An archive is a collection of materials intended to be kept safe for the long term. Those materials are gathered by some responsible agency, but they were created originally by others. They were made in the forms and with the methods chosen by their creators. That is, an archive contains materials that have been created by others, that have been formed and informed by the judgements of others and that are intensely idiosyncratic. An archive is not simply a collection of facts or ideas or objects; it is a collection of other peoples’ individual or collected facts and ideas and objects. As a result, the contents of an archive are disparate in the extreme, from books to diaries to maps to photographs. A digital archive is at least as chaotic as any other, probably more so. Its contents may include text files, data-base files, images, CAD files, GIs files and more.

Our interpretation of Bronze Age metalwork is based, for the most part, on common-sense ideas of what is functional and what is not, which items were intended to be recovered, which were gifts to other worlds. A more considered source of analogy than our limited experience is available at a certain distance. Remote in terms of measured miles, the analogy is nevertheless effective in expanding current definitions of how ritual is expressed through material culture.

The intricacy and variety of classical ‘small finds‘ again combine with the dangers — so archaeologically helpful and satisfying — of Roman sea-faring to point directly to how Roman surgeons carried out their skills.

In 1898 a Swedish-American farmer, Olaf Ohman, cut down an aspen tree on his farm. He found enveloped in its roots a large flat stone which he only just managed to get out without ruining his axe. When his ten year old son had brushed some of the dirt from the stone, Ohman discovered that one of the faces and one of the edges were covered with strange engraved figures. It was soon decided that these had something to do with runes. This is where the saga of the Kensington stone begins: from Ohman's farm to a shop window in Kensington, to Prof. O. J. Breda in Minneapolis, to Prof. George O. Curme, back to Ohman's farm condemned as a blatant forgery. Here it lay despised as ‘a stepping stone near his granary for eight years, without further notice’. It was ‘rediscovered’ by Hjalmar Holand, bought by him, and he devoted his life (three large books and innumerable articles) to attempting to prove that the inscription was genuine. Finally in its Jubilee year 1948 it was given the place of honour in the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington as one of the finest pre-Columbian monuments of America.

It is more than 70 years since O.G.S. Crawford, founder of ANTIQUITY, was given air photographs from southern England which led him to realize their potential for archaeology. Leo Deuel's book Flights into yesterday was translated into Czech in 1979, providing a first impetus to the new programme of work in Bohemia presented here, a programme made possible by the new freedom to fly and photograph that followed the revolution of 1989.

Commercial excavators often find that their way back to the past runs through relatively recent structures. What should we do with them? Intellectually sensitive modern excavators, like our authors, are beginning to convince us that these recent constructions not only matter in themselves, but may have interesting links to what lies beneath. Here they introduce us to the foundations of an early telescope, a monument that takes its context both from the much-investigated lands of West Cambridge, and the more abstract landscape of early science. Forcing archaeology to ask fresh questions and make ambitious connections is only proper in a place heavy with the aroma of investigative scholarship.

Examples of Open Arable Fields in cultivation at the present time are so rare that it is strange that those in the Isle of Portland in Dorset have been overlooked by every writer on this subject, This omission is probably due to the isolation of Portland, thrust, as it is, far out into the waters of the English Channel. Its isolation, also, is probably one reason why these open fields have survived, for Portland is a district of survivals. The Court Leet of its Royal Manor still exercises real authority, and Portlanders are tenacious of their ancient rights and customs. They tolerate but are not over-fond of ‘foreigners’ from the mainland and they sturdily resent outside interference and direction.

The Middle East generally (Bar-Yosef 1994) and Iran specifically (Vahdati Nasab et al. 2013) have become a focus for the study of human migration between South-west Asia and Central and Eastern Asia during the Pleistocene (Asgari Khaneghah et al. 2005; Biglari & Shidrang 2006; Heydari Guran 2012). In Iran, studies of the Palaeolithic have concentrated on the Zagros and Alborz areas, but recent work in the sub-montane areas, desert margins and lowland plains have also revealed interesting results regarding the activities of hunter-gatherer societies (Biglari et al. 2000; Dashtizadeh 2009; Vahdati Nasab et al. 2009, 2010, 2013; Darabi et al. 2012).

The water-mill with the horizontal wheel remains a characteristic feature of peasant Tc ulture in several Faeroe settlements, but its remaining days of usefulness among the islands are doubtless numbered. Formerly, nearly all the villages appear to have maintained one or more such mills for the production of rugmjJ, the coarse brown flour made from the six-rowed barley (Hordeurn vulgare Linn.), but in the majority of places these interesting structures have fallen into desuetude, or have vanished completely, within the last thirty or forty years.

A British academic abroad may find it hard to explain why his country – with a lower proportion of school-leavers going to university than in almost any other western state – sees no good cause to improve matters. For archaeology, the recent past, as is set out here, has been a story of disordered attrition; the future seems a choice between planned contraction or unplanned decay. Behind this British-parochial dilemma is a wider issue: should archaeology be a vocational training or part of broad liberal-science education? And the concern as to the minimum size of a viable archaeology department has implications everywhere, especially where archaeology is taught as one element in a broader historical or anthropological field.

Our only guide to the thoughts and motives of mankind is a correct interpretation of their acts; and when we are dealing with the Past our only guide to their acts lies in a correct interpretation of the results of those acts. These results are visible in their writings, buildings, paintings, and in all the other works of their hands.

Time, with all its attendant destructive agents-war, wear, and wilful destruction-has obscured the evidence onsiderably; but much still remains, though it may require labour, patience, and careful deduction to secure it.