The hippopotamus is a large beast with large teeth—large enough for hippopotamus ivory, then and now, to be a useful alternative to elephant ivory (there are both kinds in the Aegean Bronze Age, as well as the little tusks of wild boar). A newly found cache of hippopotamus ivory at Gao, medieval city of the south Saharan edge, opens a wider place for the material in contact across the great north African desert.

Following the development of pollen analysis in the earlier part of this century, much effort was devoted to unravelling the sequence of vegetational change during and after the retreat of the last European ice-sheets. The outlines established, questions of causation came to the fore, and the debate focused on factors such as climatic change, rate of species migration from glacial refuges, and natural vegetational succession. In more recent decades, a further factor has been widely investigated, namely the possible influence of humans on the landscape, principally as farmers and smiths. The development and modification of hypotheses is well illustrated by the Elm Decline of the Atlantic period, where climate (Iversen, 1941) or man (Troels-Smith, 1960) and occasionally disease (see refs in Simmons & Tooley, 1981, 134) have been held responsible for a widespread but by no means straightforward decline in elm pollen.

Since cereals and legumes were successful domesticates, archaeologists and botanists have investigated early domestication with particular emphasis on these plants. What about other foods, which may have been staples in their own time, for which we have no simple continuity into a later subsistence in the classic region of Near Eastern domesticates? The mediterranean climate, and the lifeways, of California provide an analogy.

Eisele et al. in ANTIQUITY (1995) reported discouraging results from experiments to see if blood traces reliably survive on stone tools. Here, issue is taken with aspects of that study, and new research is reported from the celebrated buffalo-jump at Head-Smashed-In, southern Alberta. The great bone-bed there, consisting almost exclusively of bison bones, gives rare opportunity to study remains of a known single species under the genuine conditions of an archaeological site, rather than a supposing simulation.

Kerma is an ancient city on the Nile in Middle Nubia, long known and the subject of renewed recent exploration. Its position, at the southern limit of Egyptian control, sets it strategically on the routes to the African interior. Its environment in the arid desert results in remarkable preservation of organic remains.

This paper reports the first chronometric study of the ‘moats’ of the abundant mounded Iron Age sites of northeast Thailand. Here AMS 14C dates and TL dates are reported which indicate that the moats date from a short period in the Mid to Late Iron Age, before being infilled. The dates also contain preliminary evidence for the chronology of landscape change, which is critical to the understanding of the Iron Age occupation of this region.

In situ preservation is a complex and dynamic process, which requires an understanding of the nature and scale of the material to be preserved, an understanding of the context of the site in terms of managerial needs and a programme of scientific monitoring of changes within the burial environment. The example of a rural archaeological landscape in northeast England, which is undergoing a programme of hydrological management, is considered.

The British hill-fort in these days needs no introduction. Everybody, certainly every reader of ANTIQUITY, is familiar with the ancient earthworks that crown the blunt spurs and whale-backed ridges of the chalk downs, and the grimmer ramparts of stone that take their place as one penetrates the lands of sharper contours and more obstinate rock that lie to the west and north.

Opinion as to the nature of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the British Isles has varied with changing ideas about the overall pattern in northern Europe, and with interpretations of the securely dated evidence—which continues, sadly, to be both slight and ambiguous. Here a new assessment is made, by a researcher who comes to the question from an antipodean perspective.

Six wells at Tossal de les Basses in Spain captured a large assemblage of Iberian woodworking debris. The authors' analysis distinguishes a wide variety of boxes, handles, staves, pegs and joinery made in different and appropriate types of wood, some – like cypress – imported from some distance away. We have here a glimpse of a sophisticated and little known industry of the fourth century BC.

Two organizers of the TAG meeting at Lampeter, December 1991, take issue with Bintliff's view of their intellectual position, starting with the label ‘post-modern’.

A bone deposit found in a round barrow overlying a rich Beaker-period burial in Northamptonshire (England) contained at least 184 domestic cattle skulls and one aurochs skull, but very few other cattle bones or bones of other animals. Most of the cattle were young adults. The relative scarcity of premolars suggests that they were deposited on the cairn some time after death. The paper discusses archaeological and ethnographic parallels for this unusual deposit.

When was silk first brought across the steppe from far China towards the European world? There is silk from the Middle Bronze Age of Uzbekistan, in Scythian burials of Siberia and among the Hallstatt grave-goods of western Europe. Teasing out the story of silk depends on identifying the textile, and distinguishing its several varieties apart.

The preservation of organic remains and environmental indicators in those soft, damp and colourful deposits that visually indicate ancient excreta is familiar. This note reports a horse parasite, and draws attention to preservation of valuable material in deposits much less promising in nature.

The sources of tin in the ancient Near East have been a long-standing puzzle. Anatolia is a key area, for it has copper in vast quantities, and silver. Since no substantial or workable deposits of tin seemed to exist in Turkey, an external source for tin bronzes in Anatolia has seemed necessary. The new finds reported here change that picture, as they reveal a major source of the metal in the Taurus mountains, on the south coast of Anatolia.

This is probably the question most often asked of the metallurgist by the archaeologiist, and the object of this report is to show how far we have got in our attempts to answer it.

First, it must be clearly understood that we can only expect some correlation between ore and weapon or utensil, and therefore provenance in the early eras of metallurgy, where the bulk of the metal used emanated from primary sources, and where the amount of secondary re-used metal was negligible. This objection does not apply, however, in the case of semifinished products such as those ingots which have been made from ores and not from secondary material. This should include the plano-convex copper ingots of Late Hronze and Roman date in Britain and the ox-hide ingots of the Eastern Mediterranean.