation ago, the ‘grey literature’ of field reports began to grow, soon reaching a point at which no library and no individual could be relied on to possess the ‘collected literature’ on any topic of large range. Now an increasing amount of archaeological knowledge is only or better made accessible electronically.

Further fieldwork at Sembiran, on Bali in the Indonesian archipelago, tells more about the eastern end of the exchange network running across southern Asia about 2000 years ago.

Using the World Wide Web is not unlike visiting an unfamiliar place to look at the archaeology. You want to know if there is anything interesting to see, so you start in the library, looking for information; you read books and articles from journals; perhaps you contact colleagues who can tell you about the place; you want to know how to find the sites and to get to them; and once you are there, you want to visit the museums as well as the monuments, and to locate people who are working there, whether they are from academic institutions, government archaeological bodies or local societies. You will want to check that access arrangements have not changed since the last published information; you also want to ensure that as far as possible the information you have is accurate, so that you do not waste time looking at sites which are not relevant to your interests.

In recent years traditional print publication has become increasingly limiting for archaeology. The limitations are well known and include: small and expensive print runs; high distribution costs; declining library subscriptions; and a tiny readership. As a consequence greater selection is required and ‘full’ publication is rarely possible. Some publishers adopted microfiche as a method of distributing supporting information and specialists reports, but this has proved consistently unpopular and has its own limitations. Archaeological fieldwork generates huge quantities of data (or should it be capta?) and with developments in information technology much of this data is now captured in a digital format. Why not distribute the data electronically to overcome the limitations of print technology? Archaeological reports arc wellsuited to multimedia publication which allows access to colour images and large data-sets, as well as permitting several possible journeys through the hypertext.

In ANTIQUITY a year ago, Vincent & Ruth Megaw found a useful parallel between the multiple definitions of the ancient Celts, as it can be seen from varied sources, and the several ways an individual's ethnic identity is seen and defined in the contemporary world. Here the other view is stated: that the methodology and interpretations advocated by the Megaws are both false and dangerous.