The second edition of the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain gives us what we have never had before—a detailed account of the distribution of population over a large tract of the Roman Empire. Hitherto it has been impossible to say what principles governed the distribution of population during that period; and the result has been that everything written about the population of the Roman Empire has been somewhat vague and inconclusive, and has generally been confined to sweeping generalizations founded on induction from a very few facts, or to mere repetition of isolated statements, some doubtless true, others perhaps exaggerated or misleading, made by ancient writers.

The Basquesmith project aims to illuminate the cycle of iron production and consumption by early medieval rural farming communities in the Álava province, Basque Country, northern Spain.

On a bit of marsh-mound land cast up in the James River was planted the first permanent English settlement in America. The landing at Jamestown, 13 May (o.s.), 1607, did not represent the first attempt to found an English colony on the eastern seaboard. In 1585 an expedition under the command of Sir Richard Grenville and with Ralph Lane as Lieutenant-Governor established the ill-fated Roanoke Island colony off the coast of North Carolina. By 1590 it had vanished—to this day the fate of the ‘Lost Colony’ is uncertain.

Of all the prehistoric periods yet distinguished in Western Europe the Neolithic has suffered the hardest fate. Having in the past enjoyed a seemingly secure and important position in the field of prehistory, with an estimated duration of several thousand years, this unfortunate period has of late been so assailed before and behind that its very existence has been called in question. In Britain, however, recent researches seem to have rescued our Neolithic from complete extinction by the encroaching Mesolithic and Bronze Ages, and given it an established position once more, albeit a more humble one than it occupied in its days of undue inflation. Because it has become better understood, an epoch to which formerly thousands of yearswere allocated is now limited to hundreds.

The readers of ANTIQUITY were, from the first, correctly informed about Glozel. But, having exposed the fraud, the Editor decided to ignore the torrent of polemics which ensued. His attitude was a wise one, for a forgery can only be scotched in its own country.

Why then revert now to the subject? Are there not good reasons for saying no more about it? One might urge, for instance, that the affair was now at an end: that it was an absurd hoax which now has been recognized as such by practically all prehistorians; that there remain only a few obstinate dupes who refuse to admit their original mistake; and that in the heat of controversy, inexpert people have become involved and have taken the affair out of the domain of science: so that it has now ceased to be of interest to serious students—it is no longer Science.

Southern Arabia was an important trading partner for the Roman world but owing to geography and politics its archaeology has been less intensively studied than that of neighbouring regions. A succession of kingdoms rose and fell in the last centuries BC and first centuries AD, but in the late Roman period the dominant power was Ḥimyar, with its capital at Ẓafār. In 2008 a relief sculpture was discovered at the site depicting a crowned ruler accompanied by symbols of office. This study reviews the arguments surrounding the date of the sculpture, but more importantly throws light on the cultural and political connections that it embodies. The proposal is that it represents an Aksumite puppet-ruler of the sixth century, at a key moment in the history of the Ḥimyarite kingdom. The crowned king of Ẓafār is significant not only in itself but also in helping to delineate the cultural and political stage on to which Islam was shortly to emerge.

The Flag Fen excavations of 1984 revealed a large number of oak timbers and it was immediately apparent that there was potential for dendrochronology. It was suggested that the work should initially comprise a major element in the Ph.D research of Nigel Holman, at the University of Cambridge. The direction of that research, however, moved away from Flag Fen, and it was not until 1987 that the Trust became aware of the situation. It was then decided, after much urgent consultation, that the best approach to the Flag Fen tree-ring analysis would be to undertake the study in-house (Pryor 1991: 111). The intention has been to keep costs low and (in view of the accumulated backlog) to produce as many measured samples as was reasonably possible. The dendrometer and computer facilities were initially provided by the Trust and the full implementation of the scheme has been supervised by the author. This work has been carried out under the supervision of the English Heritage funded Sheffield Dendrochronology Laboratory – to whom special thanks are due.

The physical form of the Elizabethan theatre, as shown by contemporary prints and engravings, has long been an important field of study for Shakespeare scholars. The discoveries in the late 1980s on Bankside of first the 16th-century Rose theatre and then the Globe have provided material remains of these structures, but at the same time posed new questions relating to design and construction, as this account of the excavation of part of the Globe site in 1989 and 1991 graphically demonstrates.

Between 1967 and 1979 the Institute of History of Material Culture of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the State University of New York at Buffalo carried out a joint programme of archaeological field research on Neolithic and early Bronze Age (EBA) sites in southeastern Poland. As part of this programme in 1967-9 and 1971-3 Professor Jan Machnik conducted archaeological investigations at Iwanowice on a wedge-shaped elevation known as Babia Góra (50 12 14 E, 19 58 30 W, FIGURE 1). The site, some 8 ha in area (520 × 230 m), lies on the borderline between the Cracow-Częstochowa and Miechów Uplands, some 20 km north of Crakow on a hill spur overlooking the Dłubnia river valley. Babia Góra is built of siliceous limestone heavily laced with flint nodules covered by a thick mantle of loess. The entire area of the site is now under cultivation.

In an important paper, O'Connor et al. (2011) described evidence for marine fishing from around 42 000-year-old (cal BP) deposits at Jerimalai Shelter on Timor-Leste. The paper's title referred to evidence for pelagic fishing and the maritime skills of anatomically modern humans (AMH). Considering that not long ago human seafaring and marine fishing were considered to be limited to the terminal Pleistocene or early Holocene (see Erlandson 2001), the paper's broader significance lies in the further evidence for Pleistocene voyaging required to colonise Timor-Leste and the quantities of fish bone that represent a substantial marine fishing effort at a relatively early date.

Issue is here taken about inference from skeletal evidence to the darker side of Dark Age life and death.

We print here a slightly revised version of a lecture given by Professor Stuart Piggott to the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society at Devizes on 15 October 1985. It includes new material, particularly relating to the Richard of Cirencester forgery, that has come to light since the publication of his book on William Stukeley, the new edition of which was recently reviewed in these pages (1986, 67–8).

The judgements shaping archaeology and every subject in British universities (see remarks in the Editorial above) are based on certain presumptions about how research and teaching can best be done. Some of these premisses are noted.