My age-fellows and I, whose professional careers over the past 50 years or so have been devoted to college teaching in the USA and whose fieldwork was conducted mainly in Mediterranean countries, will scarcely see the opening of the next century. Perhaps the most useful contribution veterans like us can now make to the overall discipline – not just to our own ‘wing’ — is to outline certain problems that have particularly disturbed us during our active careers. Younger colleagues – the new decisionmakers – can then judge whether our criticisms are well founded and, if so, what can (or should) be done to alter present practices and attitudes If our concerns are reasonable and our recommendations for remedial action are constructive, we can at least hope that useful discussion will result – particularly in the disciplinary subdivision with which we have been most closely associated.

When ANTIQUITY published the historical article by Clarke, I was a 20-year-old student, deeply engaged in field activities and substantially torn away from the ‘theoretical’ debate.

My archaeological loss of innocence happened only in the early 1980s, when I discovered (thanks to people like Maurizio Tosi and Anna Maria Bietti Sestieri) the enormous explanatory potential of processual theories.

It would be absurd to label the whole of Italian archaeology as ‘atheoretical’; as a matter of fact, a powerful theoretical machine, the Marxist theory, had operated from the late 1960s, thanks to the group of Dialoghi di Archeologia. The problem was in the idealistic roots of our (academic) culture, characterized by a programmatic divorce between humanistic and scientific studies and from a substantial lack of interest for the anthropological theories.

It has been received wisdom for nearly half a century that 6th-millennium BP models, discovered at Eridu in southern Mesopotamia, are the earliest direct evidence for sailing-boats. Yet certain features of the models, and their contexts, identify them instead as spinning bowls used by weavers.

I do not see that Professor Palmer has any adequate grounds for his refusal to accept the definitive opinion of Evans and Mackenzie that the Linear B tablets found at Knossos were all of them—or the great bulk of them—from the ruins of the Palace and other buildings destroyed at the end of the Late Minoan II period about 1400 B.C.

This opinion was based, not upon a few isolated ‘facts’ of the kind which Professor Palmer has, with commendable diligence, mustered against it, but upon their observation of the ruins of the ‘Last Palace’ (as they called it) as a whole. In these ruins they found, on the one hand Linear B tablets, on the other remains of vases decorated in the ‘Palace Style’ of Late Minoan II, which falls in time between what Evans called Late Minoan I (c, 1550–1450 B.C.) and Late Minoan III (c. 1400 B.C. and later). It is to the end of the Late Minoan III period, about 1200 B.C. or later, that Professor Palmer wishes to transfer the tablets.

Peter Woodman's survey-article in ANTIQUITY, ‘Filling the spaces in Irish prehistory’ (66: 295–314), was developed from his paper to the Prehistoric Society, ‘What's new in Irish prehistory?’ Was it actually new? Did it fill the spaces in the periods of earlier Irish prehistory that ANTIQUITY asked Professor Woodman to address? Gabriel Cooney offers a different perspective on Irish prehistory.

When we study the end of the Roman occupation of Britain we tend to glue our eyes so closely to the nnumismatical and archaeological evidence that there seems to be some danger of giving the literary authorities rather less attention than they deserve. But the relevant passages of Zosimus are of capital importance, and it is proposed to examine them here.

It will not be denied, I think, that Zosimus is one of the most incompetent of the Greek historians. Nevertheless, as in the case of all ancient historians, we are bound to suppose that Zosimus’ statements are accurate unless we have some sufficient reason for doubting them. It is a mistake in method to ascribe errors to him when there is no evidence for doing so. Now in the passages under discussion he is supported by other writers in some particulars and he is our sole authority in others. It does not follow that where he is our only authority his statements are necessarily wrong. His source here is Olympiodons, who, though an Egyptian Greek, seems to have dealt mainly with Western events in his History. Born c. 365, he was an exact contemporary of the last days of the Roman administration of Britain. His History in 22 books covered the fateful years 407–25, and an examination of his fragments (mostly preserved by Photius) gives good reason for supposing that he was a writer of exceptional interest and reliability. It would be folly to ignore the narrative of such a writer, even though that narrative survives only at second hand.

New calibration studies of burials from the Catacomb culture of western Eurasia enable better understanding of the spread and development of different Bronze Age traditions.

Two curiously marked bones from a Medieval deposit in Tarragona are seen to have functioned as anvils, on which iron sickles were anchored while they were being given saw teeth. The interpretation drew on the knowledge of a modern blacksmith working in a village near the town, and the practice turns out to have been widespread in Spain Portugal and Morocco from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries.

In the latest of his periodic reviews of Celtic exhibitions in the pages of Antiquity (Megaw 1981; 1992; 1994) Vincent resumes the Grand Tour and evaluates a series of such events over the past decade.

The recommended Belfast/Seattle radiocarbon calibration (Pearson 1987) coming into common use gives us ‘good’ portions, where the calibration curve has a shape that aids in refining dates, and ‘sloughs of despond’ - the periods when the shape of the curve is less helpful. Two deep sloughs arefound in the last few centuries ncand in the 3rd millennium BC. Here, a series of new determinations are presented for Bell Beakers in Spain, falling in the 3rd-millennium slough, and it is shown what can and cannot be learnt from these and their calibration.

Zambujal is c. 40 km. NNW of Lisbon, 11.5 km. from the Atlantic coast. A farmhouse (casal) of this name is situated on a steep inland promontory above the Ribeira de Pedrulhos. This stream flows into the Rio Sizandro near its mouth. The location of the settlement is one of easy access from the coast; at the same time it is far enough from it to be safe from surprise attacks from that direction. When approached from the coast or along the valley, the casal is not immediately visible. Its position on the mountain ridge was presumably advantageous for the fortified settlement too. From the site itself one has an excellent view of the region, including the approach routes and a strip of the coast.

No one, so far as I know, has as yet made any particular study of the many local learned societies that were founded up and down France in the years after the French Revolution, and of their effect upon contemporary thought. These Sociétés d’Émulation differed from the local archaeological and historical societies of England in being more all-embracing ; they included in their scope pure literature, philosophy and science as well as the history and antiquities of the district, and often developed a philanthropic side as well. At the time of their foundation they were often of a free-thinking colour ; but as the balance of French life came to be restored after the Revolution this element was forgotten, and the more learned priests of the neighbourhood were often included among their members.

These societies fostered a peculiar polymathic quality among those who regularly attended their frequent meetings. They were to a great extent self-supporting in the provision of papers and communications, and it would have been pure selfishness for any member with any claim to versatility to specialize too deeply. Their standards, too, were not those of the Metropolis, where a new professionalism was bringing higher and more exact criteria into every branch of knowledge and speculation. Rather, we can see in the Sociétés d’Émulation of the nineteenth century the continuance of the amateur spirit that in the eighteenth century had flourished in the aristocratic circles of Court and château : a spirit surviving in a less polished form among the lesser gentry of the provincial towns.

The 1968 excavations were a continuation of the investigations that have been in progress at Knowth since 1962. In brief, this work is establishing that there is a cemetery of Passage Graves at Knowth. This consists of the large tumulus (Site I) with a number of smaller tombs in its immediate vicinity. This group is situated on a low hill that on the west overlooks the River Boyne at a point a couple of miles downstream from Slane where the river takes a sharp turn to the left [I]. MAIN MOUND At Knowth a tract of land that is close to a halfmile in length and one fifth of a mile in greatest width (c. 800 m. x 340 m.) is above the 200-ft. contour (60 m.) but even the highest part of this is only slightly over the 200-ft. mark. The large mound is situated towards the north-western extremity of this ridge and the smaller tombs are

Very soon after the ice withdrew from the higher levels of the Scandinavian Peninsula the vegetation invaded. Even up to at least 1,100–1,20 m above sea-level the pine forest was in existence about 8,500 years ago (Barth et al., 1980).

Radiocarbon datings from human sites in the high mountains of southern Norway also go back 8,500 years BP (Moe et al., 1978, Bang-Andersen & Kjos-Hanssen, 1979). It seems probable that the reindeer has been ‘the only possible resource that can explain man's presence in the highlands during the Early Mesolithic’ (Moe et al., 1978). There is little doubt that for groups of people in the Norwegian mountains, reindeer was the most important food during thousands of years (Barth 1981a).

A rock-shelter near the north Argentinian coast offers an archaeological sequence of hunter-gatherer occupation running intermittently from Palaeo-Indian times to the era of European contact.