The megalithic monuments of western Europe have long been a celebrated proof of the engineering achievements possible in an early farming society. With the engineering skills to raise up the stones went the capability to move them to the site, with Stonehenge the best-known example of an apparent long-distance transport, incorporating Welsh bluestones and sarsens that perhaps originate in the Avebury region to the north. Following their recent challenge to the belief that the builders of Stonehenge did carry its bluestones from west Wales, the authors look critically at the larger pattern of megalithic manoeuvring.

Archaeology, like many of the sciences, works to a masculine metaphor, the (male) archaeologist as hero explores and tames the mysteries of his (female) subject. Feminist theory has made important criticism of positivist science on these grounds, drawing on much the same postmodern theory as ‘post-processual’ archaeology. How do the ‘post-processuals’ appear, seen in the feminist light?

Pecked figures – seeming to depict humans, animals, objects and ‘abstract’ shapes - are an important and recalcitrant aspect to the archaeology of the desert USA, in the Great Basin and the Southwest. Where they are covered by desert varnish, they provide an opportunity for an absolute dating by cation-ratio method. Here - as they did not for a similar study in South Australia reported in an earlier Antiquity - the cation-ratio dates do seem to run alongside the chronological pattern inferred by conventional means.

My age-fellows and I, whose professional careers over the past 50 years or so have been devoted to college teaching in the USA and whose fieldwork was conducted mainly in Mediterranean countries, will scarcely see the opening of the next century. Perhaps the most useful contribution veterans like us can now make to the overall discipline – not just to our own ‘wing’ — is to outline certain problems that have particularly disturbed us during our active careers. Younger colleagues – the new decisionmakers – can then judge whether our criticisms are well founded and, if so, what can (or should) be done to alter present practices and attitudes If our concerns are reasonable and our recommendations for remedial action are constructive, we can at least hope that useful discussion will result – particularly in the disciplinary subdivision with which we have been most closely associated.

Kadero, in the central Sudan, offers new discoveries pertinent to the old and valuable question of early domesticates - both plant and animal - in the Middle and Upper Nile region.

Over the last hundred years there have been many publications on the animal remains from the Swiss Neolithic lake sites, ranging from the first descriptions of Rütimeyer (1861) to the detailed analyses of Boessneck et al. (1963) and Becker (1981). During the 1970s I had the privilege to work on one of these faunal assemblages, retrieved by rescue excavation at the site of Yvonand IV on the shore of Lake Neuchätel in the canton de Vaud (Clutton-Brock 1990).

Although - or because - the 19th century saw great archaeological interest in the standing buildings of medieval England, the early legislation to protect British ancient monuments expressly excluded church buildings that were still in use. A new measure, just come into force, gives cathedral archaeology a formal place, and makes this a timely moment to see what kind of work which the archaeology of a standing cathedral can now amount to.

The Avebury region has been given World Heritage status for its complex of Neolithic sites - Avebury itself, Silbury Hill, the West and East Kennet long barrows, and others. New fieldwork reveals a further complex of sites on the edges of the Kennet valley bottom.

A new look at the old collections from Jebel Moya, the site in the southern Sudan excavated by the Wellcome expedition early in the century, sets Jebel Moya in the light of modern understanding of the Nile and Sahara sequences.

The Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum sets out his view of where responsible museums and researchers should find a balance in the difficult matter of unprovenanced antiquities that may be the spoils of recent looting.

Flint quarries in the Rohri hills supplied stone to the city of Mohenjo-Daro, out on the silty river-plain and lacking local supply. A new survey has identified workshop sites and an extraordinary scale of production.

The rôle played by humans in the extinction of late Pleistocene vertebrate fauna is a controversial topic (Diamond 1989; Grayson 1989; Martin & Klein 1984), and actual archaeological data for a human factor are quite rare. Recent multidisciplinary excavations in Cyprus, however, suggest that people were at least partially responsible for the extinction of local endemics, primarily pygmy hippopotamus (Phanourios minutus).

The relationship, chronological and cultural between Wessex and Mycenae, was much argued about some 20 years ago, as the implications of radiocarbon calibration were taken note of. New finds from Switzerland, somewhat midway between south England and south Greece, offers some fresh evidence.

The archaeological literature, Antiquity included, has often taken a severe view of the consequences, for archaeological collections and for archaeological knowledge, of private collections of antiquities. Here is another viewpoint on the issue.

Late in the 16th century, a man fell into the glacier crossing a high Alpine pass between Switzerland and Italy. The ice has released him these last years.

There is a large gap between the fact of a radiocarbon determination and the archaeological answer to the question to which it relates. The first part of the gap is addressed by calibration, that turns a measure of 14C activity into an estimate of a calendar date. Here is a contribution to the second part, by which a set of calibrated dates is made to provide a calendar range for the archaeological events under study.

This note follows ANTIQUITY's usual convention, under which uncalibrated determinations are given in lower-case, b.p., and calibrated dates in small capitals, BP, BC or AD.

The determination of the leafy vegetable constituents of the diets of early societies is notoriously difficult using traditional archaeobotanical techniques. In an effort to provide a solution to this problem, a new approach, using gas chromatography (GC) and GC/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), has been adopted to detect the presence of preserved epicuticular leaf wax components absorbed in potsherds. The characteristic compounds identified can serve as chemotaxonomic indicators of the vegetables prepared in vessels during their usage.

We reported last year on the course of TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) and its annual conferences over several years. This further report reads the meaning of the post-modernist agenda which dominated the most recent TAG conference.