The widespread adoption of deeper ploughing has led to the discovery during recent years of many remarkable antiquities in East Anglia. Prominent among recent discoveries resulting from this practice have been a series of finds of metal objects of the Early Iron Age in north-western Norfolk. These have ranged from an iron anthropoid sword with an inhumation burial at Shouldham through isolated finds, such as tores at Bawsey and North Creake, to the impressive group of hoards of ornaments and coins at Snettisham and the small hoard here studied found at Ringstead five miles from Snettisham and two miles east of Hunstanton.

Few remains of the latter part of the Iron Age from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 43 had previously been recorded from north-west Norfolk. Within a ten-mile radius of Ringstead only indefinite traces of human occupation had been noted, such as pottery from Hunstanton and coins of the Iceni from Brancaster, Burnham Thorpe and possibly Ingoldisthorpe. A much-damaged hillfort at South Creake has been attributed to this period, though on very little direct evidence. Actual indications of settlement at this period are still very scanty.

One of Piggott's Young Turks, C.W. Phillips (1987, 48), wrote in his autobiography, ‘By 1935, I was to be part-author of a revolution in the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia and become Hon. Secretary of the national Prehistoric Society conjured from its ashes.’

To this day, the transition of the regional Prehistoric Society of East Anglia to the national Prehistoric Society is remembered as a well planned coup. The story of an abrupt and resisted occupation of this key institution stands vividly in collective archaeological memory. In a recent interview, Thurstan Shaw, who took a First in the Cambridge Archaeology and Anthropology Tripos in 1936, clearly remembered his very young teacher, Grahame Clark, ‘referring to the take-over with considerable satisfaction’ (Shaw, in conversation with the author, 1996). Another of Clark's students, Jack Golson, who graduated in '51, maintains that Phillips, Clark, Hawkes, and Piggott took the Society out of an ‘East Anglia frame to a national level … They stacked it!’ (Golson, in conversation with the author, 1996).

The name ‘Azilian’ is firmly linked to that of Edward Piette, the principal excavator of the site on the left bank of the river Arize in the tunnel-cave of the Mas d'Azil (Ariège), in the French Pyrenees (see Bahn 1979). From 1887 onward this site yielded hundreds of painted and engraved pebbles (Piette 1896, 1903). Their decoration shows little variation, and consists largely of groups of dots and transverse marks; however, there are more complex signs such as longitudinal marks, lines of chevrons, grecques, crosses, perpendicular marks and ovals, while some pebble-faces are completely painted over. These little stones constitute almost the only evidence of artistic activity at the very end of the Upper Palaeolithic, and they span a period from c. 9000 to c. 7500 BC.

Twenty-eight sites in France, five in Spain, three in Italy and one in Switzerland have yielded a total of 1951 worked pebbles, but the Mas d'Azil accounts for no less than about 1427 of these. The figure is approximate because it is very difficult to reach an exact total: there have been losses, and infiltrations of fakes, and the ensemble is scattered in at least 16 museums and private collections.

We report on the recording and analysis of 17 petroglyph or pictograph sites, containing a total of 168 glyphic units, carried out as part of a large scale survey of the ancient district (moku) of Kahikinui, on south-eastern Maui Island, Hawaiian Islands. In contrast with previous studies which have tended to view Hawaiian petroglyphs as divorced from their larger archaeological context, we analyse and interpret this corpus in terms of a landscape-level settlement analysis. The Kahikinui petroglyphs exhibit a regular and limited range of motifs, with certain styles of anthropomorphs and zoomorphs (especially dogs) dominating; petroglyphs dating to the early post-European contact period are characterised by Roman lettering reflecting early missionary efforts at literacy. Petroglyphs are strongly associated either with an early historic-period trail, or with rockshelters and cliff faces where there is evidence for freshwater springs or seeps. In the arid environment of Kahikinui, freshwater was a precious resource, and the petroglyphs may have served as territorial markers, or signs of individual ownership or rights of access. Excavations at three rockshelter sites with petroglyphs provide indirect evidence for dating these petroglyphs to the late prehistoric era (16th to 18th centuries AD). Comparisons with petroglyph sites on other islands in the Hawaiian archipelago indicate the existence of distinct regional variations.

A variable proportion of finds from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic of ‘Old Europe’ has come from places outside settlements, cemeteries, production sites, ritual sites, or caves. Such finds tend to be described as ‘chance/isolated/single/stray’ finds or, when in groups, as ‘hoards’. The frequent, modernist cause invoked for these finds is that they were either ‘hidden’ in times of mortal danger, represented a ‘gift to the gods’, or simply ‘lost’. One reason for these explanatory shortcomings is the over-attention to the types of objects deposited in the landscape and the frequent lack of attention to the often-distinctive place of deposition. We believe that we have misnamed, overlooked, or not accurately characterised an entire class of sites, which we term ‘landscape deposition sites’, whose defining feature was the transformation of a place by the deposition of a significant object or group of objects to create a qualitatively different place. The creation of such landscape deposit sites varied in time and space throughout Old Europe, but all sites were affected by this new dimension of the extended cultural domain.

In this article, we consider the interpretations of metal deposition in North-west Europe and the light they shed on an earlier and geographically different region. The primary aim of this paper is an exploration of the variable relationships between landscape deposit sites and the coeval finds made in special deposits in settlements and cemeteries in the 5th and 4th millennia bc, which will lead to proposed new interpretations of landscape deposition sites.

Since the discovery of Neolithic flaking debris around Great Langdale almost 50 years ago, a number of surveys and excavations have taken place in the heart of the Lake District. These have shown that the outcrop of Seathwaite Tuff was the most productive source for stone axes in Britain. People were procuring the raw material from the outcrop in a number of locations, notably the Langdale Pikes, Scafell Pike, and Glaramara (Claris & Quartermaine 1989; Bradley & Edmonds 1993).

The creation and dissemination of the majority of Cumbrian stone axes can be divided into four processes: i) procurement of the raw material from the outcrop; ii) shaping of the stone into axes; iii) movement of the roughouts to the lowlands for polishing; and iv) movement of the axes across Britain until their eventual deposition. While it is valid to examine all aspects of this phenomenon, it is apparent that investigating the processes employed at the source may provide some of the most revealing information.

During the seasons 1926-8 excavations have been undertaken in this cavern by a party of members of the Torquay Natural History Society, co-operating with a sub-committee of Section H of the British Association. A trench 60 feet long has been carried along the northern wall of the chambers known as the Vestibule and the N.E. Gallery so as to pass directly beneath the original position of the Black Band, a prehistoric hearth of very late Magdalenian age discovered in 1866 by William Pengelly. The Black Band adhered to the base of the upper or Granular Stalagmite, and at a depth of 4 feet lower in the Cave-earth, Pengelly had collected a couple of rostrate scrapers, an end-scraper with opposed point, and a bone pin, identified by Miss Garrod in 1926 as belonging to an industry of Middle Aurignacian type.

The pottery of the later prehistoric period in the Western Isles of Scotland displays a variety of decorative styles and forms not found elsewhere on the Scottish mainland. Traditional approaches have attempted to define stylistic sequences or to identify wares to which chronological and cultural labels may be attached. In this study neutron activation analysis was utilized to examine if the distinctions which had been drawn were mirrored by chemical composition. Analysis of clay beds had indicated that the analytical and statistical techniques which were employed were sensitive enough to identify patterns which existed within the data. The results for the later prehistoric ceramics indicated that pottery was probably locally produced and locally distributed and that the clays involved in the manufacture of metalworking moulds and crucibles were different in terms of source or method of preparation from those employed in the manufacture of the more mundane range of domestic vessels.

A recent monograph written by three prominent Korean archaeologists reports on the results of the past 20 years of research on Korean palaeolithic sites. Discussed are tasks completed, projects underway, and suggestions for future work to be done on palaeolithic remains in the Korean Peninsula. Particularly significant is the chapter on the archaeology of the Jǒngok-ni site which has produced many palaeolithic artefacts; among these the excavators find a high percentage of handaxes and other core bifaces, a cultural phenomenon claimed to be unique in East Asian prehistoric technology.

Jacquetta Hawkes in a paper called ‘The Proper Study of Mankind’ (Hawkes, 1968) has made an impassioned plea against what she considers to be the ‘dehumanization’ of prehistory at the hands of those who have sought to apply to it numerical methods and the techniques of the natural sciences. There can be few who do not sympathize with her denunciation of aimless manipulation of data and the use of techniques for their own sakes; and many must share Clark's fear that prehistoric archaeology will serve merely ‘… to provide intellectual games for the meritocracy’ (Clark, 1967, 472). But such comments as these only prompt the question ‘what are we studying prehistory for?’ or ‘what is prehistory about?’

The well-being of any academic discipline depends upon the posing of questions like these, for if a subject is to develop at all, it must undergo periods of self-analysis when some of its practitioners take stock of what they themselves and others are doing. The analysis may be concerned with methods and techniques and may either tacitly or openly accept the existing philosophy. Or it may consider the philosophy of the subject directly, by asking if the priorities of a past age are still acceptable or whether in the different climate of thought of the present, they must be changed. Self-analysis of this kind may however produce a state of unease and disquiet.

Responding to recent advances in knowledge about the first arrival of woollen sheep in Europe and linked investigations of textile remains on the Continent, this paper argues that our insight into the role of wool in the English Bronze Age needs rethinking. We argue that the relevant questions are: when did the procurement of and working with wool become a routine aspect of settlement life, and did the change from plant fibres to wool affect communities differently? The paper outlines some of the core research questions we need to consider and points to the necessity of triangulating between the evidence provided by textiles, faunal remains, and textile working tools to reach more comprehensive insights. The paper ends by indicating a further research question – namely whether the apparent differences in the ‘wool economy’ in different parts of Bronze Age Europe may suggest differences in ‘body politics’.

In recent decades some archaeologists have come to doubt key components and properties of the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age (EBA) Avebury monument complex. By site excavation of the Beckhampton Avenue, Silbury Hill, and the West Kennet Palisades the idea of an integrated group of contemporaneous monuments has been thrown into doubt. In this paper these critiques are themselves critiqued and further tested by an inter-disciplinary exercise integrating archaeology, landscape phenomenology, and archaeoastronomy. It is suggested that the emergent properties of this procedure reveal that these recent doubts are unfounded and that this monument complex was designed for rituals to initiate neophytes by simulating journeys through a virtual underworld.

Petrological and chemical analyses of stone, bronze and iron implements are playing an increasingly important role in the study of prehistoric economies. Their contributions, long familiar to students of European prehistory, were recently discussed in a paper which also reviewed the evidence from Polynesia, Melanesia and Australia (Clark, 1965). Apart from some studies limited to stone artefacts from individual archaeological sites, these techniques have not previously been applied to material from Australian prehistory (Gutsche in McBryde, 1966; Branagan and Megaw, 1969). In this brief communication we present some of the results of a petrological analysis of ground-edge artefacts from north-eastern New South Wales.

The widespread dispersal of stone for axe-making based on organized exploitation of definite quarry sites is well documented in the historical and anthropological literature for eastern Australia at the time of European settlement. Unfortunately few of these historical records are sufficiently detailed, so even for the recent past as well as for prehistory, techniques of petrological analysis may make vital contributions to our knowledge both of quarry sites in eastern Australia and of the distribution of their products. Our preliminary discussion here is based on an investigation of some 200 axes mainly taken from the archaeological collections in the History Department of the University of New England and various local museum and private collections, but also including axes from northern New South Wales in the Australian collections of the British Museum, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Anthropological Museum of Aberdeen University.