The remarkable progress since 1960 in the decipherment of Maya inscriptions has created unique opportunities for interpretation. The Classic period (AD 250–900) Maya, who for half a century had been interpreted almost entirely from archaeological evidence, have suddenly become an historical civilization. Archaeological data and models can now be combined with and cross-checked against the Maya’s own dynastic records. New data have accumulated so rapidly, however, that communication between specialists in different realms of Maya studies has not kept pace. To stimulate communication, the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sponsored a seminar in October 1986 that brought together a group of epigraphers, art historians and archaeologists to share their data, expertise and divergent approaches. This article will summarize the parts of the seminar that bear upon political history. My debt to the ten colleagues† who participated in the seminar is very great. The experience was genuinely collegial and whatever contribution our efforts make to Maya studies will be the result of the interplay of ideas and viewpoints that we established during our week together.

Various ways of dividing up the chronological and cultural content of the Neolithic of the British Isles have been proposed. Thus Piggott assigned the Windmill Hill culture to Early and Middle phases, and the Peterborough and other cultures to a Late phase (1954); Clarke proposed similar Early, Middle and Late phases, with the addition of a Final phase (1970,275); Case divided the Irish Neolithic into a beginning, a middle and an end (1969a) (a scheme recently further subdivided by ApSimon (1976)), his stages marked by various cultural innovations and developments. Though based on such cultural changes, these schemes—necessary as they are—all tend to create the impression of steady and consistent human activity, though manifesting itself in different ways at different times, over the by now vast span of the British Neolithic. Nor has this impression been altered greatly by the large number of radiocarbon dates-over 150—available for cultural activity over the period from at the latest 3500 bc down to 2000 bc or soon after.

Egypt has some of the oldest written records and extended lists of named rulers. But radiocarbon dates have only fulfilled expectations 66 per cent of the time. So why haven&t the two types of dating made a better match? The authors provide a dozen excellent reasons, which will sound the alarm among researchers well beyond Dynastic Egypt.

Radiocarbon dating and stratigraphy here offer a new chronological structure for the Iron Age in the Levant. The credit for the construction of massive public monuments in the northern part of Israel is here wrested from David and Solomon and attributed to the later Omride dynasty. The early Israelite monarchs actually ruled over a small kingdom in the highlands around Jerusalem rather than a great empire.

Many scholars have examined the changes that occurred in Greek life around the twelfth century BC. After a period of great prosperity during Late Helladic III B, there followed an era of war, uncertainty, and cultural disintegration that was part of a general upheaval extending from Italy to the Near East. In Greece the disruption was especially pronounced, and many areas were left relatively unpopulated. The ensuing ‘Dark Age’ witnessed the birth of a profoundly different society.

A thematic or a period discipline?

Industrial archaeology has generally been defined as a thematic discipline, concerned with only one aspect of man’s past activity. Although the term ‘archaeology of industry’ was used in the 19th century, it was Michael Rix who used the phrase ‘industrial archaeology’ in print for the first time (Rix 1955). He later defined industrial archaeology as ‘recording, preserving in selected cases and interpreting the sites and structures of early industrial activity, particularly the monuments of the Industrial Revolution’ (Rix 1967: 5). The emphasis on the term ‘industrial monument’ followed a need to define an industrial class of Ancient Monument so that some examples would be scheduled. Industrial archaeology, then, grew from the need to record and preserve standing structures threatened with demolition rather than an inherent desire to understand more about the historical period of the monuments. It was perhaps felt that understanding of the industrial revolution period was more readily arrived at by other means, particularly written historical evidence. During the ‘rescue’ years of the 1960s and 1970s, archaeology was one of the two areas of fastest university expansion and very popular in extra-mural teaching. But none of the archaeology departments took up industrial archaeology, although many of the extra-mural departments did; it is largely as a part-time, amateur interest that industrial archaeology has flourished ever since. The author’s post as an industrial archaeologist in the Leicester archaeology department is one of the first occasions on which the specialism has been given a place in full-time undergraduate archaeology courses.

Ideas about the prehistoric past have for long been based upon pieces dug from the mounds and hollows which are the remains of man’s activities. Only recently has it been clearly realized that monuments are continually being modified by nature and that evidence of weathering, denudation and silting can be as informative as the artifacts sometimes found in them. A recent conference showed that there was relatively little exact knowledge of how such processes take place and, in particular, of their quantitative aspects. As has been recently emphasized archaeological excavation is a means of investigating the truth of an hypothesis by destructive analysis. It thus emerges that any study of the action and interaction of natural processes affecting a prehistoric monument must clearly involve the converse, i.e. a monument must be built and studied, in all its component parts, under controlled conditions. Today an impressive and substantial ditch and bank, cut into and heaped upon the chalk of Overton Down in Wiltshire, stands a shining witness to the execution of this principle.

The work of construction was undertaken with hand tools, but not all of these were modern picks and shovels. A part of the bank was dug and heaped with primitive tools and appliances—antler picks, shoulder-blade shovels and wicker carrying-baskets. It has long been known (from the not infrequent discovery of examples apparently discarded) that antler picks were the primary digging tools of those who dug the ditches and heaped the long and round barrows, the causewayed camps, the henges and the cursuses, but precise appreciation of the real potentialities of antler picks was slight. Greenwell and Pitt Rivers commented upon the use of such implements, while the subject was pursued in some detail by Horace Sandars in his paper On the Deer Horn Pick in the Mining Operations of the Ancients, among others. Curwen’s accounts of the Sussex flint mines further stimulated such studies as did Clark and Piggott’s classic paper. From Sandars’s, Curwen’s initial and subsequent study and from summaries of the past two decades the view emerged that the antler picks were almost invariably used as punches and levers to break up chalk. Thus, such thought as has been given to prehistoric mining and digging has been to some extent inhibited by acceptance of that notion.

Whilst there is no evidence that human representations in Palaeolithic art are an accurate reflection of contemporary social demography, they can yield valuable data on Palaeolithic populations and their social organization. The paper analyses a group of Palaeolithic figures which show that women seem to have been accorded a privileged role in hunter-gatherer society, based on their physiological functions as mothers and sexual and social partners.

This new sword comes from the collection of Mr Evangelos Loizou of Famagusta, and has been brought to my attention by my former colleague Dr Vassos Karageorghis of the Cyprus Museum. The sword (PLATE XVI (a)) was given to Mr Loizou’s father by a villager of Enkomi some years ago, and almost certainly comes from the famous Late Bronze Age city and cemetery site a few hundred metres west of the village. It could well have come from a grave. The sword lacks the extreme tip; one edge is chipped. Apart from superficial corrosion it is in excellent condition.

The preserved length is 0.47 m.; the handguard is 0.05 m. wide, and the length of the hilt, 0.10 m. The greatest width of blade (below handguard) is 0.035 m. The rivets diminish in length from pommel to handguard in the range 0.023–0.018 m. There are two rivets in the handgrip and six in the handguard. The pommel ears are prominent, but there is no spur. The hiltplates were made of some perishable material, but, as often, their outline can be restored from the ‘shadow‘ left by the corrosion pattern on the handguard. The junction of blade and handguard is more angular than on any other Mediterranean example known to me; also unusual is the even taper of the blade from handguard to tip in place of edges normally either parallel, or even slightly swelling.

There were two main sources of supply of flint available to early man,–superficial deposits whether in the form of river gravels, sea or lake beaches, or nodules incorporated in surface soils, and deposits beneath the surface of the ground for which it was necessary to mine or quarry. While it is generally true to say that mined flint was of superior quality and more easily worked than the superficial variety it must not be forgotten that the magnificent honey-coloured flint of Grand Pressigny, which in the dawn of the first age of metal was traded to Switzerland, North France, Brittany, Belgium and even Wessex, occurs naturally in the form of surface nodules. In passing it may be observed that the so-called livres de beurre, the most typical product of these Chalcolithic workshops, are technically no more nor less than elongated tortoise-cores from which were struck long flakes with faceted butts. In view of the play that has been made with the presence of ‘Mousterian’ technique in our British mines this is not without its significance.

Large curvilinear enclosures are now established as a principal instrument of human activity in Central Europe from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age (Antiquity, passim). Here the authors introduce us to examples from southern Iberia and make the case that they should be regarded as part of the same continent-wide phenomenon.