Two hundred and ten years ago ‘ old Stukeley ’, the Archdruid, (then 36 years of age) made a famous discovery on a heath near London—nothing less than one of Julius Caesar’s camps. At least Stukeley liked to think it such, and to embroider his treasure with many fanciful imaginings. ‘Here he received the ambassadors of the Trinobantes, desiring their prince Mandubrace to be restored. . . . Another day came in ambassadors from the Cenimani, Segontiaci, Ancalites, Bibroci and Cassi’. True to his laudable custom, he made a rough plan of the ’camp‘, which shows that it was, according to his own measurements, 100 by 80 paces, and contained within it another similar enclosure. There was also an irregular eastern annex, 100 paces by 130, designed for the accommodation of the second lot of ambassadors !

Few monuments are more interesting to the general observer than the hill-figures carved on the chalk downs of Southern England. The publication of Sir Flinders Petrie's monograph has led us to revisit one of those he describes; and the resulting observations are here set down for what they are worth.

The Trucial Oman States in Eastern Arabia have been intermittently in the news since withdrawal from the area was announced in 1968. At that time, Mr D. B. Doe and I were engaged in a brief survey of archaeological sites in the Sheikhdom of Ras al-Khaimah subsequently extended to a stretch of the eastern coast from Kalba to Khawr Fakkan (FIG. I). An awareness of political boundaries is essential in the Oman peninsula because the extreme north and a large part of the southeastern sector south of Kalba lie in the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, a territory which is virtually closed to foreigners.

Looking back over a concern with archaeology which has lasted for half a century I am grateful to have been present through a crucial period in its development.

There were few advantages in my earliest days. On my father’s side I come from a line of farmers, land appraisers, bailiffs and the like which I can trace back in some detail for nearly three hundred years, living for the most part in Northwest Essex; on my mother’s side my ancestors were North Wessex peasants and inn-keepers, with a probable admixture of Welsh cattle-drover blood at the end of the eighteenth century. Wantage and Abingdon were their local centres. All with the exception of one or two backsliders were strict Evangelicals, often wavering on the verge of Dissent, and none ever aspired to any higher standard of education than one who entered the Congregational ministry in 1827. Any known interest in learning or antiquity showed itself more among the Wessex peasants than the clod-hoppers of Essex. My maternal grandfather, who was a native of the Vale of White Horse, was personally known to me and was interested in the many relics of the past observable about him, an intelligent man but with little formal instruction.

The excavation of the Clickhimin site in the Shetland Islands by the Ministry of Public Building and Works revealed the arrangement of living quarters inside a small stonebuilt fort occupied between the 4th and 1st centuries BC [I]. With the exception of a large communal stonebuilt hut in the centre of the enclosure, the inhabitants dwelt in a series of half-timbered storeyed ranges attached to the inner face of the fort wall (FIG. I). The pent-roofs of these ranges were supported by a dwarf, or casement, wall built on the wall walk, and access between the rooms at first-floor level and the walk was obtained through a series of doorways. Two stonebuilt duns in the Western Isles, Dun Ringill and Dun Grugaig, still retain the jambs of such doorways and at Clickhimin a similar door was preserved in the blockhouse guarding the fort entrance though here it led to a passage which gave access to a stair to the parapet walk at second-floor level [2].

The management of earthwork sites and their protection from erosion is a constant problem. Here Kevin Jones assesses methods and materials used on archaeological sites in Britain. It is essential to find compatible, economic land uses for most earthworks but this use should not lead to diminished expectations of good protection and historic interpretation.

A set of papers on the human settlement of the steppes, epoch by epoch, is not complete unless it pays attention to the last glaciation, when periglacial steppe adaptations show remarkable cultural development, especially in the famous mammoth-bone houses. The subsistence basis depended - as a coincident paper in this issue (pages 719-32 above) shows – on an unusual and unusually early development of food storage, with all that implied for social evolution.

Pressure of present commitments did not allow the writing of a new single paper on this time-period. Instead, we print here a collected set of five short contributions, by N.D. Praslov and colleanues that indicate well the evidence and the range of Soviet approaches to it. We thank Olga Soffer and George Frison for allowing us to draw on the outlines of papers given at the joint USSR-USA meeting on the Upper Palaeolithic-Palaeolndian held in the USSR in August 1989.

Radiocarbon dating is probably the greatest contribution that has been made to archaeology by the physical sciences, and we owe its existence to the genius of Willard Frank Libby, who died in Los Angeles at the age of 71 years on 8 September 1980. His death is a loss both to archaeology and, because of the breadth of his scientific interests and achievements, to science at large.

Ireland is important in the early metallurgy of northwest Europe, for it has given us a large majority of the Early Bronze Age artefacts from the whole British Isles. Is there tinore to have been mined in early Ireland to produce this bronze or must it have come from elsewhere?