When Christopher Columbus arrived at La Espanola (the large island called in English Hispaniola, now divided between the modern states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in early December 1492, he encountered a society entirely different from the ones described by Marco Polo for Asia and India. Columbus, sailing through the Bahamas and Cuba, had already discovered indios who went about naked, did not know the wheel nor used any metal tools, practised agriculture and fishing, and had a complex social structure and an elaborated system of religious beliefs. These ‘Indians’ called themselves Tainos, to signify that they were peaceful, although they defended themselves well from their neighbouring enemies, the Caribes of the Lesser Antilles islands (Colon 1961; Las Casas 1967)

It was to be expected that the pioneering concordat between archaeologists and Native Americans (Shared principles': a cooperation agreement between a Native North American group and archaeologists, ANTIQUITY 65: 917–20) would evoke a response from physical anthropologists.

A further contribution to the continuing debate on the best means of making the voluminous results of rescue excavations available to the archaeological community (see ANTIQUITY 64: 667–71; 65: 822–8).

The archaeological survey of the Fenlands around the Wash in eastern England was completed in 1989. This note summarizes the results in terms of knowledge and conservation needs that emerged from the subsequent Fenland Evaluation Project.

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most dramatic cultural and biological transformations in the history of the world. Small groups of conquistadores toppled enormous empires. Millions of Native Americans died from epidemic disease. Old World animals and plants revolutionized Native American societies, while New World crops fundamentally altered the diet and land-tenure of peasants across Europe. In the words of historian Alfred Crosby (1972: 3),

The two worlds, which God had cast asunder, were reunited, and the two worlds, which were so very different, began on that day [I1 October 14921 to become alike.

The papers in this Special Section present the latest results of research into the waterlogged later prehistoric site at Flag Fen, Peterborough. The landscape is almost flat and very low-lying, and the archaeological site consists of two main elements: a man-made timber platform and a kilometre-long alignment of posts, interpreted here as a defensive palisade. The site also has an important ritual component that continued into the Iron Age. Dendrochronology and other evidence indicates that the platform and posts were used for some 400 years, between about 1350 and 950 BC. This was a period of increasing wetness in the region.

During the 1930s and 40s most studies of Indian villages in Mesoamerica focussed on acculturation, the adoption and integration of Spanish cultural traits into the native cultural system. This paper summarizes that research, also applying an evolutionary perspective, particularly an ecosystem model. It focusses on the 16th century, when two great cultures – each the product of thousands of years of independent, parallel evolution – clashed and exchanged cultural traits. From this blend began an internal growth that continues to the present.

The European discovery of a separate and distinctive ‘new’ world was an event of cosmic proportion not only because of the enormous social, political and economic expansion potential for the developing nation-states of the European peninsula; discovery of this distant realm also required significant reconstruction of basic European cosmography. In the centuries prior to the Age of Discovery, Europe, focussing on Rome and Byzantium, had balanced its own geo-political centricity with cosmological interpretations of mystically paradisiacal or demonic distant lands generally situated to the East, places filled with exotic creatures and things, some dangerous while others constituted kingly riches. A new era began when the ocean to the west, long regarded as a restrictive barrier, became a possible route, a direction, which could lead to the exotica of the East. Realization that this western direction led instead to distinctive new western lands, new places, re-ordered the European cosmological paradigm (Helms 1988: chapter 6).

Rather than give very detailed descriptive accounts of the eight profiles examined, what follows is a summary of the main conclusions of the soil and sediment analyses undertaken on the Fengate fen-edge at the power station subsite (1989) and Cat’s Water (1990) sub-site. The sedimentological (geochemical and mineral magnetic) analyses have been done by D. Passmore and M. Macklin, both of the Department of Geography, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the buried soil and alluvial micromorphological analyses by the writer.