Southern England, especially after yet another miserably wet summer, seems a surprising place to find neolithic grape-pips – at least by comparison with the sunnier places like southern France and Greece where early records of both wild and domesticated grapes have been reported. But here is a find of a grape-pip from neolithic Dorset.

Since seeds and grains have in the past proved intrusive even into deposits that seemed stratigraphically secure, an uncomfortable choice had to be made after the identification: to preserve the pip, leaving its date unproven; or to make a radiocarbon determination on the pip and so to destroy it in securing evidence of its date. The second option was taken, which is why this report is on a pip which no longer exists.

Pottery is so ubiquitous among the material we have surviving from later periods that it is easy to think that ancient people occupied a world which was as stuffed with broken sherds as the layers we excavate; and ceramics seem especially important when they are as handsome and archaeologically informative as classical vases. Starting with a single sherd from Populonia, David Gill takes a different view of pottery, and its commercial transport, in the classical Mediterranean.

The reconstructed trireme (Coates & Morrison 1987; March issue, 87–90) was launched in the Aegean this summer. Here is the first first-hand report for many centuries as to how a great classical Greek warship actually rows and sails.

The building of a replica classical warship, the Athenian trieres, is the most ambitious project of experimental archaeology so far. The ship is building in a Piraeus yard to a design worked out from original sources and using the experience of the partial replica illustrated in ANTIQUITY in 1985 (Morrison & Coates 1985; and for the full story Morrison & Coates 1986, reviewed in this number). But how authentic is the replica? The project leaders set out here how their trireme will differ from the real thing. The result, they believe, is a craft which will faithfully copy a new and well-built ship. But it does use some modern materials; it should last much better than did the classical ships; and it will carry some wholly modern gear. It is no part of their experiment to see how fast an ancient ship rotted or how nastily an Athenian crew drowned when the rotting was complete.

The editors of the Industrial Archaeology Review reply to Clark's remarks about their subject in the last number.

The wooden vehicles of ancient Egypt provide valuable opportunities to see directly the ancient methods of wooden engineering, rather than inferring them from the metal elements alone. Here, one critical element in wooden-vehicle design – the pre-stressing of the wheels – is explored.

A comment, following Webb's paper in the last number, comes from another place where comparable issues have arisen about reburial.

Japanese archaeology, in both its practice and its substantive results, has its own character. The scale of archaeological activity, especially in salvage work, is massive. The intellectual framework of study has its special concerns and aims. The cultural sequence has some exceptional features. Here the pattern of Japanese archaeology is set out with particular reference to the major new synthesis, Pearson's Windows on the Japanese past (1986, Ann Arbor (MI): Center for Japanese Studies, $26 paperback).

The first calibration curve, published by Suess in 1967 (Suess 1967), was a wiggly thing arrived at by a process Suess called ‘cosmic schwung’. Later curves used more formal statistical methods, including Clark's published in ANTIQUITY (Clark 1975), which came to be one of the most used. It would be good to have the new standard curves available in ANTIQUITY, but they are far too bulky. We recommend the now-indispensable calibration issue of Radiocarbon (Stuiver & Kra 1986), which takes 230 large-format pages to set them out as tables, graphs and a computer program.

Gordon Pearson is the British end of the Anglo-American axis, with Minze Stuiver at the University of Washington, largely responsible for the new calibration. He summarizes what the calibration does and how best to work with it.

This paper is a guide to working with the Radiocarbon calibration issue in particular, as well as calibration curves in general. It therefore follows the conventions for calibrated and uncalibrated dates that are presented there, rather than ANTIQUITY's normal convention.

Salvage excavation demands rapid plan-making in the field. A method is offered of planning photographically with everyday equipment.

The first and obvious strength of AMS and other small-sample radiocarbon techniques is in the tiny quantities of material they destroy, opening the way for 14C determinations on little and precious objects – fabric and pictures, for examples – from which no curator will sacrifice a large chunk. In this case, the object is a more substantial thing, but the point still applies; and the size of its timbers has made possible a completely independent and confirming date by dendrochronology.

This paper follows the normal ANTIQUITY convention of b.p. for uncalibrated dates.

Many of the provenances of material in the great 19th-century collections have been lost. Here is one re-discovered, with the artifacts to which it relates.

In the new opening-up of China to the outside world that has taken place in the last decade, archaeology and history has a major role. A walk on the Great Wall seems obligatory for visiting monarchs and presidents, while the jade princesses have themselves come to Europe. The excavation of the ‘terracotta army’ exemplifies the scale of active archaeological research, and its exposure to public view. But why is there such concern for the past, and its artefacts, in China today?