Since 1991, the Archaeology Department of the National Museums of Scotland (NMS) has been undertaking programmes of AMS radiocarbon dating of organic items in its collections, particularly wetland finds. This work was initially stimulated by the success of Caroline Earwood’s research on dating bog butter containers and other wooden vessels from the National collections (Earwood 1990; 1993a; 1993b; 1997), which demonstrated among other things that the practice of bog butter deposition in Scotland extended at least as far back as the early centuries AD.

When the Anglo-Saxons invaded England, about the middle of the fifth century, they came as barbarians in the proper and Roman sense of the word, illiterate and unpolished. At the beginning, too, their religion was a paganism at variance with imperial Christianity. Yet they cannot have been the blundering creatures they are sometimes taken for: within a few generations this assortment of tribes had produced scholarship of European standing, in the persons of Aldhelm and Bede, and as to the decorative arts their jewelry and illumination of manuscripts—not forgetting Irish influence—were a match for anyone in the western world. Fierce and warlike at first, guilty of unprovoked aggression, most of them soon settled down to become peaceful farmers.

The civilizations of prehispanic America never advanced technologically beyond the early bronze age: although both the Inca and the Aztec had tools and some weapons of cast bronze, the warriors that fought Cortes used swords edged with obsidian blades. The Classic Maya, who flourished in the first millennium AD, had only a casual acquaintance with metal until the ninth century (Bray, 1977) and raised the great temples of Tikal with an engineering capability no greater than that of the builders of Stonehenge.

In 1878, General Pitt Rivers excavated the motte and bailey castle on the downs behind Folkestone and published the results with characteristic promptness and accuracy. Today, over three-quarters of a century later, only four excavations, all in the past ten years, have advanced our knowledge further. While these have solved many problems, they have posed others, for few mottes are adequately documented (Old Aberystwyth is an honourable exception) and the dating of results can only be approximate.

The English Fenland, a million acres of drained wetlands in eastern England, is on the doorstep of Antiquity's present office. But no local excuse is needed to report once more on work in a classic region; from large-scale survey the focus has moved to assessment of what survives, and now to managing for its better future that discouragingly small proportion of its old archaeological wealth which is still with us.

This contribution intends to present, very briefly, one of the facets of medieval archaeology in Bohemia, a land which to this day bears the marks of having belonged to ‘the other Europe’. I will focus on a short phase of Bohemian history and within it, I will take out just a small portion that is accessible via the archaeological evidence. In spite of all the material limitations, I want to show that in this theme Bohemian archaeology documents one of the components of the gradual emergence of Europe, a continent so varied and yet so internally coherent.

Towards the end of 1989, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Chairman of English Heritage, announced that detailed planning had started on a visitor centre at Stonehenge. For someone not touched by the generations of wrangling over this site, or spared the depressing squalor with which a visit deftly obliterates any preconceptions of mystery or romance, what could be more appropriate than good visitor facilities at one of the world’s top heritage attractions? What could be simpler to construct in an open landscape of not particularly valuable farmland?

Of course, Stonehenge is not like that. This small group of standing stones by a road has provoked one of the most complex, bitter, and long-running archaeo-political stories of all time. It will run and run – make no doubt about that – but Lord Montagu’s announcement has a real significance for anyone with an interest in our past. Someone is actually trying to do something about the place.

‘Although the Greeks seem to have undertaken the founding of their cities most successfully looking for beauty and security of position, harbours, and fertile country, the [Romans] planned best those matters which the Greeks made light of, laying down roads, and bringing in water … They laid a network of roads over the countryside, adding cuttings over the hills and embankments along the valleys, so that their wagons can accommodate whole shiploads’

So says Strabo (v. 3.8), stating concisely a great deal that has since been written contrasting the beauty-loving Greeks with the practical Romans. S The justly admired roads of the Romans have long been a symbol of Rome at her best. The Greeks come off very poorly indeed when contrasted with Rome in the matter of roadbuilding—so poorly that their apologists have often felt constrained to explain it away : the mountain-terrain, and the division into unco-operative city-states were hostile to the development of road-building. Yet both these excuses are groundless, for under certain circumstances the Greeks did build roads over difficult terrain and across state boundaries. Roads from quarries to temple-sites are good examples of the first difficulty overcome, sacred roads of the second. The truth is that the Greeks could build good roads if the need for them was sufficiently compelling, but they had no sense of the ROAD, as the Romans did, and as we do to-day.

McIntosh and Fagan (above) write that “For 45 years, Ingombe Ilede has been viewed as a key nexus linking the Copperbelt and Great Zimbabwe”. Some regional specialists have not believed this since the publication of Swan's (2007) important review of the sizes and shapes of prehistoric copper ingots found in modern Zimbabwe. Swan noted that both of the ingot moulds found at Great Zimbabwe (which have a clear stylistic connection to the Copperbelt) are of the earlier HIH style (ninth to fourteenth centuries AD; de Maret 1995; Nikis & Livingstone Smith in press). But neither the later HXR-style copper ingots (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries)—some of which were excavated at Ingombe Ilede—nor the moulds to make them have been found on a Zimbabwe tradition site. The distribution of HXR ingots within the modern nation of Zimbabwe is almost exclusively in the north, within the former territory of the Mutapa state (Swan 2007: fig. 2). The clear implication is that the HXR ingot style—and thus the elite burials at Ingombe Ilede—post-date the breakup of the state ruled from Great Zimbabwe, which gave birth to the Mutapa (northern) and Torwa (southern) states. The new radiocarbon dates by McIntosh and Fagan provide welcome confirmation of this inference.

Does the curiosity of an archaeologist lead to encounters with forbidden things, inviting retribution? The learned antiquary M.R. James, writer of celebrated ghost stories, certainly thought so. In this vivid analysis, our author unearths the roots of James' impetus and compares it with that of his contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Of course, those days of paranormal terror are long gone, we are all rational now … or are we?

In discussing contemporary wool production the Elder Pliny comments (NH, VIII, 192): 'oddments of wool from the fullers" coppers are used for stuffing bolsters-an invention of the Gauls, I think; at any rate, the process is distinguished by Gallic terms today.'

It has long been a source of pleasure to us both that the author of the first of these Archaeological Retrospects, Charles Phillips, should share with me independent boyhood contacts with the Vale of White Horse, then in Berkshire but since 1974 in Oxfordshire (Phillips, 1980). Piggotts had been around in Marcham, Hatford and West Challow since the early seventeenth century, and the families died out or slipped quietly downhill to the status of farm labourers or at best small peasant farmers. My great-grandfather was one of these, in Uffington beneath the famous hill-figure, and my grandfather at the age of 10 was taken up to the last of the traditional festive 'scourings' in 1857 by Thomas Hughes of Kingston Lisle, best known as the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, who wrote up the event as The Scouring of the White Horse (1859). Among the festivities were wrestling and back-sword play: these sports 'were kept up there perhaps as long as in any portion of Middle England' wrote the son of a rector of Childrey, a village a few miles from Uffington, who came there in 1882. 'The Childrey schoolmaster', he goes on, 'when he was a boy at Uffington, could throw all his schoolfellows' (Cornish, 1939, 80). The schoolmaster was my grandfather, and my father was born in the village in 1874.

Controversies about the ‘Celts’ have constituted an ongoing debate over the last few decades, with postures ranging from blank scepticism and denial, to critical revisions, but also to the maintenance of more traditional approaches. After a lively and overall useful debate in the pages of Antiquity between 1996–1998 (principally with articles by Vincent and Ruth Megaw vs Simon James and John Collis), Simon James's controversial volume The Atlantic Celts. Ancient people or modern invention? (1999) attracted considerable attention, both among scholars and the wider public, encouraging discussions about the relationship—if any—between modern Celtic identities and the ancient Celts. A major milestone was reached with the publication of John Collis's monograph The Celts. Origins, myths and inventions (2003), which is probably the best historiographical review about the construction of the concept and the different sources involved from Antiquity to modern times. One of his main points is that classical sources never referred to the presence of Celts on the British Isles and that the use of the term for the populations of ancient Britain was mainly an invention of the modern era (see also Morse 2005, How the Celts came to Britain). From a rather different perspective, new approaches based mostly on linguistics emphasise the crucial role of the Atlantic façade in the development of Celtic languages (Cunliffe & Koch 2010).

A new examination of the polish on Late Palaeolithic tools from the Nile identifies some kind of siliceous sheen, but shows no ‘sickle gloss’. This is consistent with the demonstration that cereals were not in precociously early cultivation in Egypt.