Lithic studies all too often ignore the material of later prehistory. Here an exploration of ideas of curation and expediency offers a new insight into material from Bronze Age Cyprus.

Exploratory expeditions in 1834, sponsored by the newly independent state of Guatemala, researched on sites such as Copan, Iximche and Utatlan. The political, literary and social climate was such that a pre-Hispanic past was eagerly sought. This paper offers an intriguing insight into early Latin American archaeology.

Chinese scholarship well illustrates how research attitudes direct the spirit of research, and the tenor of the archaeological story which results. What happens when non-Chinese theory, approaches and field methods are brought to bear in a Chinese regional study?

The decoration of Neolithic passage-graves in Scotland and the British Isles/Ireland has come under renewed scrutiny–showing interesting patterns between tombs and houses. Here Richard Bradley examines two Orkney tombs and compares their decorated stones with motifs in Ireland and elsewhere.

Oakbank is one of 18 crannogs in Loch Tay, and the first in Britain to have been excavated underwater. The abundant and well-preserved plant remains indicate a prosperous society with a well-founded arable and pastoral agriculture. Opium poppy and spelt wheat remains imply trade and suggest high status. Cloudberry pips highlight long-range gathering, possibly during transhumance.

Archaeology in Brazil shares many empirical similarities with Latin American and North American research but, as a social science, it has remained isolated from mainstream theoretical and methodological advances. The large size of the country, the lack of resources and government support, the difficulties of working in tropical environments, the lack of monumental architecture, and Brazil's being neither a Spanish- nor an English-speaking country have all been thought of as shaping Brazilian archaeology and its failure to integrate into a larger, Latin American or international context.

Pompeii, recovered from under Vesuvius ash, offers a famous ‘frozen moment’ in archaeological time: a city as it stood at a certain day. Beyond and beneath the dating evidence visible in its standing buildings is to be found a more archaeological chronology.

Various methods have been employed in the attempt to date rock-art. Here Robert Bednarik offers a critique of the cosmogenic radiation nuclides method, and its application to the Côa petroglyphs.

Excavations at Flixborough, Lincolnshire (1989–91) revealed an important Anglo-Saxon settlement. Here the various interpretations are discussed, ranging from monastic to ‘magnate’.

Two new finds of Camelina seeds prove the presence of the plant in middle Neolithic and Chalcolithic western France nearly 3000 years before widespread cultivation in France.

There is a preconception among American archaeologists that the late Pleistocene (c. 12,000-10,000 hap.) and early Holocene human occupation of the Americas would have had highly formalized and diagnostic technologies (Bryan 1986), as seen in bifacial fluted projectiles (Clovis and/or Folsom points) or Palaeoarctic microblades. This bias carries with it two presumptions which have no reason to exist:

• Clovis and related industries had to be diffused throughout the Americas; and

• there should be a ‘big-game hunting’ horizon in South America.

Christopher Hawkes was one of the leading British archaeological theorists in the middle decades of this century. Much underrated, Hawkes is reassessed here in the broader development of processual archaeology in Britain.

With changes in political structures, a pan-European dimension is increasing in importance for many archaeologists, because of cultural policy and funding from the Council of Europe and, especially, the European Union. Although nationalist frameworks are currently more important, archaeologists should keep a critical eye on European developments.

Sambaqui is the name given to a certain type of archaeological evidence left by fisher/hunter/gatherer groups who inhabited large expanses of the Brazilian coast. The word is of Tupi etymology, tamba meaning shellfish and ki a piling-up (Prous 1991: 204). The Tupi were a horticultural/potter group who lived on the Brazilian coast at the time of the first European arrivals; they coined the term which describes the main characteristic of the sites — the accumulation of great quantities of mollusc shells (FIGURE 1) .

Recent research at the great Irish passage tomb of Knowth has revealed new decorated stones, which were apparently recycled from an earlier tomb. Here, George Eogan describes the finds and discusses the implication of an early phase of tomb building pre-dating the major passage tombs of the Boyne Valley.

Recent strontium isotope analysis of Beaker burials from Bavaria raises important new questions about prehistoric migrations in Europe.

In March, we discussed the founding of the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre (IARC) at the McDonald Institute in Cambridge (ANTIQUITY 72: 4–5). Here we publish a contribution towards the debate on the theft of antiquities from Turkey and their acquisition by museums in the USA. Turkey has long had an active policy in fighting cases for restitution of its heritage, and Janet Blake describes their success.

The rock-shelter of Jinmium in the Northern Territory of Australia hit the headlines a year-and-a-half ago when TL dates suggested human occupation might date from 116,000 years ago. Such dates were much earlier than any previously obtained for Australia, and thus suggested the continent was colonized at a very early stage in human dispersal around the Pacific. However, some TL dating is notoriously difficult to interpret, and here Nigel Spooner has re-assessed one of the later dates in the Jinmium sequence. His interpretation calls into doubt some of the earlier claims.

At the beginning of the Christian era, potterymaking groups started occupying the southern region of Brazil (the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná: FIGURE 1), their origins closely related to former inhabitants, mainly hunters and gatherers. Two major groups are recognized, from the hundreds of identified sites. Vestiges of the first, dispersed in settlements in the southernmost area and in the low savanna landscape, show that settlers of mounds — cerritos — were nomadic, their economy based on hunting, fishing and gathering. In the second, dispersed in the plateau and along adjacent coastal plains, settlers depended on gathering; at least in a few areas and in more recent periods they were sedentary, with the rudiments of more complex social and political patterns. The two settlement systems are in very different environmental, cultural and temporal contexts. Current research takes a normative view of culture, in which pottery has a place of honour and is classified by archaeological ‘traditions’ and ‘phases’. Yet both groups present pottery industries rather matched in time and space, obscuring evidence of internal differentiation or cultural change processes.