In 1967 the regional museum for prehistory at Halle (Saale) began an excavation in the field known as the Schalkenburg, near Quenstedt, which lies in Hettstedt district, on the eastern edge of the Harz mountains, about 50 km north-west of Halle, in the south-west of the German Democratic Republic (PL. xxva). The excavations were carried out annually in the months of July and August (Behrens & Schröter 1980), and their aim was to investigate a settlement of the neolithic Bernburg culture.

There has always been an enigma over the precise date during the Troy excavations of 1873 when Schliemann found the collection of metalwork which he dignified as ‘Priam's Treasure’ . His only published indication of the date appears to be his statement in 1884 that the discovery was made ‘at the end of May 1873’ (Schliemann 1884, 57). Biographers, even those who have studied Schliemann' s unpublished diaries and letters, have proposed a variety of dates, Ludwig places it ‘on a morning in the middle of June, one day before the termination of the work’ , in other words on the 14th June (Ludwig, 1931, 179). Payne prefers 30th May, ‘or a few days earlier’ (Payne, 1958, 116). Stone seems to settle for Saturday 31st May (Stone, 1976, 318f). Poole and Deuel place the discovery simply in late May or early June (Poole, 1967, 133; Deuel, 1978, 194). Brackman suggests 17th June or several days earlier, but suspends judgement on the matter (Brackman, 1974, 157). Ernst Meyer, who, because of his extensive work on the Schliemann papers in the late 1930s, has some claim to be regarded as the definitive biographer, at first gave the date as lying between 7th and 10th June (Meyer, 1953, I, 342, n. 335). Later, however, he narrowed this to 7th June on the authority of an otherwise unpublished entry in Schliemann's diary (Meyer, 1969, 273). Thus there is not only disagreement in the secondary sources, but in Schliemann's own writings; for this date, which is indeed explicitly named in the diary, conflicts with Schliemann's published statement referring to ‘the end of May 1873’.

Pontnewydd Cave lies in the Elwy Valley, near the western edge of the Vale of Clywd (FIG. 1), six km north-west of the modern town of Denbigh. The site first became well-known through the successive investigations of the nineteenth-century geologists Professors William Boyd Dawkins and T. H. McKenny Hughes, the latter working with the Reverend D. R. Thomas, then Vicar of Cefn. Boyd Dawkins' s excavations at the site (1874, 286–7; 1880, 192) yielded a fauna which included hippopotamus, but no artifacts were observed. The work of Hughes & Thomas (1874; Hughes, 1887) seems to have been confined principally to scouring Boyd Dawkins' s dumps, and yielded not only fauna but also evidence of the presence of man in the form both of artifacts and of a human molar tooth, since lost. This molar has long excited interest on account of its description by Busk (in Hughes & Thomas, 1874, 390) as being ‘of very large size’ and looking ‘quite as ancient as the rest [of the fauna]’. One of the many research aims of the current investigation was, therefore, to examine the possibility that the cave was a site where human remains might be found in association with an archaeological industry.

The Naveta of Els Tudons (Boat of the Wood-pigeons) is the name of a prehistoric tomb whose shape resembles an upturned boat, situated on the estate of Els Tudons about 4 km east of Ciudadela. On one of the walls of Mahon Airport is shown a greatly enlarged reproduction of the engraving of it from Die Balearen in Wort und Bild (II, 1897, 419) by the Archduke Louis Salvator. This monument, and a Taula, are indeed the symbols of Menorca's past and have to some extent been recently adopted as emblems for Menorcan tourism.

In 1966 David Clarke gave a series of lectures in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge entitled Archaeological Taxonomy. These served as the basis for the preparation of a much expanded and more comprehensive treatise which was published in 1968 as the first edition of Analytical archaeology. This work was a substantial tome with the ambitious intention of providing a first approximation of an overall theoretical framework for the archaeological study of material culture.