Mortimer Wheeler famously tied together the worlds of ancient Rome and ancient India by finding Roman ceramics stratified into levels at Arikamedu, in south India. Late Roman pottery from far down the East African coast now permits the same kind of matching link from the Mediterranean to a distant shore, this one in the Swahili world.

A skull excavated from a 2nd-century AD pit in the Roman city of St Albans shows evidence for violent injury and displays cut-marks which seem to indicate deliberate defleshing. The find appears to be without close parallel in Roman Britain.

Our interpretation of Bronze Age metalwork is based, for the most part, on common-sense ideas of what is functional and what is not, which items were intended to be recovered, which were gifts to other worlds. A more considered source of analogy than our limited experience is available at a certain distance. Remote in terms of measured miles, the analogy is nevertheless effective in expanding current definitions of how ritual is expressed through material culture.

One of the larger — and more expensive — present programmes of study in archaeological science explores the provenance of prehistoric bronzes from the Mediterranean. What are the bases of research? What will the findings tell us about the real place of metal as it moved in the ancient world?

In September 1994 the European Association of Archaeologists held its inaugural meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a sovereign nation formerly part of Yugoslavia. As was to be expected in such a place and at such a time, questions of ethnicity and identity were much in evidence. Here a classic case-study in defining an ancient European entity is explored from a fresh starting-point in contemporary Australia; it was first developed in the Ljubljana session on ‘Contemporary myth of the past’.

From a University of Copenhagen excavation in the United Arab Emirates come two fragments of sheet alabaster, from a large private house dated to the 1st century AD. They prompt consideration of alabaster's use for windows and of provision for natural lighting in the ancient buildings of the broad region, using ethnohistoric observations, medieval literary sources and ancient epigraphic evidence.

Further (and final) comment on the origin of ancient human skulls from the River Thames (ANTIQUITY 62 (1988): 503–9; 69 (1995): 162–9) is prompted by comparison with the skulls from the London Thames tributary, the Walbrook.