The small, golden pendant from the Minoan settlement of Mallia on the island of Crete (PL. 1) is one of the best known pieces of jewellery from Minoan, if not all, prehistoric times. First published in 1930 (Demargne, 1930), it was unearthed in the Chrysolakkos cemetery area of the palace at Mallia. Although dating is difficult, the piece is usually assigned a date in Middle Minoan times, generally to MM I, between roughly 2000 and 1700 BC (Demargne, 1930, 419; Evans, 1935, 75–6; Higgins, 1967, 47, 199).

The roots of Celtic civilization can be seen to lie in the hill strongholds of late Hallstatt period in Eastern France, Switzerland and Southern Germany, distinguished by their Mediterranean contacts: these have been classed as the residences of chieftains, Fürstensitze, by Kimmig (1968). Three of these Fürstensitze have particularly attracted archaeological attention in the last 30 years, in Southern Germany, the Heuneburg on the Upper Danube (Kimmig, 1968; Kimmig/Gersbach, 1971), and the Hohenasperg near Ludwigsburg (Zürn, 1970), and in Burgundy Mt Lassois near Châtillonsur-Seine (Joffroy, 1960). The excavation of the Heuneburg was mainly confined to the settlement site itself, whereas we know the Hohenasperg only from the graves surrounding the site. The excavation of the Grafenbühl tumulus by Hartwig Zürn in 1964/65 (Zürn, 1970) has shown, however, that the importance of the Hohenasperg must have been at least equal to that of the Heuneburg.

It is initially flattering to receive an invitation to be retrospective in ANTIQUITY. The moment of truth comes soon, however, as thought about writing begins. Was the growth of one's career and ideas about archaeology so smoothly flowing and well reasoned as casual and doubtless fatuous fancy first recalls? How fairly have earlier attempts at retrospection (and I've attempted several: 1972a, 1972b, 1974) corresponded to reality, and what, if anything, remains to be said? What follows, therefore, is offered most diffidently. My old teacher, Henri Frankfort, claimed the most important element in the formation of a career was good luck: I have certainly had my share of it.

The historicity of the two Indian epics, viz., the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana, has been the subject of heated debate ever since these epics attracted the attention of scholars, both in India and abroad. Thus, while there are some who hold that every event mentioned in these epics is historically true, there are others who regard them as mere figments of the imagination. Apart from the possibility that ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘reactionary attitude’ may respectively be partly responsible for such extremely divergent views, the confusion seems to arise from the fact that these epics are neither contemporary documentation of the episodes concerned nor have their texts remained immune from large-scale interpolations.

One of the most spectacular of all the theories recently advanced in archaeoastronomy concerns the standing stones of Carnac in southern Brittany. The possibility that the famous prehistoric megaliths or ‘menhirs’ in this region represent the remains of an extensive, highly accurate lunar observatory has excited much interest in both academic and popular literature. In the company of two experienced archaeologists I recently set out to re-examine and record the field evidence on which the lunar observatory theory is based. The result of this work is to cast serious doubt on the theory, and to illustrate the difficulties of assessing the astronomy of the megalith builders.