Direct dating, using the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) 14C method, of a wooden moai kavakava (anthropomorphic woodcarving) in the collection of the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels has given a date of about cal AD 1390–1480. As there are reasons to believe that this age not only regards the raw material but also the carving itself, preserved examples of Easter Island wood sculpture may be much older than previously assumed and possibly contemporaneous with the giant monolithic sculpture of the first half of the 2nd millennium AD.

The author looks at construction and subsequent use-pattern of round barrows in the Cheshire Basin. He argues that the use of natural mounds for burial during the Early Bronze Age may be the result of mistaken identity, indicating a forgetting of the past.

While palaeobotanical remains provide clear evidence for the exploitation of the date at various locations in Egypt and Nubia, it is the detection amongst lipid residues in closed form vessels of fatty acid distributions dominated by diagnostic short-chain fatty acids, i.e. C12:0 and C14:0′ that provides the first direct evidence for the processing of palm fruit in pottery vessels.

Where is rock-art study heading? The author analyses the current trends and proposes a landscape-based, gender-sensitive approach for future work.

The use of a wide range of narcotic drugs in antiquity has been widely documented, although archaeologists have sometimes been too credulous of apparently scientific data, and have failed to appreciate the post-excavation histories of artefacts, including mummies. This paper examines the discovery of tobacco in the mummy of Rameses II, provides an alternative model for its origin, as a 19th-century insecticide used in conservation, and throws doubt upon the evidence for both cannabis and cocaine in ancient Egypt.

This paper reviews the architectural and human skeletal remains from Umm an-Nar period tombs (c. 2500–2000 BC), found across the Oman Peninsula. Possible meanings for the regional dispersal of the tombs across the region are considered. Tomb Unar 2 may provide possible interpretations of 3rd-millennium BC burial practices.

Understanding how differential wealth develops between households in villages is one key to understanding how socioeconomic inequalities develop; a key theoretical issue for archaeologists. An ethnoarchaeological perspective in Southeast Asia gains major insights into how socioeconomic inequalities emerged and were maintained, with numerous implications for other cereal and stock based prehistoric cultures, such as those of Neolithic Europe.

This paper presents archaeological and palynological evidence for long continuation of the Mesolithic way of life in east-central Europe irrespective of the presence of early Neolithic farmers. The complete Neolithization of the area took place only about 3500 BC, as a consequence of long-term interactions between indigenous foragers and exotic farmers.

This paper presents a revised chronology for the Linearbandkeramik and strontium isotope measurements of human skeletal material from two cemeteries which indicate a high incidence of migration. It appears that LBK farmers were highly migratory and interacted with surrounding communities.

In December 2000 we published ‘Time Please’, a retrospective of archaeological transformation in England, by Geoffrey Wainwright, the former Chief Archaeologist of English Heritage. He reviewed the enormous changes over the last 30–40 years from his perspective at the heart of the ‘Heritage’ establishment.

We have received three comments from fellow professionals which offer some alternative recollections of events, priorities and changes. Philip Rahtz, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at York and a founder of Rescue, comments on that area, and the emergence of state archaeology in the early years. Peter Fowler, formerly Secretary to the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) and Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Newcastle, comments too on Rescue, and particularly on the role of academic archaeology, including that of Extra-Mural, as one of the principal promoters of public interest and action in archaeology. David Baker (formerly County Archaeologist for Bedfordshire and Chair of ACAO) & Richard Morris (formerly Chair of the Council for British Archaeology) add their views to the debate with a candid discussion of PPG-16 and the business of planning and archaeology. Predictably, there are many perspectives on the route that archaeology, as a means to mitigate damage to the heritage, and to provide a record of the past, has taken over its years of increasingly high-profile professional and business activity.