This fine, and deservedly famous, ragstone head from Czechoslovakia makes an appealing piece with its delightful curling moustaches – ‘perhaps the closest that we have to Celtic self-portraiture’. This new study looks at the head in its context, and notes the pieces that may parallel it.

Twenty years' debate in English and Americanist circles about the fundamental aims of archaeology, and the methods that are to achieve them, has mostly been conducted in a framework of named schools – ‘new’, ‘processual’, and now also ‘postprocessual’ and ‘contextual’ – and in terms of their philosophical good standing (or lack of it).

This paper addresses the fundamentals as they declare themselves in a different region, the Pacific, and sees that the heart of the matter lies more in the nature of history, the history of the Pacific itself, and the history of its study.

Experimental study with replica bows and projectiles of a variety of types indicates the superiority of archery over the throwing of spears, and makes it possible to indicate a hierarchy of increasing efficiency in the main classes of bows.

Burnt mounds, found across northern Europe, are especially frequent in Ireland. Here a new review of the Irish evidence is presented, and issue is taken with Barfield & Hodder's diagnosis, published in ANTIQUITY last year, that the primary function of the burnt mounds was as bathing places.

Desert varnish, the distinctive coating on exposed rock surfaces in arid regions, can be dated by cation ratios, providing a rare means directly to date petroglyphs. A first application of the method, much used in north America, is here reported from Australia, where it indicates minimum ages up to 30,000 years old. And it also shows that the style of figures, so often taken as a measure of chronology, is in this instance largely independent of age.

Sandra Bowdler reported in the last issue of ANTIQUITY (62: 517–23) on the controversy surrounding the recent repainting of Wandjina figures on the rocks of the western Kimberley, northwest Australia. Here is an Aboriginal Australian's view of the repainting project and its significance, along with an explication and further discussion of implications.

This report presents new evidence for cultivation of rye in Denmark in the first centuries AD, from a context which suggests that more than simple agricultural subsistence was concerned.

Pleistocene dates from a rockshelter on Buka Island at the northern end of the Solomons Chain demonstrate human settlement by 28,000 b.p., some 25,000 years earlier than previously reported for this island group.

New radiocarbon dates confirm the evident possibility that Machu Picchu was not an Inca foundation on a wholly new site, and give a first indication of the duration of the citadel's previous occupation.

A salutary test of the advances made in the communication of archaeology to a non-specialist audience is to go into a children's bookshop and ask for books about prehistory. It can be an unsettling experience. This note looks at what was produced on a visit to a children's bookshop in Cambridge, as it indicates the sort of haphazard collection available to a casual buyer.

ANTIQUITY reported last year on the start of the British project ‘to teach yourself how to sail a classical warship’. The second season's trials, benefitting from the lessons of the first, took place in the summer, and it begins to come clear that the classical reports of the trireme's astonishing performance are well founded.

Issue is here taken about inference from skeletal evidence to the darker side of Dark Age life and death.

Much of the Parthenon and its sculpture is, visibly enough, no longer standing on the Acropolis. Here is notice of where some bits of it may have gone, and of where and in what form they may now be seen.

The current campaign to return to Athens the Parthenon sculptures that have been in the British Museum since the early 19th century highlights the profoundly dual nature of Greek architectural and sculptural heritage, as emblems of both Greek and global attachment. Classical relics in particular have become symbols of Greek attachment to the homeland; underscoring links between past and present, they confirm and celebrate Greek national identity. Other elements of Greek heritage – language, literature, religion, folklore – likewise lend strength to this identity, but material remnants of past glories, notably temples and sculptures from the times of Phidias and Praxiteles, assume an increasingly important symbolic role (Cook 1984; Hitchens 1987).

In the 2nd century AD Pausanias (i.2.4-15.1) walked through the agora at Athens describing some of the statues and naming the artists; at least 35 of the statues were of bronze, yet not a single one survives intact today (Mattusch 1982: 8-9). Thinking only of the extant marble sculpture does an injustice to the civic art of Athens. This problem is commonplace; almost any classical site has numerous stone bases for bronze statues which have long gone into the melting-pot. Yet so often in modern scholarship stone sculpture is given a privileged position. Although modern histories of Greek art pay much attention to the marble sculpture of the Parthenon, ancient authorities were not so impressed; Pausanias (i.24.5-7) provides the briefest of descriptions to the marble sculpted pediments and omits to mention the frieze. For many scholars today the frieze has become an example of what ‘unlimited money can do’ (Ashmole 1972: 116), yet, as R. Osborne has recently pointed out, it merely helped the viewer to process to the east end of the temple where he or she would have been confronted by the great chryselephantine cult-statue of Athena: ‘this is what the temple was built to display, this is the object towards which worship is directed, and this is what the procession was all about’ (Osborne 1987: 101). And this is what Pausanias describes in detail, the great work of art and expression of Athens’ wealth which no longer survives.

Chartres is made of stone and glass. But it is not just stone and glass; it is a cathedral, and not only a cathedral, but a particular cathedral built at a particular time by certain members of a particular society. To understand what it means, to perceive it for what it is, you need to know rather more than the generic properties of stone and glass and rather more than what is common to all cathedrals. You need to understand also – and, in my opinion, most critically – the specific concepts of the relations among God, man and architecture that, since they have governed its creation, it consequently embodies. (Geertz 1973: 50.)

Greek society was changing rapidly in the 8th century BC. The archaeological record reveals population growth, increasing political complexity, artistic experiments and a strong interest in the past. Because these processes resemble those at work in early modern Italy, the period has often been referred to as the ‘Greek renaissance’ (e.g. Ure 1922; Hägg 1983a; cf. Burke 1986). This paper is about the glorification of the past in the 8th century, and its relationship to the rise of the polis, the Greek city state. I concentrate on one particular phenomenon, the spread of cults at tombs dating to the Mycenaean period (c. 1600-1200 BC). I argue that the common renaissance analogy has limited value, and that the 8thcentury Greeks created a past narrowly focussed on the persons of powerful ancient beings, from whom they could draw authority in the social upheavals which came about as the loose, aristocratic societies of the ‘Dark Age’ (c. 1200-750 BC) were challenged. Tomb cults go back at least to 950 BC, but after 750 they were redefined and used as a source of power in new ways. I have adapted my subtitle from Maurice Bloch’s well-known paper ‘The past and the present in the present’ (1977), where he argues that rituals bring the past into the present to form a system of cognition mystifying nature and preserving the social order. The argument here is slightly different. I stress the variety of the cults and the range of meanings they must have had, making their recipients highly ambiguous figures. The same cults could simultaneously evoke the new, relatively egalitarian ideology of the polis and the older ideals of heroic aristocrats who protected the grateful and defenceless lower orders, while standing far above them. Bloch's paper borrowed Malinowski’s idea of culture as a ‘long conversation’; developing the analogy, I look at the multiple meanings which any statement in such a conversation may have for the different actors.