An essential ingredient of the lovely blues in ancient Egyptian materials — faience, glazes, frits — is copper. How did the knowledge of that copper use arise? There is a telling congruence with Egyptian techniques in drilling stone artefacts, and the characteristics of the powder drilled out as waste.

The human settlement of Australia falls into that period where dating is hard because it is near or beyond the reliable limit of radiocarbon study; instead a range of luminescence methods are being turned to (such as thermoluminescence at Jinmium: December 1996 ANTIQUITY). Ngarrabullgan Cave, a rock-shelter in Queensland, now offers a good suite of radiocarbon determinations which match well a pair of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates — encouraging sign that OSL determinations can be relied on.

A piece of pumice among drift material on Nadikdik Atoll, Marshall Islands, in far Micronesia had a large chunk of flakeable obsidian attached. As the atoll had been devastated by a typhoon and associated storm surge in 1905, the piece must have arrived by sea within the last 90 years. This and similar incidences of raw materials distributed by ocean drift show how sea-borne dispersal cannot be excluded offhand in the occurrence of obsidian in far-flung places, commonly attributed to human transport.

Further fieldwork at Sembiran, on Bali in the Indonesian archipelago, tells more about the eastern end of the exchange network running across southern Asia about 2000 years ago.

In ANTIQUITY a year ago, Vincent & Ruth Megaw found a useful parallel between the multiple definitions of the ancient Celts, as it can be seen from varied sources, and the several ways an individual's ethnic identity is seen and defined in the contemporary world. Here the other view is stated: that the methodology and interpretations advocated by the Megaws are both false and dangerous.

Survey in southwest Macedonia provides a new field record of the pattern of Neolithic settlement. It prompts a further opinion in the enduring debate about the nature of the diffusion of agriculture, discussed most recently in ANTIQUITY by van Andel & Runnels (1995).