Most of the opposition directed at the new AcropolisMuseum (herafter NAM), both beforeand since its opening in June 2009, has turned out to be politically motivated, mainly from the Left in Greece, mainly from the Right in Britain (the Daily Telegraph called it 'a hideous visitor centre in modern Athens'before it was even built [Wilson 2006]). Dimitris Plantzos comes at the museum from a different angle, but he too is determinedly on the attack. A first sign of this is his total silence about the protection and exhibition of the archaeological site underlying the museum, one of its major positive (and innovatory) features.

Ever since the beginning of recorded history, Ancient Egypt was dependent upon the goodwill of the Phoenician overlords of the mountain land of the Lebanon for supplies of timber in the long running lengths required for the construction of large ships, especially those intended for use on long voyages by sea ; fine timber was also in considerable demand for the making of the elaborate wooden sarcophagi of nobles and of members of the royal family as well as for furniture of superior quality. This lack of suitable native timber made the Egyptians late comers in sea-trading ; indeed, it restricted progress so seriously that their water-borne commerce was limited to traffic with Nubia and the South by way of the Nile waterway, to occasional expeditions down the Red Sea to Southern Arabia and to Somaliland (Punt) and to short coasting trips to Phoenicia to buy timber logs and to the coasts of the Sinai Peninsula in search of copper.

Using the World Wide Web is not unlike visiting an unfamiliar place to look at the archaeology. You want to know if there is anything interesting to see, so you start in the library, looking for information; you read books and articles from journals; perhaps you contact colleagues who can tell you about the place; you want to know how to find the sites and to get to them; and once you are there, you want to visit the museums as well as the monuments, and to locate people who are working there, whether they are from academic institutions, government archaeological bodies or local societies. You will want to check that access arrangements have not changed since the last published information; you also want to ensure that as far as possible the information you have is accurate, so that you do not waste time looking at sites which are not relevant to your interests.

A two-day conference, Fields of Conflict: progress and prospect in battlefield archaeology, held at the University of Glasgow, 15–16 April 2000, began by considering techniques of research and the interpretation of events and moved to consideration of site management and preservation

Some five months have elapsed since I was invited to write this paper and, as seems always to be the case, the continued rapid change in applied computing and available technology has transformed my view of the potentials offered by CD-ROM (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory) as a publishing medium. The paper I now offer is substantially different in content; the conclusions, however, are the same.

The early nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable reversal of judgment on the American pre-Columbian cultures. Prescott's romantic histories and Lord Kingsborough's monumental Mexican Antiquities are inspirations of earlier and less sceptical eras. Such pleasing imaginings as that the Spaniards ‘overthrew in Mexico a greater civilization than their own’ received scant support from the archaeologist who had displaced the antiquary, or from the critical historian who interpreted him. Dr Robertson1 summed up the verdict of the new investigators;:—‘The inhabitants of the New World were in a state of society so extremely rude as to be unacquainted with those arts which are the first essays of human ingenuity in its advance towards improvement’. He characterized Cortes's ‘emperors’ as ‘headmen’, the gorgeous palaces of the Conquest as ‘huts or mounds of rubble’, the Aztec Empire as a ‘league of primitive tribes’. Research, both among the ruins of the Mexican Valley and in the histories of the more prosaic conquistadores, established a singular lack of anything on the pre-Columbian continents which could be described as other than a tawdry barbarism.

Originally there were two main points of controversy about Piltdown. Did the Piltdown cranium and the Piltdown jaw-bone (mandible) represent one creature, ‘Eoanthropus’ as Smith Woodward inferred; or did they belong to two creatures, the cranium that of a man and the jaw-bone that of an ape, as David Waterston, Gerrit Miller and A. T. Marston believed? The second point of controversy concerned the antiquity of the specimens.

The archaeological record is dominated by the repeated object and the repeated event, so we search for patterns that explain the regular in general terms. But human societies are not like that; the mass is actually made up of individuals, and the engine of change more often at the margin than at the centre.