Reconstruction drawings intended to illustrate the realities of prehistoric life can be famously revealing of preconceptions in the minds of the modern illustrator and of the researcher who briefs the illustrator. But are the less interpretative drawings whose purpose is to record the material evidence more neutral in their look? Nineteenth-century technical illustrations of the Neanderthal skull are unintentionally revealing of attitude.

All (or almost all) archaeology seeks to know the things that were by the evidence of the things that are, as battered and fragmented by centuries of collapse, decay, wear and breaking. And from the things that were, all (or almost all) archaeology seeks to know the people who were, to grasp the human meanings that were held in those things. The unthinking assumptions, common to old and new programmes for good archaeology, that go with this common framework are explored.

An issue in the status of the flaked stones from Pedra Furada, Brazil is whether they are artefacts or fractures naturally made on falling stone. An experiment by other researchers is pertinent.

Canarium is a group of rainforest trees found in southeast Asia and into the Pacific, whose nuts are edible. The nuts have quite often been found in early archaeological contexts: that evidence and the palaeobotanical record largely deriving from pollen now enables some rounded account of the early human place of the tree and its nuts.

The origins of Korean archaeological heritage management can be traced to 1916, when Japan's Resident-general Government in Korea (Chōsen Sōtokufu: 1910-1945) promulgated the first comprehensive laws of historical preservation called the ‘Regulations for the Preservation of Korea's Remains and Relics’. They reflected a combination of late Meiji and early Taishō era laws tailored to the Korean peninsula such as Lost and Stolen Antiquities (1909); Temples and Shrines Protection Laws (1911); the Preservation of Stone and Metal Inscriptions (1916); and most significantly, the establishment of an administrative apparatus, the Committee on the Investigation of Korean Antiquities (1916). The Chōsen Sōtokufu Museum laws governing art exhibitions and display were compiled from Imperial Museum laws (Tokyo National Museum 1976) dating from 1890-1907 (Chōsen Sōkufu 1924: 215-30).

The purse found at Sutton Hoo contained forty-two gold objects. Thirty-seven of them were Merovingian coins of the last decades of the 6th and the first half of the 7th century, three were unstruck circular blanks, and two were small rectangular ingots (Bruce-Mitford, 1968, 47-51; Lafaurie, 1968, 258-60, correcting Marseilles to Arles as the mint of no. 3). The coins weigh from 1.221 grams to 1.388 grams—Bruce-Mitford's text by a slip reads grains—and average 1.27 g. (= 19.6 grains), the theoretical weight of the Merovingian gold coin at this period being 1.3 grams, i.e. 20 grains. They are generally termed tremisses or trientes, this being the name of the third of the Roman solidus from which they were derived, but they were in fact somewhat lighter—1.3 g. as against 1-5 g.—and no longer represented the Roman tremissis of eight carats but the Germanic shilling of twenty grains (Grierson, 1961, 351-2). The three blanks, which are about the same diameter as the coins, are of much the same weight (1.09 g., 1.38 g., and 1.46 g.: average, 1.31 g.). The ingots are heavier, weighing respectively 5.21 g. and 4.97 g., i.e. 80 grains and 76-7 grains, and are also of slightly inferior gold. It is probable that they were each intended to represent four shillings.

Inquiry immediately makes it clear that man must first have come to know iron through meteorites. Except for the great masses at Ovifak in Greenland, which are outside the question, iron from earthly sources is not known to occur in the native state. It does, however, occur in metallic form in meteorites (FIG. 2) and is the only metal to do so. In this form it may be found in solid lumps of metal weighing as much as 50 tons (Bacubirito), 36½ tons (Ahnighito), or 15⅔ tons (Chupaderos). But of course most of it occurs in much more manageable sizes—in pieces as large as a man’s head, a hen's egg, a pea, or only as dust. But all meteorites are not solid iron, Very many are a mixture of iron and stone (FIGS. 1, 3) or what is to all intents and purposes merely stone (FIG. 4), and so useless to man as a source of iron. All meteorites fall into one of these three classes.

When a distribution map of Neolithic stone axes in Ireland was published in ANTIQUITY (Grogan & Cooney 1990), the new Irish Stone Axe Project (ISAP) was mentioned. Stone axes, it turns out, are unusually common in Ireland. Here Project progress is outlined, with special attention being given to those axes identified as having been moved across the Irish Sea.

A British colonial estate in eastern Australia, built by 1830 and abandoned 20 years later, survives as the ruins of the Big House surrounded by stables, a farm and servants' quarters. The authors recovered pottery assemblages from a number of different servants' dwellings and here show that they differed from each other, revealing a ‘hierarchy of servitude’. It is natural to think that such a situation would provide helpful analogies for earlier empires, like the Roman, but historical archaeology has its own framework, varying even from country to country.

Introduction

Belfast Lough is a deep indent of the Irish Sea into the coastline of Northern Ireland. Its southwestern continuation is the Lagan Valley, which separates the steep scarp ofthe Antrim Plateau (height c. 300 m) from the hills of Co Down (c. 120 m) to the southeast. The River Lagan flows along this broad, undulating valley floor through thick deposits of glacial sands and gravels before emptying into the Lough at Belfast. Eight kilometres southwest of Belfast, the river passes the townland of Ballynahatty, a sandy plateau 100 ha in extent. This was the site in the 4th millenium BC of a small passage tomb, orientated to the northwest (Collins 1954: 48; Lawlor 1918: 16–19). Though now denuded of its covering mound, it provided the subsequent focus for a series of atypical passage tombs utilizing ever smaller settings of stone (Hartwell 1998: 33–6). Shortly after 3000 BC this was followed by a complex of large and elaborate east-facing timber structures (Ballynahatty 5 and 6). These in turn were eventually replaced by the earth and stone hengiform enclosure of the Giant's Ring, built around the original passage tomb.

Two generations ago, Sir Mortimer Wheeler made himself the master of public relations in archaeology. He found some of the funds for digging Maiden Castle from opening the site to the visitors, who were able to buy souvenirs for a few pennies. After a period when the public have seemed a nuisance on-site, the fashion has come back — with added urgency in Britain where the pipeline of funding from public sources no longer flows so easily and where responding to some apparent public demand is becoming a new essential.

Flag Fen, in the wetland of eastern England, is being seen as a model of the new approach. It is conspicuous in the pages of Visitors welcome, the new English Heritage guide for excavators, which is reviewed warmly from across the Atlantic elsewhere in this issue. Here the Wheeler of the Fens explains what he is doing there and way.

In a number of publications W. G. Collingwood has described the north country hogbacks and he has suggested that they were replicas in stone of the dwellings prevailing at the time among the people responsible for their erection. He was primarily concerned, however, with their development and dating, based upon the ornament employed. In this paper I have concentrated rather on the hogback as a representation of an Anglo-Danish house and its bearing on the origin of cruck construction.

The hogback is a recumbent tombstone in the form of a long, low house with a roofridge slightly arched lengthwise. Its ground plan (FIG. I, D) is bomb6 in shape, affording a plan which has only rarely been revealed by excavation. From Glendarragh, The Braaid, Isle of Man, Fleure and Dunlop have described two alignments which they consider represented the side walls of a boat-shaped house (FIG. I, A). These, they contend, were built of more durable materials to provide a stronger construction whilst the gable walls, which contained the entrances, were probably built of wattle. This is supported by the evidence of the hogbacks which show low stone ground-walls at the sides only and the walls at The Braaid are probably survivals of similar ground-walls. Fleure and Dunlop compare it to the ‘banqueting hall’ of Hofstaoir, Mývatn, in northern Iceland, which is 118 feet long and has incurved stone side walls varying from 19½ feet, at the ends, to 26 feet, in the middle, apart (FIG. I, B).