For some years it has been obvious that the new tree-ring-calibrated radiocarbon dates would necessitate a drastic revision in conventional time scales and in the whole structure of cultural relationships developed for the European Mesolithic and Neolithic. The full assessment of the new pattern, however, has to await the time when relative archaeological sequences, based on stratigraphy and supposed cross-datings, become supplemented with or replaced by approximately absolute chronologies covering each of the major cultural provinces of Europe.

Under and behind the splendours of Maya ceremonial buildings are the craft skills of the artisans who put them up. A first find of a lime-plaster kiln, from Copan in Honduras, illuminates one of those technologies, the burning of lime in a closed oven rather than on an open-air pyre.

In 1978, the excavation of the Macedonian royal tombs at Vergina in north Greece gave a more physical aspect to the historical place of Philip and of Alexander the Great. These archaeological finds now have an active role in the region's politics, where the present is again being re-made by the pictures of the past.

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA; c. 9600–8500 cal BC) period in the Levant provides the earliest confirmed evidence for plant cultivation anywhere in the world, marking a significant escalation in the human management of plants towards fully fledged agricultural food production. Until now, the majority of PPNA sites have been documented in the Jordan Valley, the Wadi Araba and farther north along the Upper Euphrates (e.g. Mureybet, Jerf el-Ahmar, Djade). By contrast, few PPNA sites have so far been reported from the semi-arid to arid eastern part of the Levantine interior. Among these is El Aoui Safa (Coqueugniot & Anderson 1996) and sporadic flint scatters elsewhere in the Harra. Recent fieldwork in the Qa’ Shubayqa area in the Harra has produced the first evidence for a more substantial settlement site in this region.

The first calibration curve, published by Suess in 1967 (Suess 1967), was a wiggly thing arrived at by a process Suess called ‘cosmic schwung’. Later curves used more formal statistical methods, including Clark's published in ANTIQUITY (Clark 1975), which came to be one of the most used. It would be good to have the new standard curves available in ANTIQUITY, but they are far too bulky. We recommend the now-indispensable calibration issue of Radiocarbon (Stuiver & Kra 1986), which takes 230 large-format pages to set them out as tables, graphs and a computer program.

Gordon Pearson is the British end of the Anglo-American axis, with Minze Stuiver at the University of Washington, largely responsible for the new calibration. He summarizes what the calibration does and how best to work with it.

This paper is a guide to working with the Radiocarbon calibration issue in particular, as well as calibration curves in general. It therefore follows the conventions for calibrated and uncalibrated dates that are presented there, rather than ANTIQUITY's normal convention.

The authors describe an ingenious Aztec form of irrigated field system and assess its costs and benefits. Swamps were reclaimed by digging channels by hand and the excavated soil used to construct embanked fields (chinampas). The banks were anchored by planted trees and the trees, the crops and the water channels created a sheltered space which itself raised the temperature and increased productivity. The construction of the whole system took 25 million person-days spread over 40 years. In their study of the energetics of construction, the authors show that this project, forced on the local community, was within their capacity and comparable to the labour expended on the production of cloth.

Traditionally, the process of neolithization in the Dutch delta has been considered to have been slow, spanning some 1500 years. Re-examination of the available evidence makes clear that a ‘short transition model’ fits the available data equally well.

It has long been recognised that the Neolithic spread across Europe via two separate routes, one along the Mediterranean coasts, the other following the axis of the major rivers. But did these two streams have a common point of origin in south-west Asia, at least with regard to the principal plant and animals species that were involved? This study of barley DNA shows that the domesticated barley grown in Neolithic Europe falls into three separate types (groups A, B and C), each of which may have had a separate centre of origin in south-west Asia. Barley was relatively rarely cultivated by the early Linearbandkeramik farmers of Central and Northern Europe, but became more common during the fifth and fourth millennia BC. The analysis reported here indicates that a genetic variety of barley more suitable for northern growing conditions was introduced from south-west Asia at this period. It also suggests that the barley grown in south-eastern Europe at the very beginning of the Neolithic may have arrived there by different routes from two separate centres of domestication in south-west Asia. The multiple domestications that this pattern reveals imply that domestication may have been more a co-evolutionary process between plants and people than an intentional human action.

The Greeks and Romans reproached the Phoenicians for the sacrifice of infants, and the excavation of cremated infants at ‘Tophets’ (named after the sacrificial site in Jerusalem mentioned in the Bible) seems to bear this out. However, the argument for infant sacrifice depends largely on a skewed age profile, and age is not easy to determine. The authors approach this problem with a battery of new techniques, showing that in the Tophet of Carthage the majority of the infants died between one and one and a half months. Sacrifice was thus very probable.

This is the first description of the prehistory of the coastal Congo, won by the author and his colleagues against considerable odds: war, exploitation by big business and, above all, by the entrenched assumption that this part of the world had no history to save. Here is a first glimpse of that history: 3300 years of prehistoric settlement, movement and change chronicled by radiocarbon dating and a new ceramic typology.

It is now 20 years since the discovery of the Grotte Chauvet with its impressive cave art, but controversy continues over the antiquity of the images. Radiocarbon assays have been used to argue that the ‘black series’ charcoal drawings date to the Aurignacian period, more than 20 000 years earlier than traditional stylistic models would suggest. This paper questions the validity of the radiometric dating and cautions against reliance solely on the date of the charcoal. Instead, the authors propose an alternative chronology for the art of Chauvet based on stylistic comparanda, palaeontological remains and stratigraphic evidence.

Not long ago the theoretical literature in archaeology dealt mainly with excavation techniques and the primary analysis of archaeological data. In recent years, the successful realization of many of these empirical objectives, plus a rapidly increasing corpus of data, have motivated a younger generation of archaeologists to investigate more carefully the problems that are involved in the explanation of these data and the study of prehistory in general. This concern has produced a spate of publications which, although they often disagree radically about particular issues, are attempting (a) to investigate the theoretical structure of prehistoric archaeology, (b) to formulate a more rigorous canon for the interpretation of archaeological data, and (c) to pioneer new methods of analysis (Binford, S. R. and L. R., 1968; Chang, 1967 and 1968; Clarke, 1968; Trigger, 1968).

The written sources are overwhelming for that great historical event, the conquest of the world by Europeans between the 15th and the 19th centuries. Historical archaeology, especially in north America, now provides an important source of evidence of a different character. But what was it like to receive Europeans on your shore, what was it like to be dispossesed? Here is a report specifically concerned with relations between native and newcomer at the Cape, one of those African regions which first felt the European impact.