The Mediterranean, and especially Greece, provides fine conditions for field-survey – long and intense human occupation, good surface exposure, and distinctive, diagnostic ceramics. Where the Classical authors are conspicuously reticent about the countryside, field-survey can provide a rural picture, as well as the settlement patterns of prehistory. Here, the methods of field-survey return from the countryside to look at the cities, formerly the preserve of the excavator.

The recommended Belfast/Seattle radiocarbon calibration (Pearson 1987) coming into common use gives us ‘good’ portions, where the calibration curve has a shape that aids in refining dates, and ‘sloughs of despond’ - the periods when the shape of the curve is less helpful. Two deep sloughs arefound in the last few centuries ncand in the 3rd millennium BC. Here, a series of new determinations are presented for Bell Beakers in Spain, falling in the 3rd-millennium slough, and it is shown what can and cannot be learnt from these and their calibration.

The paper by Ian Kinnes et al. in the March number published the gold objects from Bush Barrow, Wiltshire, examined the evidence for the original form of the large lozenge, and described its recent restoration into a domed profile. In this paper a different view is taken of evidence for the original form of the lozenge and of the wisdom of its recent transformation.

Burnt mounds, found across northern Europe, are especially frequent in Ireland. Here a new review of the Irish evidence is presented, and issue is taken with Barfield & Hodder's diagnosis, published in ANTIQUITY last year, that the primary function of the burnt mounds was as bathing places.

Desert varnish, the distinctive coating on exposed rock surfaces in arid regions, can be dated by cation ratios, providing a rare means directly to date petroglyphs. A first application of the method, much used in north America, is here reported from Australia, where it indicates minimum ages up to 30,000 years old. And it also shows that the style of figures, so often taken as a measure of chronology, is in this instance largely independent of age.

The relations between rescue and research have been a lively issue in those many countries where salvage work has become the context for much, or most, funding for archaeological fieldwork. Nowhere has the debate been livelier than in the USA, where the last decade has seen the growth of cultural resource management (CRM), in part ‘as a rebellion against the connotations of the term “salvage archaeology”’ (Knudson 1986:400).

The University of Pittsburgh is one of the most active anthropology departments in the field; here the CRM issues are explored, with examples from the Pittsburgh programme.

Prominent in the new literature of a ‘post-processual’, ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ archaeology are a pair of books, conveniently colour-coded as one black and one red, written by Michael Shanks 6. Christopher Tilley, and both published in 1987. The ‘black book’, from Cambridge University Press, has a stark cover mostly of solid black; the cover of the ‘red book’, from Polity Press, is a more cheerful crimson, though its picture, a 19th-century Comedy of death, is a despairing image of dismal decay.

Kristian Kristiansen, of the Center for Research in the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, reviews here the black and the red, and the post-modern vision of archaeology they amount to.

In view of the issues raised by the preceding paper, ANTIQUITY invited the Chairman of the United Kingdom Institute for Conservation to comment.

Sandra Bowdler reported in the last issue of ANTIQUITY (62: 517–23) on the controversy surrounding the recent repainting of Wandjina figures on the rocks of the western Kimberley, northwest Australia. Here is an Aboriginal Australian's view of the repainting project and its significance, along with an explication and further discussion of implications.

The new Dorchester by-pass is being constructed (scheduled completion in autumn 1988 through a busy landscape of later prehistoric England – and one where fieldworkers have been very active recently, especially at the Maiden Castle hillfort, and in the county town itself. Survey and excavations along the by-pass route were undertaken by the author for the Trust for Wessex Archaeology. The excavation at Flagstones House, directed together with Martin Trott, identified a late Neolithic causewayed enclosure. This note concentrates on the chalk engravings from that site, which lies to the west of Max Gate, the house of Thomas Hardy. It is perhaps apposite that the Wessex novelist built his home so close to the heart of a sacred Wessex site.

This small tabular bronze artefact, recovered from an occupation layer sealed beneath volcanic ash on Lou Island, is the first bronze artefact found in a dated context in Papua New Guinea, well outside the range of the normal occurrence of bronze in southeast Asia.

The Lake Nyos disaster of 1986, when gases blew up in a Camerounian lake and the resulting gas and water vapour killed hundreds of people, prompted this examination of the effect of gases coming from underground, on a smaller but steadier scale, from a place that was reputed to be one of the entrances to Hades in ancient times.

Re-examination of medieval finds from the Syrian town of Hama provides new evidence about the making of ‘Greek fire’, the famed and feared incendiary weapon of the crusader wars.

Papers in ANTIQUITY earlier this year (Kinnes et al. 1988; Shell 6. Robinson 1988) have studied evidence for the original profile-shape of the decorated gold lozenge, from Bush Barrow, in the barrow-field immediately to the south of Stonehenge. They have not addressed the pattern of the markings inscribed on the lozenge, which are here identified with the significant directions of solar and lunar events, the lozenge acting as a long-term record for prehistoric astronomers.

This report presents new evidence for cultivation of rye in Denmark in the first centuries AD, from a context which suggests that more than simple agricultural subsistence was concerned.

The preservation of organic remains and environmental indicators in those soft, damp and colourful deposits that visually indicate ancient excreta is familiar. This note reports a horse parasite, and draws attention to preservation of valuable material in deposits much less promising in nature.

Earlier this year, a BBC television series dived into the regions where underwater archaeology fades into the murkier waters of treasure-hunting. This is an opportune moment to review an archaeologist's account of his rôle in the richest of recent recoveries, the gold from the Spanish galleon Atocha.

The first settlement of the Americas is one of those research questions in which convictions have sometimes seemed as important as data. There has recently been encouragement both for True Believers, in the very early sequence of dates reported by the French from a Brazilian rock-shelter, and for True Sceptics, in the revised and more recent dates now given to some of the older finds from North America after further study by AMS carbon dating. Here, a review of a major new book is the opportunity to review the issues.

Forgotton beside the well-known and well-studied collections of metalwork from the river Thames is a remarkable collection of human skulls; this new study dates some skulls and finds important order in their pattern of dates.

Pleistocene dates from a rockshelter on Buka Island at the northern end of the Solomons Chain demonstrate human settlement by 28,000 b.p., some 25,000 years earlier than previously reported for this island group.