David-gorod, now in the state of Belarus, is an ancient wood-built settlement in eastern Europe, where astounding preservation of timber buildings, streets and objects gives us a full and organic view of its medieval world. The finds from excavations in 1937–8, conducted by the Państwowe Muzeum Archeologiczne, Warsaw, are at last being published – metal, glass, pottery, leather, bone, stone, textile, along with the wood. The town was an important craft centre with trade links to Old Rus and beyond.

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.

Tectonic movements – continuously re-moulding the surface of the earth over the inexorable activity of underlying plate motions – are rarely taken into account when assessing landscape change, except as an exotic hazard to human life or a temporary disruption in longer-term trends. Active tectonics also create and sustain landscapes that can be beneficial to human survival. The tectonic history of northwest Greece shows Palaeolithic sites located to take advantage of tectonically created features at both local and regional scales.

In watery places people prefer to live where they can keep their feet dry, and an elevation of a metre or two can make a difference. The simple distinction between humanly created middens and naturally built features does not easily apply in the Australian tropics, where the natural causes include cyclones, shellfish die-off and the building of mounds by scrub turkeys, and where foragers are not directed in where they choose to camp by concern for the classification by which tidy-minded archaeologists may want to order mounds in the wetlands.

O.G.S. Crawford, founder of ANTIQUITY, flew in the 1920s over an English landscape where the grooves and lines cut into unploughed downlands showed the courses of roads and tracks since earliest times. Similar patterns of crop- and soil-marks in the rain-fed agricultural zone of the Middle East, when studied in the same spirit, also reveal the local and the long-distance routes of a proven great age.

Excavation of a cropmark in northeast Scotland revealed a substantial timber hall of the general form one expects from the early medieval period. Yet it turned out to be Neolithic in date! The structure produced copious quantities of charred cereal grains from contexts intimately associated with its destruction. Accelerator dates confirm the integrity of selected species with the period of use of the building. Hexaploid wheat and cultivated flax were both identified.

The recent great exhibition in Venice of Celtic art and artefacts showed once again the intriguing attraction of the Celtic traditions, so influential in our view of old Europe, both western and central. But what about the Celts in the east, and specifically in the region to the north and west of the Black Sea? And what is the relation between that artefactual evidence, Celtic artefacts in the west, and the evidence from the documents?

Archaeology is notoriously vulnerable to the ideological pressures of authoritarian regimes. This paper charts the political influences that shaped archaeology in Spain for some 40 years. Following the Civil War Spanish archaeologists were isolated from mainstream theoretical evolution, a situation that was exacerbated by the exile of some leading figures. The centralizing authoritarianism of the Franco régime stifled regional autonomy in administration and research, and key archaeological appointments went to committed supporters of the régime.

The great cast bronzes of China are today deservedly celebrated for their splendour and sheer size. By looking behind that surface impression, and into the characters of their find-contexts, one can - as for any class of artefact - see behind what they are for us towards what they were in their own time.

In 1989 ANTIQUITY published a special section of papers on the archaeology of the steppe zone, to notice the special role of that great sweep of land that links the northern fringes of early prehistoric agriculture in Europe and Asia. A new international team has now returned to Jeitun, the key early agricultural site in Turkmenistan, on the edge of the Kara Kum desert.

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.

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.

Later in this number of ANTIQUITY is a review, page 930, of our knowledge, direct and often indirect, about chariots and wagons in the Europe of 2000 years ago. How much greater is our knowledge in China, where sacrificial burials of vehicles with their horses and drivers may give evidence of chariots by the fleet!

The relationship between archaeology and history is not just an abstract theoretical question: it is one which determines the practical organization of archaeological activity and the publication of its results. It is a general problem of archaeology in Europe, where the subject has had to differentiate itself from the historical study of a long series of literate cultures; and it is especially acute in the former Soviet bloc, where a Marxist orthodoxy of historical science formerly prevailed. Leo Klejn is Russaian archaeology's most distinguished theoretician. Here he discusses in his own words both the academic sociology of the historical sciences and the role which he sees for archaeology within them.

Recent work at the important Neolithic site of Bylany (Czechoslovakia) has shifted from the large-scale open-area excavations of the 1960s to intensive field survey and selective excavation. The 1991 investigation concentrated on the so-called ‘Rondel’, a multivallate enclosure with entrances at the cardinal points. Analysis of the internal structures revealed suggests that the main function of these features was ceremonial.

Dendrochronology now provides a date, exact nearly to the year, for three Viking Age burial mounds of special importance for chronology in Scandinavia and across early medieval northern Europe. Their dating used to depend on the style of the carved wooden artefacts in the grave goods; now the grave-goods are exactly and independently dated by the tree-rings, those same links will provide dating bridges across the Viking world.

Ground radar investigates shallow archaeological features in burial mounds of the Kofun Period (300-700 AD) in Japan. A variety of analytical methods – time slices, synthetic radargrams simulated from model structures, and 3-D depth constructions – are used to interpret the profiles, to reveal the location, depth and shapes of buried features.

The first major season of field operations at this major Lowland Maya site, located on the eastern edge of the Classic Maya core area, has revealed a great deal of information about the layout of the site and also demonstrated that its history was a long one.

This year, as it seems every year, news comes from China of another spectacular archaeological discovery. What is the framework of ideas and research that studies these treasures? And how does the special character of Chinese history, with its long, near-continuous record of dynasties, written sources and encyclopaedic texts, give archaeology a different place, whether higher or lower, among the other historical and social sciences?

An articulated hen's skeleton, set under the doorway of a building at the celebrated desiccated site of Qasr Ibrim in Egyptian Nubia, is cause to look again at the flight of chickens into Africa.