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.

Aerial mapping and remote sensing takes another step forward with this method of modelling lidar data. The usual form of presentation, hill shade, uses a point source to show up surface features. Sky-view factor simulates diffuse light by computing how much of the sky is visible from each point. The result is a greatly improved visibility — as shown here by its use on a test site of known topography in Slovenia.

The authors deliver a decisive blow to the idea of unidirectional behavioural and cognitive evolution in this tightly argued account of why the bow and arrow was invented and then possibly laid aside by Middle Stone Age communities in southern Africa. Finding that all are modern humans (Homo sapiens), they paint a picture of diverse strategies for survival and development from 75 000 years ago onwards. It is one in which material inventions can come and go, human societies negotiating their own paths through a rugged mental landscape of opportunity.

What was the effect on Late Minoan civilisation of the catastrophic destruction of Akrotiri on Thera (Santorini) by volcanic eruption? Not much, according to the evidence for continuing prosperity on Crete. But the authors mobilise their ingenious mathematical model (published in Antiquity 82: 1009–1024), this time to show that the effects of removing a major port of call could have impacted after an interval, as increased costs of transport gradually led to ever fewer routes and eventual economic collapse.

The authors comment on the date of the formation of the Tüttensee, holding that it was not created by a meteorite in the first millennium BC as claimed in the Antiquity article, but formed at the end of the Ice Age and can have nothing to do with Phaethon and his chariot. In reply, Rappenglück et al. offer a brief defence of their thesis.

In an op-ed piece on The Wall Street Journal's website promoting his latest book, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (Wilkinson, T. 2010), Toby Wilkinson draws parallels between events in Egypt's past to those in its present. “The current situation in Egypt”, we are told, “comes as no surprise to a student of the country's long history” (Wilkinson, T. 2011). It is only appropriate to observe, then, that the problematic nature of Wilkinson's book comes as no surprise to a historian of Egyptology. Both it — and the accompanying comparison of the country's past to its present — are part of a long tradition (although tradition is too positive a word) of questionable Egyptological analysis.

Microstratigraphy — the sequencing of detailed biological signals on site — is an important new approach being developed in the Çatalhöyük project. Here the authors show how microscopic recording of the strata and content of widespread middens on the tell are revealing daily activities and the selective employment of plants in houses and as fuel. Here we continue to witness a major advance in the practice of archaeological investigation.

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.

We acknowledge the observations of Doppler et al. on our paper and we are grateful to Antiquity's editor for this opportunity to reply to their objections.

Firstly, it should be noted that we have not claimed that the Chiemsee once included the Tüttensee. We agree that the region in which both lakes lie was glacially formed. But while Lake Chiemsee is the result of the last Ice Age the Tüttensee basin originates from a much later Holocene meteorite impact. We do not use the myth of Phaeton to date this event that is known as the Chiemgau impact. On the contrary we estimate from archaeological evidence and OSL dating that the event occurred between 2200 and 800 BC, i.e. the Bronze Age (Rappenglück et al. 2010: 436).We go on to discuss parallels between the independent dating of the Chiemgau impact and the possible time frame of the myth (Rappenglück et al. 2010: 435–37).

Archaeology claims a long tradition, going back to the middle of the nineteenth century, of undertaking both palaeoclimate research and studies on the impact of past climate change on human communities (Trigger 1996: 130–38). Such research ought to be making a significant contribution to modern climate change debates, such as those led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); but in practice this rarely happens (e.g. McIntosh et al. 2000). This paper will attempt to conceptualise a ‘climate change archaeology’, which is defined here as the contribution of archaeological research to modern climate change debates (cf. Mitchell 2008). Irrespective of whether climate change poses the greatest challenge in the twenty-first century or whether it is just one of many challenges facing humanity (cf. Rowland 2010), the absence of an archaeological voice diminishes the relevance and impact of the debate as a whole.

In recent years, Central Europe has experienced an unprecedented acceleration in social development (especially due to the demise of the communist regimes), in streams of thought (for example the post-modern vision of truth and the relativity of scientific knowledge) and, above all, in the availability of new information and communication technologies. Like every discipline, archaeology has been obliged not only to react to the contemporary dynamic but also to adapt to it in a positive — i.e. creative — way. Among the resultant trends to be noted in the Czech Republic are a decreasing interest in a single general theoretical paradigm, coupled with an increasing demand for the conservation and mitigation of sites threatened by development and looting. As a possible consequence of these developments, the past two decades have seen a shift in the agenda of archaeological researchers towards landscape and a realignment of the discipline away from the humanities and towards environmental and geographical considerations.

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).

Fiery pool: the Maya and the mythic sea is a travelling exhibition of nearly 100 finds that, together, imply a specific concept of the environment, physical and spiritual, for the Maya of Mesoamerica. As usual, the majority are from ‘public’ contexts, more or less aristocratic; but the exhibition generalises about Maya culture. Most of the exhibits are of the Classic period (c. AD 250–900), predominantly Late Classic, but there are some earlier pieces and several of the Postclassic (to the Spanish Conquest). Some are well known and there are striking new finds too. Curated by Daniel Finamore & Stephen Houston, Fiery pool draws from more than 40 collections in the USA, Mexico, Central America and further afield. It was shown at the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, in 2010, and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, in 2010–11. It is now in Missouri, at the St Louis Art Museum, where its tour finishes on 8 May 2011.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of China's Institute of Archaeology, the author looks back to its origins, and recalls a short period, now almost forgotten, of dynamic and fruitful collaboration with the archaeologists of Soviet Russia. Soviet intellectual aims in the 1950s had a profound and lasting influence on the development of Chinese archaeology, including the design of its institutions, its theoretical basis, its research agenda and its field methods. The new emphasis on ancient life beyond the elite and the study of social and economic process seems to pre-echo some of the themes of Anglo-American processual archaeology that was to follow a decade later.

In early 1988 my grandfather, Robert Barron Kerr Stevenson (1913—1992), former Keeper of the National Antiquities of Scotland, was asked about his recollections of his former teacher and colleague Vere Gordon Childe. “There is”, he wrote in reply, “very little that I can say of use to you”. The reason for such a statement seems to be that my grandfather felt that his contacts with Childe had never been concerned with the broad historical and philosophical concepts that scholars were so interested in, believing rather that his own academic perspectives were more from the “worm's eye than the bird's eye view”. Yet what my grandfather knew was a more personal side to Childe that does not come across in his published works.

Archaeology aims at imagining past societies, using physical data together with, if available, historical documentation. But this imaginative process is bound by factors widely discussed in social epistemology, including unequal social relations among researchers. Such unequal geopolitics in knowledge has been explored by the present author and others (Goonatilake 1982, 1984, 1999, 2001; Clough 2001). The present exercise aims to investigate and question the social and intellectual context in which Anuradhapura, the first capital in Sri Lanka, has been interpreted as belonging to a ‘theocracy’ (Coningham et al. 2007). Prehistoric archaeology has dated the site to around the ninth century BC at which time it was one of the largest cities in South Asia. A continuous set of chronicles, authenticated by physical remains, document the continuation of the city from at least the fourth/third century BC up to the eleventh century AD, when it was sacked by south Indian invaders. The written evidence includes Sinhalese chronicles (written in Pali), descriptions of the city by foreign travellers and a large number of inscriptions dating back to the third century BC.

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.