Tintagel Castle (at NGR SS 0589) has been strangely absent from the pages of ANTIQUITY. O.G.S. Crawford missed seeing it during his Cornish trips in the 1920s. Glyn Daniel was there only in October 1986, his last visit to Cornwall, when the place was also inspected by HRH Prince Charles – apparently the first Duke or Earl of Cornwall to set foot on the Island since Richard (1209–72; the younger brother of Henry III), who built the Castle and was crowned King of the Romans at Aachen in 1257. If Tintagel shares with Maiden Castle the fate of being among the most frequently excavated of all the Duchy of Cornwall's monuments, it stands alone in being at once the most picturesque and the most enigmatic.

A knowledge of pyrotechnology - the skills of creating and working with high temperatures - attested for later prehistoric Europe first by refined ceramics in the Neolithic, then by copper and bronze metallurgy. But what about the third aspect of pyrotechnology – faience, glass and other vitreous materials? New work reported in this survey shows a place for glass in the European Bronze Age.

Recognition of distinctive ceramics by visual inspection is the norm in surface survey - especially when ceramic types are as varied and colourful as those of Islamic medieval pottery. Here petrographic analysis is used successfully to define the ceramic categories and the contributions of local and imported wares.

The recommended Belfast/Seattle radiocarbon calibration (Pearson 1987) coming into common use gives us ‘good’ portions, where the calibration curve has a shape that aids in refining dates, and ‘sloughs of despond’ - the periods when the shape of the curve is less helpful. Two deep sloughs arefound in the last few centuries ncand in the 3rd millennium BC. Here, a series of new determinations are presented for Bell Beakers in Spain, falling in the 3rd-millennium slough, and it is shown what can and cannot be learnt from these and their calibration.

Prominent in the new literature of a ‘post-processual’, ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ archaeology are a pair of books, conveniently colour-coded as one black and one red, written by Michael Shanks 6. Christopher Tilley, and both published in 1987. The ‘black book’, from Cambridge University Press, has a stark cover mostly of solid black; the cover of the ‘red book’, from Polity Press, is a more cheerful crimson, though its picture, a 19th-century Comedy of death, is a despairing image of dismal decay.

Kristian Kristiansen, of the Center for Research in the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, reviews here the black and the red, and the post-modern vision of archaeology they amount to.

This small tabular bronze artefact, recovered from an occupation layer sealed beneath volcanic ash on Lou Island, is the first bronze artefact found in a dated context in Papua New Guinea, well outside the range of the normal occurrence of bronze in southeast Asia.

Papers in ANTIQUITY earlier this year (Kinnes et al. 1988; Shell 6. Robinson 1988) have studied evidence for the original profile-shape of the decorated gold lozenge, from Bush Barrow, in the barrow-field immediately to the south of Stonehenge. They have not addressed the pattern of the markings inscribed on the lozenge, which are here identified with the significant directions of solar and lunar events, the lozenge acting as a long-term record for prehistoric astronomers.

Forgotton beside the well-known and well-studied collections of metalwork from the river Thames is a remarkable collection of human skulls; this new study dates some skulls and finds important order in their pattern of dates.

The Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic resettlement of northern Britain, as glacial conditions receded, has a n obvious local interest and raises wider questions for the region. Here is a significant new find from northwest England.

Under King Sesostris III (Twelfth Dynasty) two sarcophagi of the Third Dynasty seem to have been removed from tombs below the Step Pyramid and buried within the king's pyramid enclosure, probably as a kind offoundation deposit to complement the complex's imitation of Third Dynasty forms. Their extraction is perhaps our earliest evidence for subterranean exploration based on effectively antiquarian motives.

Where and when does a living culture cease, where and when does archaeology begin? The issue has been raised again, this time concerning the repainting of Australian rock pictures.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, most graphic of English hill-figures, is of uncertain date - arguably Roman or pre-Roman, but absent from all documentary records of its Dorset region before the mid 18th century. Previous ANTIQUITY contributors (Grinsell 1980: Bettey 1981) have set out its known early history anti lack of history. Here the story is told ofthe survival through this century of the Giant's remarkable genitals.

A review of a major book on medieval Jerusalem is the opportunity also to look at the balance of attention that has been given to different aspects of the city's history.

A new suggestion is made for early hominids' interest in stones, and thence for the origin of stone tools.

The obvious English-language literature on the early civilizations of the Ancient East gives less attention than it might to the northern aspects, towards central Asia. Here, one of the leading researchers in Soviet Central Asia reviews an important new French book on the Iranian plateau and its inter-relations.

Many of the great sites–from Mycenae to Mesa Verde – now present problems of management that derive in part from the centuries or decades that have passed since first decisions were made as to how they should be presented. The Alta petroglyphs provide the opportunity of a ‘greenfield’ site whose archaeological resources can be planned for display on a clear new slate, as well as political aspects of a kind increasingly apparent everywhere.

The oldest road, in the narrow sense of a built way across difficult ground, seems to be the Neolithic Sweet Track in the English Somerset Levels. But what about the oldest road, in the larger sense ofa long-distance highway with staging posts, its essential purpose in the need to administer a large empire? Here seems to be that oldest highway, astonishingly visible on the ground, as Dr Sevin's illustrations show.

A note on Long Meg and her Daughters, the monolith and stone circle in Cumberland,

provides excuse to quote both Stukeiey on the whole: ‘A great Celtic temple’; and Wordsworth on Long Meg herself: Speak Thou, whose massy strength and stature scorn The power of years - pre-eminent, and placed Apart, to overlook the circle vast Speak, Giant-Mother!

More to the point, these new findings from air photography report new field monuments to with the standing circle and the second circle that Stukeley drew, and require a reappraisal of the Neolithic to Eariy Bronze Age monuments in Cumbria.