Molecular biology is prompting a renewed interest in genetic histories of ancient peoples. What are the old ‘ethnic units’ of these modern studies?

The vivid engravings on vertical rocks at the desert site of Nag el-Hamdulab west of the Nile comprise a rock art gallery of exceptional historical significance. The authors show that the images of boats with attendant prisoners, animals and the earliest representation of a pharaoh offer a window on Dynasty 0, and depict the moment that the religious procession of pre-Dynastic Egypt became the triumphant tour of a tax-collecting monarch.

Horses were status symbols in central-west Africa in the last millennium. Here, the importance of some very early horse bones is discussed in the context of emerging African society.

The metal-detector is an electronic instrument; it is incapable of any independent act of free will. It is outside the reference of a system of good and evil : it is neither benign nor malign, ethical nor unethical, as neutral in such matters as a stone. It is capable merely of indicating the presence of certain objects on or below the soil. It bears no responsibility for human action consequent upon such indications. If this appears to be superfluous comment, it must be borne in mind that the very mention of the words ‘metal-detector’, with no reference at all to the machine's user, is guaranteed to raise the hackles of many archaeologists. Readers of this journal are surely aware of the wide range of archaeological opinion on metaldetecting; the issue of the relationship between orthodox archaeology and nietal-detecting has been aired at considerable length over the last few years and does not directly concern us here. Rather we intend to examine the practical application of the instrument to archaeological procedures.

Forty years after they were originally acquired for intelligence purposes, declassified US photographs from the KH-7 GAMBIT photo reconnaissance satellite programme, together with contemporary declassified intelligence reports, are being used to shed light on Cold War sites in the former Soviet Union. The method should have a great future for understanding the changes to the landscape in Europe over the last 60 years. The material impact of the Cold War was no less fundamental than other wars hotter in nature.

Just over sfty years ago the puzzling Red Hills on the coast of Essex were arousing considerable interest among English prehistorians (PLATE XXII (a) and (b)). Already in the spring of 1906, under the chairmanship of J. Chalkley Gould and supported by the Essex Field Club, the Society of Antiquaries of London had formed a ‘Red Hills Exploration Committee’, which counted among its members not only archaeologists but also geologists, botanists and chemists, and had ample means at its disposal. Eminent specialists and scholars examined suitable hills with the utmost care and published their findings and conclusions in comprehensive papers.

But in what consists the peculiarity and the riddle of these Red Hills, which obviously date back to prehistoric times and have since time immemorial lain in close proximity to the coast of England? The striking way in which they are built of loose red burnt clay unmistakably points to a human-made origin. As a rule these mounds rise by only as much as 18 in. to 6 ft. above their surroundings, and their extent varies between a few square yards to several hundred. How did these numerous and extensive heaps of burnt clay come about in prehistoric times?

Three prehistoric sites in the Upper Mun River Valley of north-eastern Thailand have provided a detailed chronological succession comprising 12 occupation phases. These represent occupation spanning 2300 years, from initial settlement in the Neolithic (seventeenth century BC) through to the Iron Age, ending in the seventh century AD with the foundation of early states. The precise chronology in place in the Upper Mun River Valley makes it possible to examine changes in social organisation, technology, agriculture and demography against a background of climatic change. In this area the evidence for subsistence has been traditionally drawn from the biological remains recovered from occupation and mortuary contexts. This paper presents the results of carbon isotope analysis to identify and explain changes in subsistence over time and between sites, before comparing the results with two sites of the Sakon Nakhon Basin, located 230km to the north-east, to explore the possibility of regional differences.

Six years ago, Darvill and colleagues reported (ANTIQUITY 61: 393–408) on the Monuments Protection Programme, a new English initiative to build, from a century of haphazard acts of site protection, a set of balanced judgements and priorities by which to recognize ancient places that are more precious, genuinely of a national importance. The Programme, they tell ANTIQUITY, has now completed the first-stage review of information in local sites and monuments records and is proceeding with the identification of nationally important monuments in every English county. This further paper reports on how the Monuments Protection Programme is addressing landscapes, as distinct from ‘spot sites’ with clear limits, where the matters of defining a ‘relict cultural landscape’ and judging relative value are harder.

To those of us who wish there was no commercial trade in antiquities, colleagues — and those themselves active in the market — say there always has been one and always will be. Since concern largely arises from destruction of context and loss of information, may there be a way forward that both permits the trade and preserves the context?

Proposals that Stonehenge was con- structed as an astronomical observatory [1, 2, 3] with the purpose of predicting eclipses [4, 5] imply that the builders of Stonehenge, even Stonehenge I, were possessed of a degree of intellectual sophistication that seems inconsistent with the usual picture of the population of S. England in the and millennium B.C. Either the people were not just primitive farmers or these proposals must be substantially in error. It is not the purpose of this paper to attempt a decision between these alternatives but to explain the nature of the astronomical arguments in more detail than has been done heretofore. My hope is that with a moderate effort it will be possible for the reader to rework the calculations on which the astronomical suggestions have been based; for only when archaeologists and astronomers have understood each other's arguments can we expect to resolve this intriguing dilemma. At several places in the discussion I shall quote the solution of mathematical problems, thereby permitting the whole discussion to be confined to simple trigonometry. These few places will be marked by an asterisk. The reader wishing to cover these gaps will need to consult a text on spherical astronomy, e.g. [6].

Theory in archaelogy has largely been an anglophone enterprise, and perhaps too inbred for its own good. The main French school, known particularly from the work of Alain Gallay and Jean-Claude Gardin, was well represented at a CNRS—NSF conference on ‘Symbolic, structural and semiotic approaches in archaeology’, held at Indiana University, Bloomington (IN) in October 1987, where a small group of American, British, French and Swiss archaeologists met to confront their theoretical views. Here Alain Gallay sets out the fundamentals of the ‘logicist’ position.

Our knowledge of the obsidian trade makes it an unique phenomenon in the prehistory of the Middle East. We know more about it than about any comparable exchange network. A great deal of work has now been done on the chemical composition of obsidian and on the location of its sources, on quantitative analyses, and on the spatial distribution of the material. The two major areas of supply, Central Anatolia and the area west of Lake Van have been extensively explored and individual sources pinpointed. It has been possible to reconstruct the movement of obsidian to sites as far away as Beidha in South Palestine and to Ali Kosh in South-West Iran. The distances involved are well over 1,600 km as the crow flies. Comparatively little work has been done on the mechanism of the trade, on the processes by which the obsidian changed hands, probably because such processes are difficult and sometimes impossible to determine from the archaeological record. In order to attempt such a task it is necessary to broaden our conceptual basis for studying data bearing on trade. To quote Adams (1974, 241) 'What is needed for this broadening to occur is a much more substantial awareness of ethnohistoric, historic and ethnographic studies of trade.

The megalithic chambered mound of Gavrinis, in the Morbihan department of southern Brittany, with its world-famed engravings, was re-excavated from 1979 to 1984 by the author of this article who is Directeur des Antiquités de Bretagne. The results, here summarized, included the discovery that the capstone, hidden for four thousand years, bore engravings which show that it was originally part of a large menhir, another part being now the capstone of La Table des Marchands, four kilometres away.

Early in 1854, in the townland of Ballinrees, about three and a half miles west of Coleraine, county Londonderry, Ireland, a labouring man unearthed from a considerable depth in peaty soil one of the most remarkable hoards of Roman silver ever found in our isles. Though no trace remained of any urn or other container, it was apparent, both from the depth of the deposit and from the closeness with which the whole was packed together, that it was indeed a hoard, no mere chance series of deposits.

The archaeological background of the people of what is now Scotland south of the Forth and Clyde in the Roman period was a La Téne one, and specifically chiefly Iron Age B. This links them intimately with the Britons of southern Britain in the conglomeration of Celtic tribes who called themselves Brittones and spoke what we call the Brittonic or Ancient British form of Celtic, from which are descended the three modern languages of Welsh, Cornish and Breton. To the north of the Forth was a different people, the Picts. They too were Celts or partly Celts; probably not Brittones however, but a different branch of the Celtic race, though more closely related to the Brittones than to the Goidels of Ireland and (in later times) of the west of Scotland. Not being Brittonic, the Picts may be ignored here. Our southern Scottish Brittones are nothing but the northern portion of a common Brittonic population, from the southern portion of which come the people of Wales and Cornwall. Some historians speak of the northern Brittones as Welsh, following good Anglo-Saxon precedent, but this is apt to lead to confusion. The best term for them, in the Dark Ages and early Medieval period, as long as they survived, is ‘Cumbrians’, and for their language, ‘Cumbric’. They called themselves in Latin Cumbri and Cumbrenses, which is a Latinization of the native word Cymry, meaning ‘fellow-countrymen’, which both they and the Welsh used of themselves in common, and is still the Welsh name for the Welsh to the present day. The centre of their power was Strathclyde, the Clyde valley, with their capital at Dumbarton.

The early Neolithic of the west Mediterranean

The archaeological complex known as the early Neolithic in the west Mediterranean represents the arrival of Neolithic traits in western Europe. Dating to around 5000 BC (Evin 1987), this complex is marked by the appearance of pottery, ground stone tools, and transvcrse projectile points. It continues for about a millennium until middle Neolithic villages, such as Villeneuve-Toulousane, begin to appear. The early Neolithic is characterized by a transitional agricultural subsistence economy. At Aude Valley cave sites, domesticated sheep first appear in aceramic Mesolithic layers with typical Tardenoisian tool assemblages and fauna (Geddes 1983). Examination of these sheep remains show that this strain originated in the Near East (Geddes 1985). Early Neolithic deposits (as defined by the presence of ceramics) are found at many of the same Mesolithic sites and contain similar lithic assemblages as well as a continuation of mixed hunted and domesticated fauna. The presumably novel open-air coastal sites of this period, such as Leucate-Corrège (Guilaine et al. 1984), also appear to represent a mixed economy. Since there is no sudden apparent shift in settlement pattern or economy associated with the early Neolithic, this period appears to be best characterized as a time of gradual transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture.