Underpinned by a contemporary view of automotive systems as cyber-physical systems, characterised by progressively open architectures increasingly defined by their interaction with the users and the smart environment, this paper provides a critical and up-to-date review of automotive Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) systems. The paper discusses the challenges with prognostics and intelligent health management of automotive systems, and proposes a high-level framework, referred to as the Automotive Healthcare Analytic Factory, to systematically collect and process heterogeneous data from across the product lifecycle, towards actionable insight for personalised healthcare of systems.

In considering the history of regional archaeological projects, I propose to use a long-term perspective. Rather than surveying relatively recent examples and inductively working out the differences between them, I should like instead to venture some historical generalisations about the mental and practical traditions in which such projects are set. I want to suggest that two contrasting attitudes and approaches have presented themselves, largely as alternatives, throughout the history of archaeology; and that these choices are still offering themselves today. While this is perhaps a rather long perspective to take, the alternative is a very short one. If we take the description ‘regional projects’ to mean the integrated investigation of sites in landscapes, then the concept is effectively post-1945 and really post-1965. The reason is very simple: money. Archaeologists at earlier periods just did not have the size of budget which now seems essential for what we call ‘regional projects’. Of course there were earlier examples of landscape studies in Europe, and excavations of two or more complementary sites; but it would be hard before the 1960s to find the degree of integrated investigation which is today the defining characteristic of a regional project. (Perhaps archaeologists in the Near East, by using very cheap labour, had the equivalent of a modern regional budget; but they had whole abandoned cities to investigate, so the regional label scarcely applies.)

The megalithic monuments of Carnac, Brittany, in the Département of the Morbihan, are amongst the most farnous in France. indeed in the world. This region has not only the densest conccntration of such sites in Europe but also retained its importance as a centre of monument-building from the late 5th to the :jrd millennium FK:, giving it a unique significance in the study of Neolithic landscapes (Sherratt 1990; 1998). Its menhirs, stone alignments, and megalithic tombs have attracted the attention of scholars since the 18th century, and there is thus an unusually full record, both written and pictorial, of the nature of these monuments as they were perceived over 300 years.

The two decades from 1860 to 1880 were one of the most formative periods in the emergence of modern attitudes to scientific inquiry in England, in what were later to become the specialized disciplines of the natural and human sciences. At this high point of Victorian prosperity a small group of scholars established both the principal questions for future research, and the character of the institutions which were to pursue them, in increasingly professional ways, during the following century. Most of the men (for it was an overwhelmingly male community) who were involved with these developments had independent means, either as inherited wealth or as a result of their own involvement in business affairs; and in consequence they were less restricted in pursuit of their interests than many of their successors who occupied paid positions in scientific institutions and universities (Levine 1986; cf. Chapman 1998).

ANTIQUITY asked Andrew Sherratt, who had been a student of David Clarke at peterhouse, Cambridge in the late 1960s and early '70s, to give his reaction to the foregoing papers, in the light of his recollections of the time.

Publication of a new volume on the beginnings of Old World farming (Harris 1996) has provided a compendium of current views on this critical inflection-point in human inhabitance of the world. Was it driven by climatic change, as Gordon Childe suggested? And what of the earlier emergence of modern human behaviour: were these two chapters in the same story?

The criteria used in the British universities' current assessment of research quality prompt the question: how would Gordon Childe have fared, if assessed that way?

This contribution, in memory of the Cambridge archaeologist and cultural theorist, David Clarke (1938–76), investigates the possibility of a coherent description of long-term change on an archaeological time scale. It rejects an earlier (‘processualist’) synthesis based on ecology; but, rather than retreat into an introverted and fragmented post-modernism, it asserts the continuing value of a ‘grand narrative’. It identifies the problems of the neo-evolutionary conception prevalent in the 1960s and early 1970s, and in particular a division into stages, and emphasis on autonomous development, and the priority given to production. In contrast, this presentation emphasises the importance of social interaction and cultural encounter. This interactionist approach is exemplified in new descriptions of the ‘Neolithic’, ‘Urban’, and ‘Industrial’ Revolutions, and discussed as a means of conceptualising some general properties of long-term change.

This paper examines differences in the nature of inter-regional relations in the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and early Iron Ages, in an attempt to define the specific characteristics of Bronze-Age world systems. It distinguishes between the slow spread of innovations and the active intervention of trade networks related to the expansion of urbanism. The former dominate in the Neolithic, and similar phenomena continue to occur in later periods. Following a suggestion by Jane Schneider, a distinction is drawn between a core area of urban consumers, a periphery that is actively altered by its role as a supplier of raw materials to the core, and an outer margin that is indirectly affected through the spread of innovations. For most of prehistory, temperate Europe acted as a margin to a Near Eastern/Mediterranean core-periphery system. The formation of long-distance routes linking northern and southern Europe (successive axial routes along the Danube and Black Sea, and from Italy to Scandinavia) was critically affected by the spread of urban-eentred trading systems along the Mediterranean. The ‘amber route’ was an important precursor of the structures underlying the later development of European polities.