The revised radiocarbon calibration curve, published last year, extends back into the Pleistocene the radiocarbon determinations that can be converted to real calendar years. For determinations of any age, the right judgements and statistical considerations must be followed if the real information held in the determinations is to be found. Here is advice with some worked examples.

The cosmology of the Etruscans, like so much else Etruscan, hovers on the edge of historical visibility. By exploring Etruscan temple alignments measured in situ and with the helpful context of the Disciplina Etrusca, factors are found that might affect temple orientation, and connections with the Greek and Roman record are explored.

Forensic archaeology is a relatively recent development in the UK but has already shown its worth on a number of scenes of crime; it has a particular role to play in the location and recovery of buried remains, notably in homicide investigations. This paper explores the overlap between archaeology and criminal investigation and considers areas of mutual interest, experience and potential.

A careful survey of reports of early sheep in southernmost Africa combines with new radiocarbon dates to revise our knowledge of early pastoralism in the Cape. The new chronology shows the keeping of domestic stock and the making of pottery are not simultaneous and intertwined but separate events in a more complex history.

A 1977 ANTIQUITY paper included a study of Neutron Activation Analyses of Ubaid pottery from Mesopotamia and the Arabian Gulf (Oates et al. 1977). A re-examination finds that the interpretation of the statistical analysis was mistaken and shows that the data do not prove the existence of ‘seafaring merchants of Ur’ in the Ubaid period.

Phytoliths — the microscopic opal silica bodies inside plant tissue that often survive well in archaeological deposits— are becoming a larger part of the world of human palaeobotany. They give a new view of early rice in southeast Asia.

Recent excavations at the Archbishop's Palace in the city of Trondheim, Norway, have brought to light mint workshops of the period 1458/1483–1537. Surviving internal arrangements, analogous with features portrayed in contemporary illustrations, are uniquely illuminative of late medieval minting.

As one digs back through the archaeological record, art and other evidence of symbolic behaviour becomes scarcer, so it is much disputed just when human marking behaviour and human language began. Is the fading away a real fact of prehistory, or a distorting effect of selective survival?

Archaeologists have long assumed that morphological variability in microliths primarily reflects cultural differences among the makers. This forms the basis for differentiating major cultural/temporal traditions in the late Epipalaeolithic of southwest Asia. An alternative explanation for morphological variability is proposed which emphasizes the dynamic aspects of lithic technology in hunter-gatherer societies and questions current explanations of culture change.

Around any great construction enterprise, whether Victorian railway viaduct or contemporary motorway, there will be a passing scatter of huts and buildings, swept away when the project is complete and the builders have moved on. In the unmechanized age, this meant large numbers of hands and large settlements, which have their archaeological trace.

A growing quantity of data about the late Pleistocene sequence in Tasmania has not been matched by an equivalent clear understanding of just what are the patterns of its lithic record. A new model is developed.

In 1978, the excavation of the Macedonian royal tombs at Vergina in north Greece gave a more physical aspect to the historical place of Philip and of Alexander the Great. These archaeological finds now have an active role in the region's politics, where the present is again being re-made by the pictures of the past.

Denmark's long coast-line, with its fjords, sounds, minor waterways, and small islands, provides every need and opportunity for a marine aspect to society. The maritime settlements of the early centuries AD, a special case within the north European pattern of seatrading, are being studied by a new Centre for Maritime Archaeology at Roskilde, whose projects include a study of the shore of Roskilde Fjord.

What is the nature of the cities and chiefdoms, the states or proto-states or would-be states that fringe the Roman Empire? Modern Spain, like other regions that were first outside and then inside Empire, shows social transformations that were as important as they are now hard to judge from enigmatic evidence.

Field survey of an unexplored zone of southern Africa enlarges and develops knowledge of the region's prehistory.

New field evidence challenges an old-established fundamental of the Lower Palaeolithic sequence in Britain.

‘Hunstanton Woman’, a skeleton found in 1897 within glacial gravels at Hunstanton on the east English coast, has now been carbon-dated. She turns out to be yet another intrusive burial, rather than an ‘Ice Age’ person.

The summer of 1994 in Britain started cold and wet, with the spring growing season distinctly late, and then turned very hot. Each summer, with its own personality, makes for a different flavour to the air photography.

Since cereals and legumes were successful domesticates, archaeologists and botanists have investigated early domestication with particular emphasis on these plants. What about other foods, which may have been staples in their own time, for which we have no simple continuity into a later subsistence in the classic region of Near Eastern domesticates? The mediterranean climate, and the lifeways, of California provide an analogy.

The postmodern, or ‘postprocessual’, tendency in contemporary archaeology pays much attention in its rhetoric to that wider public, that wider constituency whose views of the past may not match much or at all with the academics. What happens when the realities of archaeology in the real world meet with those of postmodern theory?