The site of the Dzuun Khuree monastery in the Upper Kherlen Valley of eastern Mongolia was recently investigated by UAV and ground-penetrating radar. The monastery's highly unusual circular form and layout suggest a foundation earlier than previously suspected.

The astronomical controversy about Stonehenge may perhaps be approached from an impartial view of one who is neither an archaeologist nor an astronomer, who offers no new or original observations, and proposes to examine facts rather than to discuss theories.

Sir Norman Lockyer was one of those who held that many Egyptian and Greek buildings were set so that they faced certain points on the horizon at which the sun or some bright star arose. But the buildings do not face these directions exactly, and the suggestion is that the discrepancies are due to a well recognized astronomical principle—that the points of rising and setting gradually move on the horizon; and the rate of motion being known, the date of the building may be ascertained.

Debates about archaeological interpretation are always healthy and welcome, and when, as here, arguments are not killed off, they inevitably become stronger. Importantly, the comments by Magli and Belmonte (2023) serve as a reminder that reconciling conflicting theoretical perspectives is never easy when times are changing. Grounded in positivism, their critique draws upon assumptions that become justificatory assertions. For better or worse, archaeological thinking has moved away from the processualism of the late 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s—a key turning point being Hodder's (1984) review of positivism in archaeological interpretation and his call for more contextualised approaches. The authors might usefully have consulted this and other works before setting out onto the choppy waters of post-processual archaeology. Many of their points simply escalate questions posed in my original text (Darvill 2022), and they often fail to distinguish between suggestions, arguments and more solid interpretative statements. Notwithstanding, they neatly arrange their response around three issues that are here addressed seriatim.

One of the battles of the Hundred Ýears’ War was fought in Portugal on the 14th August, 1385, on the so-called ‘Cumeira de Aljubarrota’, about 80 miles north of Lisbon. There, the small army of King D. Joao I, led by Constable D. Nuno Àlvares Pereira, faced the greater forces of D. Juan I of Castile. Under the Portuguese flag, as Professor Peter Russell has shown, about 700 English archers fought, and on the enemy's side were many subjects of the King of France (n. 1). There are different contemporary versions of the battle which have caused a certain perplexity among historians. Froissart's chronicle tells us that D. Nuno Àlvares Pereira's men had fortified the battlefield; this assertion figures in another narrative known as the Cronica del Despensero, and also in the well-known letter written by D. Juan I of Castile, dated the 29th August, 1385. The Castilian Chronicler, Ayala, an eye-witness of the battle, says nothing about it however, and this fact must have prompted another chronicler, Fernão Lopes, who wrote 60 years after the battle, to assert that there was nothing to be said about the defensive system, even giving us to understand that it never existed. This conflict in the evidence had made it impossible to make a thorough investigation of a battle which is fundamentally important to Portuguese history. To overcome this, in February, 1960, the Ministry of War ordered the Commission of Military History to submit the battle to an intensive study and to make an attempt to evaluate the contradictory versions.