New finds of astonishing splendour have come to light at Snettisham (Norfolk, England), a place which already holds a special, if enigmatic, place in Iron Age studies. Discoveries there first put British gold torques on the map; the magnificent great torque not only gave its name to an art-style but held a coin that helped to date it, and the very wealth of the place has provoked endless speculation.

The great tells of west Asia, scenes of so many romantic assaults in the early decades of archaeology, present technical problems as challenging as any: deposits to be measured by the tens of thousands of tonnes, complex stratigraphies of re-worked mudbrick. Among the tonnes are finds that run from immense buildings to tiny seals. The venture, as often as not, has its own history going back decades. How does one approach the archaeology of a tell today? Uruk, on the south Mesopotamian plain near Ur, and best known as the type-site for the 4th-millennium city, spans 5000 years, and offers an instructive example of the scale of the problem.

Excavations at the salt-making village of Kibiro, on the Ugandan shore of Lake Albert in East Africa, suggest that an important part of the economy of the Kingdom of Bunyoro originated early in the present millennium. The predominance of roulette-decorated pottery, in particular the use of carved roulettes, indicates that Kibiro was first occupied by people with northern affinities, possibly from the upper Nile region or further west. Collectively, these findings provide important clues concerning the origins of the Kingdom of Bunyoro.

Women's issues are deservedly a growing concern in archaeology, with concerns that run from the power (im)balance between the sexes in the present practice of archaeology to the technical question of how gender-relations are, or are not, recoverable from archaeological context. The several aspects that lie within the phrase ‘women's archaeology’are explored.

Archaeology, like many of the sciences, works to a masculine metaphor, the (male) archaeologist as hero explores and tames the mysteries of his (female) subject. Feminist theory has made important criticism of positivist science on these grounds, drawing on much the same postmodern theory as ‘post-processual’ archaeology. How do the ‘post-processuals’ appear, seen in the feminist light?

Kadero, in the central Sudan, offers new discoveries pertinent to the old and valuable question of early domesticates - both plant and animal - in the Middle and Upper Nile region.

The Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum sets out his view of where responsible museums and researchers should find a balance in the difficult matter of unprovenanced antiquities that may be the spoils of recent looting.

The archaeological literature, Antiquity included, has often taken a severe view of the consequences, for archaeological collections and for archaeological knowledge, of private collections of antiquities. Here is another viewpoint on the issue.

The determination of the leafy vegetable constituents of the diets of early societies is notoriously difficult using traditional archaeobotanical techniques. In an effort to provide a solution to this problem, a new approach, using gas chromatography (GC) and GC/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), has been adopted to detect the presence of preserved epicuticular leaf wax components absorbed in potsherds. The characteristic compounds identified can serve as chemotaxonomic indicators of the vegetables prepared in vessels during their usage.

Electron spin resonance (ESR) provides a dated sequence for a classic site in a classic Palaeolithic region, a sequence that covers that difficult period for absolute dating which has often proved too old for radiocarbon and too young for other radiometric methods.

The name of ‘Venus’ for the carved female figures of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe is an inappropriate nick-name, for we cannot be certain that they are goddesses of love nor patterns of ideal women. When analysing these figures, their shape seems to be very similar to the morphology of modern women.

The site of Bronocice provides a valuable chance to explore aspects of economic changes in the later Neolithic of central Europe, thanks to its large sample of animal bones, and to a remarkable trace of haulage on a horn-core.

In another – and perhaps the last – of the sequence of contributions to Antiquity on the subject of the invention of prehistory in various lands, the example of Italy is explored. Again, the basic inspirations, especially from geology, are the same; and again the particular form of Italian prehistory also reflected, and may yet reflect, the special conditions of the nation's cultural and intellectual life in the 19th century.

Some of the advantages of first-order radiocarbon dating techniques have recently been described to readers of Antiquity (Glover et al. 1990). The value of the technique is further illustrated in this note, where a similar approach has been used to date shell samples from coastal sites in southeastern Australia.

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.

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.

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.