The investigation described in the following paper may perhaps throw some light on the nature of those remarkable sepulchral mounds, known as “long barrows,” which as yet remain the crux and problem of the barrow-digger and archæologist. Many of the long barrows of South Wiltshire were examined at the beginning of this century by Mr. Cunnington and Sir Richard Colt Hoare; but with so little return for the pains bestowed on them, that, though Sir Richard was satisfied of their high antiquity, he was utterly at a loss to determine the purpose for which such immense mounds had been raised. In another part of his “Ancient Wiltshire,” he tells us that he and his colleague “had at length given up all researches in them, having for many years in vain looked for that information which might tend to throw some satisfactory light on their history.” In the various long barrows which were opened by these investigators, we find that, with very few exceptions, human skeletons were discovered on the floor of the barrow, at the broad, or east end, “lying in a confused and irregular manner, and generally covered with a pile of stones or flints.” The total absence of bronze weapons, of all personal ornaments, and of urns of pottery, such as were constantly found by them in the circular barrows of the same district, is repeatedly noticed by Sir Richard Hoare, who observes that “their original purport is still involved in obscurity, and a further explanation of them would be a great desideratum.”

First discovered by accident in 1884 – and thereafter informally investigated by workmen, nuns and clergy, for several decades – the archaeological site at the Sisters of Nazareth convent in central Nazareth has remained unpublished and largely unknown to scholarship. However, work by the Nazareth Archaeological Project in 2006–10 showed that this site offers a full and important stratified sequence from ancient Nazareth, including well-preserved Early Roman-period and later features. These include a partially rock-cut structure, here re-evaluated and interpreted on the basis of both earlier and newly recorded data as a first-century ad domestic building – perhaps a ‘courtyard house’ – the first surface-built domestic structure of this date from Nazareth to be published, and the best preserved. The site was subsequently used in the Roman period for burial, suggesting settlement contraction or settlement shift.

In the nineteenth century, a red sandstone figural carving was located in the south-facing chancel wall of the church of St John the Baptist, Upton Bishop, near Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire. In 2005, following the removal of the stone for recording and conservation, the author was invited to examine and report on the sculpture, and particularly to review the proposal that the sculpture, rather than being of Roman date as had traditionally been supposed, was more probably a Romanesque carving of the twelfth century. The characteristics of the Upton Bishop carving are here examined and the various attributions of dating are reviewed, as a consequence of which it is suggested that the sculpture is neither Roman nor Romanesque in date, but rather is of pre-Conquest origin, most probably of around ad 800. It is thus suggested that the Upton Bishop sculpture represents a significant addition to the corpus of Anglo-Saxon figural sculpture in Herefordshire and the western Midlands, that the characteristics of the sculpture suggest well-established traits forming part of a local style and that these were taken forward into the Romanesque period, thus contributing to the distinctive character of the Herefordshire School of sculpture.

Antequera, in southern Spain, is in the province of Malaga, a little more than twenty miles north of the city of that name, the nearest point on the coast. The town lies at the foot of the mountains, overlooking a large and fertile plain; while just outside it, near the road to Granada, are three tombs which are notable in several ways. Two of them are less than a kilometre distant, the third lies farther away in the plain itself (pl. liii, I).

Perhaps the most striking feature of this comparatively isolated group is their marked dissimilarity from each other in type, one being a good representative of the ' cupola tombs' of Iberia; another, a simple long megalithic chamber and antechamber, built on a large scale; while the third, with its holed stone entrances, recalls the allées couvertes of the Paris region.

One feature they share, however, which does not seem to have been satisfactorily recorded, namely that each is contained in a large round barrow. All three barrows are formed of natural hillocks which have been scarped and shaped to form symmetrical circular tumuli.

This paper explores links between the archaeology of cauldron deposition during the European Iron Age and the mythology of cauldrons as presented in the early vernacular texts of Wales and Ireland. During the last millennium BC, cauldrons were apparently the focus of repeated ceremonial activity, involving their deliberate deposition in watery contexts. Evidence for such cauldron deposits comes from all over temperate Europe. The medieval mythic texts of Wales and Ireland contain references to cauldrons as instruments of death and resurrection. Models are proposed to explain the possible link between allusions to sacred cauldrons found in the early vernacular myths and their presence in archaeological contexts. It may be that redactors of myth were influenced in their writings by observation of ancient cauldrons either in situ or recovered from watery sites, or that they may have learnt about them through oral tradition.