All across the thousands of kilometres of northern central Asia — from the Baltic Sea to the Yellow Sea — burials have been key to the later prehistoric sequence. The immediate subjects of this article are three late Bronze Age burials from North China; rich and well-preserved with weaponry and horse fittings, with agate and rush matting, they tell also of the world outside China, for into one of the daggers is cast the full-face image of a Caucasian male, complete with handlebar moustache.

This appreciation of George Grant MacCurdy does not purport to record either the main facts or the details of his long and fruitful life. It is merely the appraisal of the man, the teacher, and the scientist by one who was his junior friend and colleague for more than a third of a century. It is designed to supplement the admirable biographical sketch written by Dr Hugh Hencken for the Bulletin $16 of the American School of Prehistoric Research.

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.

Arthur SmithWoodward, an expert on fossil fish and Keeper of Palaeontology at the British Museum (Natural History), made the official announcement of the discovery of Piltdown Man’ (Eoanthropus dawsoni) on 18 December 1912 at Burlington House in London. The announcement was sensational at the time and attracted interest in a purported new hominid species with a large cranium, apparently associated with an ape-like jaw. It was not until some 40 years later that Eoanthropus (Dawn man’) was discredited (Weiner et al. 1953; Weiner 1955), with Charles Dawson (a country lawyer’, as well as amateur archaeologist and palaeontologist) being identified as the probable perpetrator of a hoax in which human cranial fragments were combined artificially with the modified jaw of an ape (considered to be that of an orangutan), at Piltdown in Sussex. Despite extensive investigations and a plethora of publications, the exact circumstances surrounding the Piltdown hoax remain uncertain (Weiner et al. 1953; Weiner 1955; Spencer 1990a&b; Thomas 2002).

Westward across the valley from St. Albans, the horizon is today fringed by a tract of secluded woodland. A part of this woodland has acquired the name of Prae Wood from a small medieval nunnery, dedicated to St. Mary de Pré, that once stood half-a-mile away beside the derelict Watling Street. The nunnery is now a patch of nettles in the meadows by the Ver, and the Street is a channel from which the metalling has been torn; but both are better known to the historian and the antiquary than are the banks and ditches which lie hidden beneath the summer-jungle of Prae Wood. For all that, these banks and ditches are relics of a city which was at one time no less than the metropolis of a considerable part of Britain. It is nearly nineteen centuries since they passed into oblivion, and there is something of ironical irrelevance in the words of a Georgian milestone which chance has set up in their midst: ‘I mile from Gorhambury, 20 miles from Hyde Park Corner The shade of Sir Thomas Browne might find a happy perch upon that milestone.

About the year 30 B.c., king Tasciovanus, suzerain (it would seem) of a large region in central and eastern Britain, struck coins which bear upon them, in one form or another, the name of Verulamium and are, incidentally, amongst the first inscribed coins minted in these islands. His predecessor, Cassivelaunus, had been the elected leader of the British tribes against Julius Caesar in 54 B.c.; and it is unnecessary here to discuss again in detail the plausible identification of Verulamium with the unnamed stronghold of Cassivelaunus which Caesar's legions stormed in that year.

The modern study of ancient landscapes is showing how the landscape and the monuments within it may have been perceived by those alive at the time. The author here broadens the discussion, distinguishing the perceptions of those who built the monuments from those who viewed them. In this example from the area comprising eastern India and Bangladesh where settlements were regularly washed away, the monuments acted as icons of permanence, and continue to impress today. However, they may not have been so appreciated by the riverside dwellers …

A modest experiment explores what is is seen and what is not seen in field survey, and what can be done about it.

The decoration of Neolithic passage-graves in Scotland and the British Isles/Ireland has come under renewed scrutiny–showing interesting patterns between tombs and houses. Here Richard Bradley examines two Orkney tombs and compares their decorated stones with motifs in Ireland and elsewhere.

Few of the standard Peruvian histories—much less those politicofantastic tracts which hasty study of the Ancient Peruvian scene has evoked in such number—give any adequate idea of the tremendous cultural background against which the Inka civilization was built up, or of the fact that from that background emerge those archaeological exceptions which constantly question the theories of modern Americanists.

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.