Out of molecular biology – the revolution of past decades in biological science – there now begins to come molecular archaeology, the study of DNA in ancient plants, animals and people to address questions of history as well as biology. Here is set out what molecular archaeology is about, how it works and what it has begun to do.

On ten stone tools from Tabun Cave, Israel, excavated from a layer dated to 90,000 years old, the presence of organic tool-use residues has been detected. Among them are red blood cells, collagen, resin and hair fragments identified by microscopy and biochemical analyses.

In 873 the Viking Great Army took winter quarters at the Anglo-Saxon monastery of Repton in the heart of Mercia. Excavations 1974–88 found their D-shaped earthwork on the river bank, incorporated in the stone church. Burials of Viking type were made at the east end of the church, and an existing building was cut down and converted into the chamber of a burial mound containing at least 249 individuals. Here is a first account of the evidence for the Vikings at Repton in and after the campaigning season of 873-4.

Dunmisk fort (Co. Tyrone), in Northern Ireland, has produced the first evidence recognized in early medieval Europe for the making/modification of glass using primary raw materials. Going beyond the evidence for glass-working – the softening of glass to form and decorate artefacts – a series of sophisticated industrial processes can be identified, and shows that not all glass was imported to Early Christian Ireland.

The modern plan of the west Midlands city of Worcester, like so many in England, hides a series of ancient towns under the standing streets. Archaeological and historical exploration, and the old topography that shows itself in modern plots and street lines, make possible the recovery of the early pattern.

From the beginning, the culture-history of the Chinese archaeological sequence has had its own character. And in a country and a civilization so vast, regional variation can also be on a grand scale. An examination of a late Neolithic culture on the southeastern coast finds jade in early contexts that give a new perspective to the traditional – and later – importance jade bears in the dynastic northern sequence.

A circle of pits from the Welsh borders is another addition to the curious catalogue of British ceremonial monuments of the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age, and provides – as often before – intriguing clues as to how it was structured and used.

Software for computer graphics is rapidly growing in power. Here is an application which enables a complex three-dimensional assemblage to be recorded and explored in its full spatial order. ANTIQUITY's illustrations – stationary in monochrome two dimensions – can so little show what the technique offers as to underline Ms Fukasawa's point.

A suite of radiocarbon dates for a regional group of the earlier Bronze Age in Hungary provides a valuable underpinning to the absolute chronology of a key region and period.

Another view is given on issues arising from the return of the Kow Swamp human remains, discussed by John Mulvaney in the March 1991 ANTIQUITY.

Two organizers of the TAG meeting at Lampeter, December 1991, take issue with Bintliff's view of their intellectual position, starting with the label ‘post-modern’.

Readers may know, from editorial comments and notes in ANTIQUITY, and from newspaper letters and articles early in 1991, the deep concern felt over the destruction of archaeological sites in West Africa, particularly in Mali, to satisfy the demands of art dealers for terracotta figurines (see ANTIQUITY 65: 904-5). Oxford University has re-considered its attitude.

Observance of the Columbus Quincentenary has greatest relevance when focused on historical processes at a global scale. Nevertheless, American events and circumstances of the contact period have not received from archaeologists the attention given to the more pre-Hispanic Aztec and Inca.

The 16th-century efforts of Spain, and other western European powers, to extend empire overseas into the Americas led to a frontier-state expansion and confrontation among vastly different cultures. Colliding with each other and with powerful indigenous societies, the Spanish established the most extensive empire in the New World (FIGURE 1). The outcome shaped the destiny of America, Spain and the world.

The first contacts between the prehistoric cultures of the Canary Islands and western civilization occurred in the European expansion of the late Middle Ages. Their ultimate colonization was intimately related to this expansion, driven by new economic forms, including ‘commercial capitalism’ or ‘pre-capitalism’, which affected economic and intellectual structures throughout Europe, the economic characterized from then on by innovation, risk and increasing turnover; and the intellectual by the concept of ‘profit’ in place of ‘service’.

The practical transition can be seen in the technology that supported expansion: transport (new types of ships, cartography, systems of navigation, etc.); financial systems (nonmonetary payment, insurance, commercial credit, etc.); and mercantile institutions (commercial societies, consulates, postal services, etc.).

When Christopher Columbus arrived at La Espanola (the large island called in English Hispaniola, now divided between the modern states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in early December 1492, he encountered a society entirely different from the ones described by Marco Polo for Asia and India. Columbus, sailing through the Bahamas and Cuba, had already discovered indios who went about naked, did not know the wheel nor used any metal tools, practised agriculture and fishing, and had a complex social structure and an elaborated system of religious beliefs. These ‘Indians’ called themselves Tainos, to signify that they were peaceful, although they defended themselves well from their neighbouring enemies, the Caribes of the Lesser Antilles islands (Colon 1961; Las Casas 1967)

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most dramatic cultural and biological transformations in the history of the world. Small groups of conquistadores toppled enormous empires. Millions of Native Americans died from epidemic disease. Old World animals and plants revolutionized Native American societies, while New World crops fundamentally altered the diet and land-tenure of peasants across Europe. In the words of historian Alfred Crosby (1972: 3),

The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day [I1 October 14921 to become alike.

During the 1930s and 40s most studies of Indian villages in Mesoamerica focussed on acculturation, the adoption and integration of Spanish cultural traits into the native cultural system. This paper summarizes that research, also applying an evolutionary perspective, particularly an ecosystem model. It focusses on the 16th century, when two great cultures – each the product of thousands of years of independent, parallel evolution – clashed and exchanged cultural traits. From this blend began an internal growth that continues to the present.

The European discovery of a separate and distinctive ‘new’ world was an event of cosmic proportion not only because of the enormous social, political and economic expansion potential for the developing nation-states of the European peninsula; discovery of this distant realm also required significant reconstruction of basic European cosmography. In the centuries prior to the Age of Discovery, Europe, focussing on Rome and Byzantium, had balanced its own geo-political centricity with cosmological interpretations of mystically paradisiacal or demonic distant lands generally situated to the East, places filled with exotic creatures and things, some dangerous while others constituted kingly riches. A new era began when the ocean to the west, long regarded as a restrictive barrier, became a possible route, a direction, which could lead to the exotica of the East. Realization that this western direction led instead to distinctive new western lands, new places, re-ordered the European cosmological paradigm (Helms 1988: chapter 6).