A new series of radiocarbon measurements on three sewn-plank boats from North Ferriby, Yorkshire, has provided consistent new dating for these craft, which suggests that the appearance of such boats may fall in the early Bronze Age.

A multi-disciplinary study of settlement in north-east Greenland found that life in this High Arctic zone was actually favoured by the climate brought in by the Little Ice Age (fifteenth–nineteenth century). Extensive ice cover meant high mobility, and the rare polynyas — small patches of permanently open coastal water — provided destinations, like oases, where huge numbers of migrating marine mammals and birds congregated. One such place was Walrus Island on Sirius Water, a veritable processing plant for walrus, where every spring Thule people stocked up meat supplies that would get the rest of the region through the winter. It was a further drop in the temperature in the mid nineteenth century that led to the region being abandoned.

In his two articles on querns (1) Dr Cecil Curwen has given us a really epoch-making contribution to prehistory and history. Not only has he provided the prehistorian with a new instrument for the establishment of chronology, but he has drawn the attention of excavators to a revolutionary but curiously neglected advance in technology. For the rotary mill is the first major application of rotary motion since the invention of the potter's wheel and the lathe in the remote Oriental Copper Age; it led on directly to the invention of geared machinery and the water-wheel and so to the first employment of inanimate motive power apart from the harnessing of the winds to the sail. Though this invention took place in the full light of history, the sole evidence for its origin, apart from a single reference in a writer so late as Pliny (2), is purely archaeological. Unfortunately it is still rather thin; excavators of classical and barbarian sites have generally been too preoccupied with statuary and art-objects on the one hand, with types accepted as chronologically significant on the other, to provide the historian of science with the data he craves. Truhelka for instance, generally so scrupulous in the full publication of all his finds, does not illustrate nor even describe a single quern from Dolja Dolina in Bosnia where he found plenty (3).

The Shapwick Project has pioneered and tested a variety of new methods in field survey. Here heavy metal soil analysis is tested in the search for aceramic sites.

Northern Belize lies in the northeastern quadrant of the central rainforest zone of the area formerly occupied by Classic Maya civilization, adjacent to the ecological frontier with the northern zone, the arid karstic plain of northern Yucatan. It is bounded on the east by the Caribbean, and is traversed by two of the major rivers of the Maya lowlands, the Rio Hondo and Rio Nuevo, the upper tributaries of which drain the Maya heartland of south Campeche and northeastern Peten.

Enhanced by recent survey, the authors define new kinds of rock art along the Lennard and Fitzroy rivers in Western Australia—black pigment and scratch-work images featuring anthropomorphic figures with elaborate head-dresses. These are shown to belong to the Contact period and represent the response of Indigenous artists to European land-taking by recalling and restating traditional themes from earlier times.

A handful of finds of camel bones from Iberia now illuminate the faint story of camels in Roman and Muslim Europe–and hint at why the dromedary never became established as a domesticate in the peninsula.

Toolmakers in Queensland Australia used ingenious knapping techniques to produce an implement with a large bulb of percussion and a gouge-shaped cutting edge: the “gull-wing tula adze”. The author concludes that the tool results from a unique compromise between an inefficient knapping technique and a peculiar – but in this case desirable – phenomenon of fracture mechanics

Investigations in a catacomb revealed an early mass grave, in which the bodies were bound tightly with plaster and textile in a type of mummification. Over 100 individuals, mostly young adults, including women, were stacked in rows apparently following a communal fatal incident, perhaps an epidemic. The presence of traces of gold, silver and probably amber with many of the bodies, and their burial in an imperial property suggests a group of some status being interred in the early years of the catacomb, at the end of the second century AD or beginning of the third.

The ‘faience’ beads of the British Bronze Age have since the last century been appreciated as the product of a somewhat sophisticated technology. Although the possibility of local manufacture was seriously considered by earlier antiquaries, especially for the Scottish beads, in more recent years-since the writings of Childe and Piggott-a Mycenaean or Egyptian origin has been widely assumed for them.

The Queen's Hotel development site in York was in the news early in the year as yet another urban rescue project where a developer's building schedule left very little time for archaeological investigation of, in this case, a palatial Roman building. As always, the question was, where best to dig to learn much and quickly? A guiding answer came from a new application of subsurface radar.

As well as being modes of supplying metal, cross-shaped copper ingots in Zimbabwe are shown to be emblems of currency and status. The author dates them to the first half of the second millennium AD and connects the appearance of ingots to increased social stratification.

There is little doubt that a religious belief imparting a sense of law and order and helping to control the relationships between human populations and the other components of their environment, is highly developed among present-day hunter/gatherers. Such beliefs not only help to provide a feeling of unity stretching far beyond the hunting band itself, but they afford an ordered interconnexion between the foragers and the spiritual processes which are looked upon as all-powerful forces influencing life and death (Turnbull, 1968, 25). This is well exemplified in the case of the Musahar, a Dravidian tribe of hunter/gatherers who inhabit the jungle regions of the Eastern Vindhyas in Central India. According to Nesfield, quoted by Crooke (1896, Vol. IV:34), ‘The great active power in the universe … is Bansapatti, Bansatti or Bansuri, the goddess who … personifies and presides over the forests. By her command the trees bear fruit, the bulbs grow in the earth, the bees make honey, the tussar worm fattens on the asân leaf, and lizards, wolves and jackals (useful food to man) multiply their kind. She is a goddess of childbirth. To her the childless wife makes prayers for the grant of offspring. In her name and by her aid the medicine man or sorcerer expels devils from the bodies of the possessed. In her name and to her honour the village man kindles a new fire for lighting a brick kiln. Woe to the man who takes a false oath in the name of Bansatti.’

The role of plants in the subsistence economy of pre-agricultural societies of the eastern Sahara is poorly known because vegetal remains, except for wood charcoal, are seldom found in archaeological sites. Site E-75-6 at Nabta Playa, with rich assemblages of charred seeds and fruits, is exceptional. Around 8000 b.p. the inhabitants of this site collected a wide spectrum of wild food plants. Wild sorghum was of special interest and its occasional cultivation cannot be excluded.