The large triangular building sandwiched betweenthe Castel Sant’Angelo and the Palazzo di Giustizia in Rome is the Casa Madre dei Mutilati, designed by Marcello Piacentini and built in two phases between 1926 and 1928, and from 1936 to 1939. Its exterior blends in well with its surroundings, suggesting it no longer conjures memories of the Fascist regime, but inside, its decorative plan reveals a series of artworks with polyvalent meanings that were later depoliticised, ‘censored’ and rehabilitated. They throw light on the ‘difficult heritage’ of the Fascist era in a continuum of meaning and memory connected to myths of war and sacrifice.

The origins of the Neolithic in the Near East were accompanied by significant ritual and symbolic innovations. New light is thrown on the social context of these changes by the discovery of a bone wand displaying two engraved human faces from the Early Neolithic site of Tell Qarassa in Syria, dating from the late ninth millennium BC. This small bone object from a funerary layer can be related to monumental statuary of the same period in the southern Levant and south-east Anatolia that probably depicted powerful supernatural beings. It may also betoken a new way of perceiving human identity and of facing the inevitability of death. By representing the deceased in visual form the living and the dead were brought closer together.

Instances of cultural interaction between Norse and native American have long been accepted. But current archaeological research recognises that the indigenous peoples of the north were themselves diverse and had diverse histories. Here the author shows that the culture of one of them, the Dorset people, owed nothing to the Norse and probably had no contact with them.

The authors examine claims that the sole surviving example of relief sculpture from the Middle Bronze of Italy or Sicily, discovered in the excavations on the island of Ustica in 1991, is a forgery that was deliberately planted on the site. Their refutation is based on examination of the photographic evidence that has been published in support of these claims.