In Garton Slack and Wetwang Slack, which together constitute one stretch of a dry valley to the west of Driffield, gravel extraction over 20 years has resulted in the excavation of a large part of an extensive Iron Age settlement.

Roads and ditches formed a focus for scores of buildings—roundhouses and post squares—as well as a cemetery of 446 inhumations in the ‘Arras Culture’ tradition and the first cart burial (in 1971) to be excavated under modern conditions (Dent, 1982, 1983; Brewster, 1971; 1981; Stead, 1984). Startling though many of these finds were, none exceeded the discovery of a group of three cart burials in the summer of 1984.

The first grave was discovered by the quarry manager, Mick Ward, who recognized it as a cart burial (he had seen the 1971 find, as well as numerous other burials in the valley) when the dark discolouration of the fill appeared in the quarry face and part of one tyre and the skull were exposed. He reported his discovery at once and I visited the site the same afternoon. The part of the quarry where the find was made had been stripped of topsoil a week or two earlier.

This paper explores the influence of merchants operating out of Germany in medieval Turku by comparing the evidence of documentary reports and the quantity and distribution of imported pottery. The documents make it clear that German merchants were present in the town and generally keep themselves aloof from the local citizens. But the pottery tells a different and more subtle story of interaction and involvement in which all parties are potential drivers. The author calls into question the ethnic and exploitative models for a Hansa culture, preferring a post-colonial interpretation that allows us to see the formation of cultures that are hybrid and local in context.

The authors have surveyed the little known paintings of the Kurnool area in central south India, bringing to light the varied work of artists active from the Palaeolithic to the present day. By classifying the images and observing their local superposition and global parallels, they present us with an evolving trend – from the realistic drawings of large deer by hunter-gatherers, through the symbolic humans of the Iron Age to the hand-prints of more recent pilgrims and garish life-size modern ‘scarecrows’. Here are the foundations for one of the world's longest sequences of rock art.

The Australian continent was peopled during the Pleistocene epoch. Positive evidence for this migration is lately emerging from that limbo known to archaeologists as (suspense account', a void into which many oddments have been shot over the years. Probably the most exotic claims were coincident with Dubois' revelation of Pithecanthropus in Java, when Australian optimists exhibited casts of the imprints left by (human' feet and buttocks, in allegedly Pliocene dune limestone from Victoria. This prompted Otto Schoetensach, progenitor of Homo heidelbergensis, to pronounce Australia as the probable focus of human evolution; both he and H. Klaatsch saw, in aboriginal techniques of tree-climbing, direct vestiges of arboreal ancestry [I].

In the early Middle Ages there was a short period when prehistoric burial mounds were reused and new barrows constructed over much of western Europe. This is interpreted as an expression of opposition to the new Christian ideology, in a time of social changes in the distribution of power and property.

Introduction

The value of dendrochronology as a precise dating tool is well established (Ashmore, this volume) and this paper concentrates on other aspects of its value to Scottish archaeology and history. Timber in Scotland has been a resource under pressure for a long time, and consequently the history of timber trade and woodland exploitation is particularly interesting. Scotland now has very restricted semi-natural woodland, representing about 1% of land cover. While the extent of semi-natural woodland has undoubtedly shrunk in recent centuries, pollen evidence indicates that much of Scotland has been characterized by open landscapes since later prehistory (Tipping 1994).

During the late 1970s when the results of theoretical analyses of prehistoric settlement to the north and south of the Polish Carpathians became available along with new methods of field research (Rydlewski & Valde-Nowak 19791, they set in motion a process of systematic discovery of archaeological sites in the region. Rich Palaeolithic assemblages were recovered which have yet to be published in full in Polish periodicals (e.g. Rydlewski & Valde-Nowak 1980a; 1980b).

Before this the existence of traces of Pleistocene settlement was not seriously considered. Sporadic surveys found nothing and the Polish Carpathians were believed to have been either unsettled in the Pleistocene or, at most, a transit zone for human groups. This contrasted with the neighbouring Cracow-Częstochowa Upland to the north (the Ojców and Mników Valleys), and the Slovakian Carpathians where Palaeolithic sites had been discovered more than a century ago.

High-resolution pollen and phytolith analyses can provide direct evidence for farming in archaeological landscapes. This is demonstrated here in the analysis of two mounds at Pouerua, northern New Zealand, where evidence indicates both functional and temporal differences between the structures, and the presence of gourd Lagenaria siceraria provides direct, unequivocal evidence that this crop was cultivated and that the site was used as a garden.

Among the general public, the extraordinarily important role played by cultural resource management (hereafter CRM) procedures in the conservation of archaeological materials usually goes unrecognized. Popular images of the swashbuckling adventures of Indiana Jones, or somewhat more generally of intrepid archaeologists making the latest Fiild of the Century, do not accord well with the concept that the remains of past human activities are actual resources, ones that can and should be managed in the interest of nations and their citizens. All too often, the significance of CRM legislation and the archaeological research that stems from it is not recognized even by academic archaeologists, in part because publication procedures and venues are so different in the worlds of academic and contract archaeology.

Ancestor worship has been a dominant religious form in ancient as well as modern China. It has shaped thought and behaviour for millennia, and has been used by élites as propaganda legitimizing their political positions. Ancestors can be created and modified, so the nature of the ancestral cult has changed through time. Using archaeological data from China, this article first enables an exploration of the earliest manifestations and the development of ancestor-worship ritual in the Neolithic period; secondly, demonstrates that lineage/tribal ancestors became state deities in the Shang dynasty (c. 1600-1100 BC); and, thirdly, investigates the process in modern history by which a legendary sage, the Yellow Emperor, was first transformed into the progenitor of the Han Chinese, and then into the common ancestor of all Chinese people.

Over the last five years, excavation of a large, stone, fortified site at Shimao, on the northern edge of the Loess Plateau in Shaanxi Province, China, has radically changed our understanding of the events that precipitated the development of the first bronze casting in central China at Erlitou (Figure 1). An international conference on the Shimao site, held at Shenmu in August 2016, explored many aspects of this major discovery.

Direct dating, using the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) 14C method, indicates that some petroglyphs (rock art) at El-Hosh in Upper Egypt pre-date the early 7th millennium BP (mid 6th millennium cal BC), making it the oldest graphic activity recorded in the Nile Valley.

The concept of ‘Celtic’ is fittingly ambiguous, ambivalent and disputed in its archaeological definition: ‘fittingly’ because later prehistoric and Roman iconography in temperate Europe is ambiguous and ambivalent. And ambiguous and ambivalent things are hard to understand unambiguously!