In May 1955 Professor Grahame Clark noticed a stone axe from Langwood Fen in the collection of Mr F. Walker of Manea. Its exotic character stood out among well known Fenland flint types and he asked me to arrange a petrological examination and to describe the implement.

The axe (fig. 1) is dark brown in colour with much of the polished surfaces roughened through oxidization, probably from underlying peat. The blue-grey, fine-grained nature of the stone shows through in fresh scars on both surfaces, which suggest its recent use as a whetstone, and in a modern chip at the butt. It is 10⅞ inches long, with a maximum width of 3 inches. The convex cutting edge is slightly asymetrical and 3⅛ inches wide, while the maximum thickness is 1¾ inches. There is a distinct waisting, or constriction, toward the butt which is rather square and 1¾ inches wide. Both edges have been ground into lateral facets ⅜ inch wide about the middle of the implement, tapering toward the butt and cutting edge. In its present state the axe weighs 3½ lbs.

Ground and polished stone axes in southern Italy received little attention after a period of lively interest in the late 19th century. The great number of axes from archaeological sites and collections suggests widespread manufacture and exchange on a considerable scale. In eastern Sicily the production of basalt axes was long-lived, beginning in the Neolithic (Stentinello phase) and reaching a peak in the Copper and Early Bronze Ages. Greenstone axes are also found throughout these periods. By the Middle or Late Bronze Age, stone axes were probably little used, having been largely replaced by metal tools.

The axes from Serra Orlando (where the historical site of Morgantina is located) form one of the largest collections in Sicily from a single site, where they were found in multi-period contexts, dating from the third millennium BC until the Hellenistic period. Petrological analysis suggests that basalt from the Iblean hills was frequently used for their manufacture, while the serpentinites, tremolite-bearing rocks and pyroxenite probably originate in the Calabro-Peloritani Arc. The results of the analysis of thin sections are presented in appendixes. Raw materials, distribution and manufacture of axes are discussed and a preliminary investigation of their typology is presented. Multiple functions for Sicilian axes, related to morphology and raw materials, are suggested by their archaeological contexts.

In plate B XIX–XX of Reliquiae Aquitanicae (Lartet & Christy, 1875), a sculptured reindeer antler from Laugerie-Basse was figured with the description, ‘a long, slightly curved Harpoon-head’. Many years later Emile Carthailac found among Lartet's papers in the University Library at Toulouse a letter from a correspondent in Ireland suggesting that the object in question might be a hooked spear-thrower of a type well-known in Australia. Unfortunately the sheet with the writer's signature was missing, so the first person to identify the spear-thrower as a Palaeolithic weapon must remain anonymous (Carthailac, 1903). Since then many more have been found; in 1907 Breuil listed 38 throwers or fragments from various Magdalenian sites (Carthailac and Breuil, 1907), and it is possible now to bring the number up to 66. Of these two, possibly three, are complete, and six are complete in so far as the part made of antler is concerned, but were certainly meant to be lengthened by insertion in a handle, probably of wood. The rest are more or less fragmentary, but in 39 the hook is preserved, and the rest can be identified by comparison with more complete specimens.

The subject of these weapons has been treated at various times by Adrien de Mortillet (1891), Carthailac (1903), Breuil (with Carthailac, 1907: with Lantier, 1951), Begouen (1912), Renaud (1925), Montandon (1934). More recently Guyan (1944) has studied the collection from Kesslerloch in relation to the rest. In addition, individual specimens have been described by their discoverers. Nevertheless, there is room for a more detailed general survey of the whole range now available.

Excavations at the Glandy Cross monumental complex during 1991 and 1992 formed part of an integrated programme of evaluation, rescue, and research by Dyfed Archaeological Trust (DAT). Enclosures, pit circles, standing stones, and cairns were excavated and their environs systematically surveyed. Radiocarbon dates show the monumental complex to have been constructed between c. 2190–1530 cal BC. However, the earliest activity at the site may date to c. 4470–4230 cal BC. A defended enclosure was constructed on the peripheries of the complex c. 830–510 cal BC.

The 1991–92 excavation results are presented along with a summary of survey, salvage, and research spanning the period 1981 to 1992. This new data set is tentatively interpreted in terms of historical process and the social practice of monumental construction. A brief commentary on heritage management at Glandy Cross is also presented.

A note on authorship: one of the authors (George Williams) directed the Glandy Cross excavations during 1991–92 and prepared an initial draft of the project report. Following his retirement from DAT a project editor (Trevor Kirk) was commissioned by Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments to guide the project towards publication. This paper was largely penned by the project editor, though the excavation and survey data were produced by George Williams and his fieldwork team. The excavation and survey archives are held at the offices of DAT.

During the last fifty years, research in the Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods in Denmark (to use the now generally accepted terms) was decisively influenced from outside. The interesting paper by Gustav Schwantes (1928) was unfortunately published when there was little activity in Denmark regarding ‘Early Stone Age’ problems. When J. G. D. Clark a few years later wrote his classic work The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe (1936), the situation was different, and the book came just in time to stimulate one of the real active periods in the study of Danish Mesolithic. Since then many new finds and excavations have been known from this country but without altering the main lines and the general picture of the hunters and fishers during the Boreal and Atlantic phases.

It would not be quite correct to say that our idea of Clark's first period in question has remained unchanged. The following lines are meant as a short survey of the time of the Northern reindeer-hunters or, according to later suggestions (e.g. by J. G. D. Clark (1950, 91)) the Late Palaeolithic. In 1936 it was only possible to register stray finds of implements here (mainly from reindeer-antler), and following Schwantes most of them were ascribed the still rather theoretical Lyngby culture (Schwantes, 1923; Ekholm, 1926). During the late thirties Alfred Rust began his revolutionary excavations in Holstein (1937; 1943), and they were, of course, followed with keen interest also by Danish archaeologists.

During the spring of 1993 Mr Darren Nichols was searching land near Canterbury with his new metal detector when he made a most interesting discovery. At a shallow depth he unearthed a burial, containing a decorated bronze mirror, a bronze brooch, and the remains of a pot holding cremated bone. The mirror was subsequently identified as being of Iron Age date, bearing a characteristic engraved Celtic design on its reverse. Realising the importance of the find, Mr Nichols reported the discovery to local archaeologists who were able to visit the site and re-excavate the find-spot. These investigations produced a second brooch and further sherds from the very fragmented cinerary urn.

In July 1994 the metalwork from the burial was passed to Dr Ian Stead of the British Museum for detailed study and recording. A year later the finder sold the mirror and brooches at a Sotheby's auction (Sale LN5398, Lot 3) to a private collector, who has very kindly agreed to details of the objects being published here.

Traces of Upper Palaeolithic settlement in Britain have up to the present been confined very largely to the limestone caves of the highland zone. Recent work in Holland, north Germany and Denmark during the last twenty or thirty years by Rust, Mathiassen, Schwabedissen, Bohmers and others suggests that indications of open settlement ought to occur in lowland England. Until the present investigations these were confined to surface industries from East Anglia and north Kent and to the recovery in association with remains of three horses of a small shouldered backed blade and of another without retouch from a deposit of Allerød age at Flixton (site 2) in East Yorkshire.

The use of marine shells in the manufacture of bracelets and beads is a well-attested phenomenon of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods of Western Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Balkans. The site of Gökçeada-Uğurlu, located on an island in the Aegean between mainland Europe and Anatolia, shows evidence for the manufacture and use of bracelets and beads from Spondylus and Glycymeris shell. This use of personal ornamentation ties the site into one of the widest material culture production and trade networks of the prehistoric period. This article explores the possible role of, and influences on, an island site within the wider context of long-distance exchange. The life history of shell products is investigated, showing that a bracelet may have gone through processes of transformation in order to remain in use. The article also questions whether there was a relationship between the use of marine shell and white marble from which similar products were manufactured in contemporary contexts. In its conclusions the article addresses the value of materials and of the personal ornaments they were used to make.

This paper seeks to re-examine the long-held view that the Celtic language developed somewhere in west central Europe and was carried westwards to the Atlantic zone, eventually reaching Ireland. An overview of the archaeological evidence for Atlantic connectivity illustrates the longue durée of community interactions along the seaways, beginning around 9000 BC, to the second quarter of the 3rd millennium. At this time mobility increased dramatically and it has been shown clearly that the Maritime Bell Beaker package spread eastwards to impact on and interact with the Battle Axe/Corded Ware tradition. Connectivity was at its most intense during the subsequent Atlantic Bronze Age until, from the 8th century BC, what had been a unified zone began to fragment into a series of regional systems. This broad archaeological scenario, with its firm chronological framework, receives more support from recent DNA studies than does the previous view, which drew heavily on ancient and (now) antiquarian views of Celticness and invasion hypotheses. It is posited that the Celtic language could in fact have emerged in the Atlantic zone and spread eastwards.

In the study of the earliest copper metallurgy, copper ornaments have received little attention compared with copper tools. Yet they are of particular interest because they often represent the earliest use of metal other than gold.

Towards the beginning of her novel Excellent Women Barbara Pym recounts a telephone conversation of more than passing relevance to our meeting today.

I dialled the number fearfully and heard it ring. ‘Hello, hello, who is that?’ a querulous elderly woman's voice answered. I was completely taken aback, but before I could speak the voice went on, ‘If it's Miss Jessop I can only hope you are ringing up to apologize’. I stammered out an explanation. I was not Miss Jessop. Was Mr Everard Bone there? ‘My son is at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society’, said the voice. ‘Oh, I see. I'm so sorry to have bothered you’, I said. ‘People are always bothering me — I never wanted to have the telephone put in at all’.

After a further apology I hung up the receiver shaken and mystified but at the same time relieved. Everard Bone was at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society. It sounded like a joke. (1952, 29–30)

Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen, if this is a typical reaction to the Prehistoric Society, then on 23 February we become a fifty-year-old joke! If we allow for the history of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, then we reach well and truly back into the days of the Music Hall joke.

This paper summarises the results of the first attempt at systematic study of the megalithic monuments of Wales. Time after time, in the pages of Archaeologia Cambrensis and other journals will be found scattered papers in which the same familiar tombs present themselves; they have formed very inadequate foundations upon which to build, and none of their writers has attempted to place matters upon the only really sound basis, which is that of the study of each and every individual site in the field.

This omission is the more unfortunate because so much destruction has taken place in the last fifty years, and inevitably it has been the less well-known sites which have suffered most. No less inevitably the feeling of gratitude to earlier workers for what they have recorded—frequently under some difficulty—is tempered with one of regret for their failure to cover a wider field, and to replace passing references with plans, sketches, or even a few lines of more detailed description, which would have enabled us to obtain a better picture of the monuments as a whole than is now the case.

South-east Italy, from the spur to the heel of Italy's boot, forms a natural geographic and cultural unit, separated from the Balkans by the Adriatic yet joined to them by the same sea. It is an area of plain and plateau bounded to the west and north by the Apennines, which come down to the sea at the Gulf of Taranto and again north of the Gargano peninsula.

Considerably more material for the study of the neolithic cultures in this area has been found since T. E. Peet drew attention to their interest nearly forty years ago (II). Yet while the main kinds of pottery are recognised, positive evidence for their succession is still scarce. This is chiefly due to the lack of fully stratigraphic digging, as well as to a tendency to regard the objects found on any single site as ipso facto contemporary with one another or at least as due to a continuous occupation. Some confusion is probably also caused by the number of separate stations all usually called ‘Matera.’ Even so the main phases are now distinguishable, and the chief differences of opinion are regarding the extent to which the characteristic range of pottery of each of these, with all that that implies, continued alongside of the innovations.

The following account based on war-time reading, and brief visits to Matera museum and a number of sites, will stress the view that there was fairly complete replacement: in this and the resulting division into three distinct periods, tentatively indicated by Rellini in 1929 (14c), it goes beyond the views of most Italian archaeologists, as well as previous English resumes. In particular Laviosa-Zambotti in her recent important study of Italian cultures and their relations with Central Europe and the Balkans (8b), while admitting that the various wares are due to a series of influences from outside, concludes that they are truly associated and therefore largely synchronous. This may be due in part to her leaning toward ‘short’ chronologies elsewhere. However, particularly in view of J. S. P. Bradford's remarkable crop-site discoveries (2), it seems worthwhile to set out the existing evidence for a more elaborate scheme, to be tested by future excavations.

This paper deals with a unique glass bead from the second millennium BC in Wessex. Overlooked for more than 150 years, it has now been recognized for its intrinsic interest and general importance and is here presented for its wide significance in ancient Europe and beyond (pls 8 and 9).

In Ancient Wiltshire (1812, 210) Richard Colt Hoare recorded the excavation of a barrow in a group of Bronze Age date at Wilsford: ‘No. 7 is a large bell-shaped barrow’ (now regarded as a bowl barrow) ‘composed entirely of vegetable earth. It contained within a cist a little pile of burned bones with which had been deposited a very fine brass pin, a large stone bead which had been stained red, a bead of ivory and a lance head of brass’. This account is based on the records of William Cunnington (1807, 5–6), which include a transcription of a letter from the original excavator, a Mr Owen. The dimensions of the barrow are there given as 80 ft in diameter, 9 ft high, with a circular cist 18 in deep. The barrow is described as ‘No. 6 of Mr Duke's barrows’; there is thus a discrepancy in the numbering of the barrow, since Colt Hoare referred to it as Lake No. 7, while Cunnington kept to No. 6. The barrow, though recently ploughed, still stands to a height of over 2 m, and is today known as G.42 (Grinsell 1957, 211).

Integrated non-invasive survey in the Stonehenge ‘triangle’, Amesbury, Wiltshire, has highlighted a number of features that have a significant bearing on the interpretation of the site. Among them are periglacial and natural topographical structures, including a chalk mound that may have influenced site development. Some geophysical anomalies are similar to the post-holes in the car park of known Mesolithic date, while others beneath the barrows to the west may point to activity contemporary with Stonehenge itself. Evidence that the ‘North Barrow’ may be earlier in the accepted sequence is presented and the difference between the eastern and western parts of the enclosure ditch highlighted, while new data relating to the Y and Z Holes and to the presence of internal banks that mirror their respective circuits is also outlined.

This paper presents a systematic study of later Bronze Age practices at round barrows – features that are typically seen as emblematic of the Early Bronze Age in Britain. Examining the evidence from 87 excavated round barrows in the east of England, it adds subtlety and empirical detail to previous discussions about the changing role of funerary monuments over the course of the 2nd millennium bc. A wide variety of activities was undertaken at existing round barrows in the later Bronze Age. Burials were added, the monuments themselves were augmented and replicated, they were often actively built into land boundary systems, and settlements were located close to them. The findings not only attest to the continued (if shifting) significance of round barrows in the later Bronze Age, they also contribute substantially to wider debates about the character of life during this period in lowland Britain – the shifting relationship between ‘ritual’ and ‘everyday’ practices, and the processes by which mobile communities began to settle down. More broadly, this investigation adds to a growing body of work that explores the multi-temporal qualities of later prehistoric landscapes.

A survey is presented of the Iron Age in Norfolk, the area containing the heartland of the tribal territory of the Iceni during the Late Iron Age. It makes use of new information from prolific artefact finds from recent excavations and fieldwork, and employing unpublished data from the county Sites and Monuments Record. Settlement evidence and artefact distributions are analysed and used to construct a model for the development of settlement from the Early Iron Age to the Boudican rebellion of AD 60–61. The model emphasises a process of continuous change, showing the population expanding, moving from west to east and finally onto the central claylands. Evidence for field monuments is reviewed, revealing regional groupings and an association between hillfort-type and rectangular enclosures and linear earthworks with strategic locations on the boundaries of better soils. Three zones are thus defined. Artefact types including tores, coins, coin hoards, and horse equipment also reveal distinct regional patterning. Some larger sites are identified as serving more than simple agricultural functions, playing a key role within and between the three defined zones. The importance of ritual and religion within Iron Age society is emphasised and is considered to underlie the deposition of artefacts and hoards around Snettisham and in the vicinity of the south Norfolk border; a practice later revived in the Romano-British period.

The purpose of this paper is briefly to draw attention to a new group of Deverel–Rimbury enclosures in Wessex. These were found in the course of field work by the writer and Mr Owen Meyrick during the year preceding the outbreak of war, and all five are within two miles of one another on open downland north of the Marlborough–Wootton-Bassett road (fig. 1).

1. Preshute Down. (See fig. 2 and pl. VII). Squarish enclosure covered with L.B.A. pottery and flints. Slight excavations were made here with the help of Mr W. E. V. Young from Avebury. The field system around the enclosure was shown to be later.

2. Ogbourne Down. (See fig. 4, and pl. VIII). Three enclosures close together, east of the Four-Mile Clump and at the bottom of a valley. Much L.B.A. pottery scattered over the whole area. Many ancient fields all round are visible from the crest of Smeathes' Ridge, but their relationship with the earthworks was not discovered before the war made more excavation impossible. Thanks to many boys from the Marlborough College Archaeological Society, excavation was made at a number of points.

3. Ogbourne Maizey Down. (See fig. 3). An interesting sub-rectangular earthwork of the same type. No excavations made. Only a few potsherds were found, but all proved to be L.B.A. This enclosure had been constructed by digging the ditch into the soft lynchet soil of a pre-existing field system.