In the fertile region between the Danube and the Balkans occur numerous Byzantine fortified posts, which are shown by occasional finds of coins to date mostly from the sixth century. All have a common form in that skilful use has been made of natural features of terrain, such as isolated mountain-tops or practically isolated spurs, so that with a minimum cf artificial strengthening they have considerable defensive power. A favourite situation for them is at points where narrow canyon-like valleys of the streams that flow into the Danube have afforded good natural advantages.

From the military standpoint these sites can easily be divided into two groups, A and B, according to their topographical situation. To the first belong those which occur on the great natural trade-routes, and, like a modern Sperrfort, rake the roads with a commanding view over the surrounding district. The second and much more numerous group consists of posts situated off the trade-routes, often so much concealed by the lie of the land as to be invisible from the great roads.

South American archaeology is a field which ANTIQUITY all too rarely embraces, and we are glad to have this report (originally planned for volume 59, 1985) on a new project studying trans-Andean contacts between the Pacific coast and the Amazon jungles.

Until the year 1939 the archaeology of Britain in Anglo-Saxon times has had to concern itself little with ship-burials and to no great extent with rich burials of any kind. If we omit those in the county of Kent and a few important burials at Taplow, Broomfield, and elsewhere, the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon graves in general presents few striking features besides its almost universal poverty.

The main purposes of the excavations conducted on the summit of this mountain were three-fold: to check the commonly accepted equation of Umm el-Biyara with the Biblical Sela' of the Edomites; to determine the character, extent and duration of the Edomite settlement, and to obtain, through stratigraphic excavation, a well-dated series of Edomite pottery and other artifacts.

As general reports on the excavations have been published elsewhere and a preliminary report appeared in the Revue Biblique, it is sufficient in this paper to give only a summary of the findings.

Serious and sustained archaeological broadcasting began only after the end of the 1939-45 War. It was the result of the general purpose of the S Third Programme and the particular endeavour of the West Region in the persons of Frank Gillard, Head of Programmes at Bristol, and Gilbert Phelps, one of the talks producers there. There had of course been archaeological broadcasts in the pre-war years, and Sir Leonard Woolley’s best-selling Digging up the Past began as a series of talks ; but it was not until The Archaeologist was created by the West Region, and taken over, first by the Third Programme—it was actually the first series of talks to appear on that programme—and then by the Home Service, that archaeology began to have a recognised and acceptable place in sound broadcasting. There have been plenty of archaeological broadcasts outside this series, and so there should be ; but it was the existence of a regular series providing for the discussion of current discoveries, new techniques and new ideas and demanding thought on the part of producers and editors that, to my mind, really put archaeological broadcasting on the B.B.C. map.

‘Ruffled feathers’ seem to be part of the World Archaeological Congress. Here we present two different assessments of the forthcoming World Archaelogical Congress in Cape Town in January–one from an observer, Willy Kitchen, and one from the WAC Secretary, Julian Thomas, which set out some of the ideals and current realities of this highly political enterprise.

The authors investigate the origins of the earliest script of the Cherokees, using inscriptions in the Red Bird River Shelter. Their analysis suggests that the engravings in the cave show the experimental creation of a syllabary (alphabet of signs). This in turn offers support for the historical notion that this writing system was not an ancestral practice preserved through missionaries, but an invention of the early nineteenth century; one that should be credited to the Native American pioneer scholar, Sequoyah.

The island site of Biskupin with its densely planned interior bears an uncanny resemblance to a prison camp. Is it typical of the Iron Age in Northern Europe? The authors here explore neighbouring sites around Poznań using aerial photographs, geophysical survey and dendrochronology – to stunning effect. These low impact methods have given high impact results: dated street plans, some similar and others different from Biskupin, but within the same time frame: almost a repertoire of early urbanism. The authors must also be congratulated on the identification of a new type of Iron Age feature, the ‘open area for spouse avoidance’ defined at Sobiejuchy.

The homogeneity of settlement across the löss lands of central Europe, and the speed with which an agricultural economy was adopted, are among the more remarkable features of the neolithic colonization of temperate Europe. Now petrographic evidence indicates long-distance transport of stone across that huge area, and confirms that this early pattern comes to an abrupt halt at the transition to the later Neolithic.

We are glad to see that our paper has stimulated a lively debate, and we acknowledge the appreciation of our work by Bietak, Kuniholm and MacGillivray as well as that of those who oppose our hypothesis (Bruins & van der Plicht, Friedrich et al., all above). The enigma of the dating of the Santorini eruption is a long-lasting one, and because of its bearing on the dating of several eastern Mediterranean civilisations, has attracted significant attention. The potentially great importance of the Santorini olive branch used by Friedrich et al. (2006) was that it came from the site itself, and possibly belonged to the destruction layer. As such, the sincere and serious attempt to date it made by Friedrich et al. (2006) should be appreciated. Unfortunately, large olive branches may exist as dead limbs for a very long time and thus represent earlier periods.