One hundred and thirty-two years after a first survey of their archaeology appeared, the Phoenicians remain the forgotten people of the ancient Mediterranean world. The October 1995 Cádiz conference provides occasion to review Phoenician studies then and now.

ANTIQUITY invited a member of the Research Assessment panel for archaeology in British universities to write about the exercise. He declined; as the matter was sub judice, he must be silent. Perhaps that phrase defines the colleague as judge, rather than as peer-reviewer.

Fortunately, Barry Cunliffe, chairman of the archaeology review panel (and of ANTIQUITY'S trustees), made public his views in his Presidential Anniversary Address to the Society of Antiquaries of April 1995 —before the current assessment got under way. We reprint it with permission. Professor Cunliffe starts with a brisk reminder—overlooked by our coverage in the March ANTIQUITY—of the real benefits of asking just what researchers do for their money in the supposedly tranquil and desirable échelons of our universities.

The rock-art of the Pecos River region, on the Texas-Mexico border, is deservedly celebrated for its very large and inspiring human depictions, convincingly interpreted as images of shamanism. Study of plant remains in associated middens gives a new aspect to understanding of the images.

Trustworthy dates on charcoal from the classic European painted caves have given a sharper view of images and their making in the later Palaeolithic. The new Grotte Chauvet has its own original themes, revealing a striking and an unexpected Aurignacian art with — again — dates from charcoal in which one can have confidence.

The ANTIQUITY prize-winning article in the last volume addressed writing, its varying nature and role in early states. Now that the decipherment of Maya writing is well advanced, we can know more of the records of kingship. From them we may discern the concepts and beliefs that defined the authority of these holy lords, as we seek the source of the power of rulers like ‘Sun-faced Snake Jaguar’.

When Francis Pryor excavated the settlement complex on the dry gravels at Fengate, east England, he was a full-time archaeologist. Now that he is working at the adjacent wetland site of Flag Fen, he has also become a sheep-farmer. That practical experience leads him to a new view of what created the pattern of these planned later prehistoric landscapes.

This paper presents the recent discovery of extensive and intensive middle Bronze Age exploitation of the marshland along the northeastern bank of the River Thames and its tributaries within a wider regional context. It also develops a site location model, and explores reasons for the presence of these sites.

The late Mesolithic sites of Téviec and Hoëdic, located on what are now small islands off the Breton coast, provide evidence for elaborate burial practices, and may be precursors of the megalithic tradition of Brittany and western Europe in general. This paper briefly summarizes what is known of the sites and examines patterning in the distribution of grave inclusions. Differences as well as similarities between the sites are found. When examined carefully and critically, older excavation reports can yield much new information.

Building floor plans are frequently recovered by archaologists. A common first sorting of the shapes of small domestic buildings is between round houses and rectangular houses. What do these differences mean? Why do social groups change their building form from one to the other? An ethnoarchaeological study from northern Cameroon illustrates how four ethnic groups in a single community use building shape to blur or define group boundaries for political self-interests.

Are sites in lowland Europe destroyed when they are ploughed many times? In north Denmark, many Neolithic and Early Bronze Age sites are now reduced to just lithic scatters, but distinctive ‘site signatures’ persist. A lithic economic prehistory from the ploughsoil is possible and instructive.

From Lattes, an ancient port on the low Languedoc coast of Mediterranean France, comes the material for an archaeobotanical study of the last centuries BC and the first AD. It illustrates the complexity of ways in which seeds are incorporated into urban deposits, where they are informative about cereals and vines in the town and in the countryside.

The archaeological evidence of the Pedra Furada rock-shelter (northeastern Brazil), showing a long sequence of dated layers from 50,000 years b.p., was questioned in a paper presented by Meltzer, Adovasio & Dillehay, who visited the region at the end of 1993, in volume 68 of ANTIQUITY (1994). This paper presents the reply of the team directly involved in the research programme in this key area of American prehistory.

In December 1993 Brazilian, European and American researchers joined forces in São Raimundo Nonato, Piauí, Brazil, to analyse the state of research on the peopling of the Americas (conference proceedings in press).

Recent prehistoric and palaeoanthropological debate is focusing new interest on the peopling of the Americas — an old and difficult research-case. Proponents of new sites need to submit their putative 'new and revolutionary' discoveries to a wider judgement, mainly contra sceptics and partisans of more conservative theories. Such a review is helpful, and we are grateful to our colleagues for their considered assessment of the evidence proposed in our Brazilian research. Nevertheless their view of the Pedra Furada evidence has gaps, misunderstandings and ambiguities.

Under and behind the splendours of Maya ceremonial buildings are the craft skills of the artisans who put them up. A first find of a lime-plaster kiln, from Copan in Honduras, illuminates one of those technologies, the burning of lime in a closed oven rather than on an open-air pyre.

An important step in our knowledge of the British Lower Palaeolithic has been the finding that its two recognized components, ‘Clactonian’ and ‘Acheulean’, are not ranged into a simple sequence; the exact relationship between the two is the subject of much debate. What does this do to interpretations of Swanscombe, classic site of the Lower Thames Valley, which has been studied in terms of stratigraphic succession?

Until modern cultivation invaded even the permanent pasture-land, the ubiquitous trace of medieval farming in the lowland English landscape was ridge-and-furrow. A record in themselves, the undulating slopes are now seen to act as a device to preserve older features underneath.

Museums across the USA are busy carrying out their new obligations under NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. There is more to the mood than some change in how human remains are curated in archaeological and anthropological collections.

Pontnewydd, in north Wales, is known as a rare Middle Pleistocene site in northern Europe with human remains. Radiocarbon AMS dates identify human specimens, deriving from later use of the cave at Pontnewydd and its neighbour Cae Gronw, that have no part in its earlier story.