John Morrison reported in Antiquity (61: 455–9; 62: 713–14) on the sea-trials of his reconstructed trieres (trireme) Olympias, tests which explored the capacities in the water of this most feared of ancient fighting craft. Here he looks critically at two ancient Greek measurements, the units of length to which the trieres was built, and the units of distance over which she sailed.

Albania, set between the Adriatic, the Balkan and the Greek worlds, is placed at a south European cross-roads A first radiocarbon date from its Copper Age is the opportunity to review how the Albanian sequence relates to those its neighbours.

The record is put straight in a matter of who deserves credit for what in southern African archaeology.

Whatever the journalist’s definition of eastern Europe might be (cf. S. Milisauskas in ANTIQUITY 64: 283], let us state, as introduction to this Special Section, that Czechoslovakia (FIGURE 1) is a country in Central, not Eastern, Europe. It is somewhat controversial to speak about its ‘return to Europe’, as some politicians would have it, as it has been there all the time. After the period of limited contacts of Czechoslovak archaeologists with their colleagues ‘in the West’ it is felt that now, in the changed (post-November-1989) situation, information on the current state of research, and especially on the approaches applied recently to the study of Czech and Slovak archaeological material (and perhaps on Czechoslovakia's geographical position as well?) may be of use for an interested English-speaking reader. The following – rather random – selection of articles is the result.

Introduction

The well-known fact that the sources of evidence concerning the pre-Neolithic period are seriously incomplete has not yet been analysed sufficiently, being concealed by the intensive interaction of very complex and variable factors. It is obvious, though, that even an imperfect attempt to quantify this problem could contribute to an explanation of the causes for the striking differences between the volume of archaeological source material from adjacent territories, or show the limits of attempts at a historical interpretation of the interrelationships between pre-Neolithic cultures. Unlike the post-Mesolithic period, the sources of the pre-Neolithic foraging societies suffer from reduced field visibility:

1 first of all, they are not usually indicated by colour contrasts in the feature fillings;

2 as a rule, they are reduced only to residues made of the most resistant materials;

3 because of the mobility of small hunter-gatherer groups, only limited accumulations of finds occur in temporary camps, both in extent and in volume, easily escaping attention;

4 Palaeolithic finds lie deeper under the present-day surface and are discovered less frequently than the remains of later periods;

5 the Palaeolithic record was, over tens of thousands of years – this partly under the extreme Pleistocene conditions – subjected to destruction more frequently than the post-Palaeolithic romains;

6 the intensity of the sedimentary and denu-datory processes differs regionally, and in other ways.

Accounts of the early barrow-diggers are chilling, both in their tales of prehistoric wood and textiles that blew away to dust at the touch of the spade, and in their vigour, a barrow quarried out in an afternoon, a barrow cemetery in a fortnight. Salvage imperatives, in advance of destruction by drainage in the Lincolnshire Fens, now make necessary the rare excavation of a whole barrow cemetery, with a happier organic outcome.

The Szeletian represents the most original – and I would not hesitate to say the most aboriginal – Upper Palaeolithic culture in Central Europe. In fact, it is the only European Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) complex the local development of which is so evident that the attribution of some of its archaic inventories to the Middle or Upper Palaeolithic has often been a controversial issue. This is exactly the reason why the Szeletian is so interesting in current discussions about the origin of the Upper Palaeolithic civilization in Europe.

In October 1991, Janusz Krzysztof Kozlowski of the University of Cracow will be at the Society of Antiquaries in London to receive the Prehistoric Society's first Europa Prize in recognition of his contribution to Palaeolithic archaeology. His achievement, involving as it has international interdisciplinary collaboration, has been all the more remarkable in that it has been conducted from a country which has been in a state of internal crisis for the last decade, and subservient to a censorious Soviet scientific and political orthodoxy since the end of the Second World War. How has the discipline of archaeology developed generally this century in Poland? What can it now teach the west?

During the late 1970s when the results of theoretical analyses of prehistoric settlement to the north and south of the Polish Carpathians became available along with new methods of field research (Rydlewski & Valde-Nowak 19791, they set in motion a process of systematic discovery of archaeological sites in the region. Rich Palaeolithic assemblages were recovered which have yet to be published in full in Polish periodicals (e.g. Rydlewski & Valde-Nowak 1980a; 1980b).

Before this the existence of traces of Pleistocene settlement was not seriously considered. Sporadic surveys found nothing and the Polish Carpathians were believed to have been either unsettled in the Pleistocene or, at most, a transit zone for human groups. This contrasted with the neighbouring Cracow-Częstochowa Upland to the north (the Ojców and Mników Valleys), and the Slovakian Carpathians where Palaeolithic sites had been discovered more than a century ago.

In most periods of European prehistory population was organized into local segments which can be called communities irrespective of what meaning is ascribed to this concept. The reality of prehistoric communities is best born out by the discontinuous distribution of both cemeteries and habitation sites in the country. The fact that the archaeological records seem to suggest spatial continuity in some regions is mostly due to our inability to classify the finds in accordance with a sufficiently fine chronological scheme. In cases where fine chronology can be applied – and Bohemia is one of the possible examples – it becomes clear that the seeming spatial continuity of the record is a consequence of our projecting many discontinuous patterns into one plane – the landsc ipe of today as archaeologists perceive it.