‘Dear dead women, with such hair, too – what's become of all the gold’? ROBERT BROWNING, ‘A toccata of Galuppi's’ What became of most of the Classical gold and silver, argues Michael Vickers, is that it went into the melting pot, with exceptions like the Sevso treasure recently brought to public spectacle. Classical ceramics, more commonplace and with nil potential for recycling, have been luckier in their survival. Those accidents of later history need to be remembered as Classical Greece is envisaged; and it is perhaps even more important to bear in mind the reasons why many students of antiquity have until recently chosen to downplay the rôle of precious metal

An important element to the future of archaeology in the ex-Communist countries of central Europe will be the freeing of archaeological ideas from the constraints of a particular set of social theories built into the fabric of the state, as Milisauskas noted in the last ANTIQUITY (64: 283–5). This is a timely moment to look at the interference of a different set of social theories in the same region some decades ago

Ceremonial architecture over 4600 years old has been discovered at the open air site of Asana in the high sierra of southern Peru – the best part of a thousand years earlier than in the central Andean sierra and with different architectural detail, form and content. This discovery provides new insights into a new regional architectural tradition and an alternative trajectory for the evolution of settled village life in the Andean highlands

Arrowheads and projectile points, with their elegant shapes, are the very stuff of archaeological classification. But do the classes relate usefuly, or at all, to real differences in arrowhead purpose or efficiency? Modern and Mesolithic arrowheads are studied with their killing purpose in mind

One of the splendours of early Chinese history is the sudden apparent rise of a skilled bronze metallurgy in the Shang period, and a correspondingly vital research question is to locate the centre of that technology. New discoveries from Sanxingdui, within China, reported here, question the primacy of north China in the late 2nd millennium BC

The identification by excavation of a small shepherd's hut within an enclosure at Graig Fechan and its radiocarbon dating suggests parallels with Dartmoor and the Peak District, when a few centuries of milder climate seem to have favoured upland farming

While lively debate has gone on about the meaning and function of Palaeolithic parietal art, the intractable and essential questions of its dating have been less in the foreground. With Leroi-Gourhan's interpretations goes his identification of styles and their chronology, published in 1965. Now one period, the Late Magdalenian of his Style IV, is looked at closely with chronology in mind

The Lower Palaeolithic has always been studied within a framework based on different types of flaked stone. Although this evidence might seem solid and unambiguous, the way it has been studied has been strongly influenced by wider social and political factors

Stone axes are numerous in Ireland, where there are important porcellanite sources in the northeast. Now there is a first clear idea of just how many Irish axes there are and what their pattern of distribution is

A new technique of radiocarbon dating is presented, offering at modest expense the means to a determination that is good to the ‘first order’ of magnitude

Archaeomagnetic dating has recently come of age. The creation of the British reference curve in 1988 allows the authors plausibly to link a north French site with a well-known historical event

A splendid statue-menhir of the 1st millennium BC, found, lost and now found again

The sorting-out of stratigraphy, a precise date by dendrochronology from the first years of the 8th century AD and recent excavations give a new picture of the founding of one of northern Europe's earlier medieval towns

Andrew Fleming's 1987 paper identified coaxial field systems in the British landscapes that could be dated over a long time-period, from Neolithic to Roman. What does that time-span imply and amount to?

Ferghana, lying between the republics of Uzbekistan, Tadjikistan and Kirghizia, was famous in antiquity for its horses. Its Iron Age archaeology was brought to the attention of western audiences in Gorbunova's The culture of ancient Ferghana of 1986 (BAR S281). Here we are presented with a fascinating ethnoarchaeological study of a mid-first millennium AD burial practice and an interpretation of its symbolism