To British archaeologists, the hill-forts in France are likely to be second in interest only to those in this country; they also form natural attractions when touring. For the southern sixsevenths of the country, however, information about these sites is very sparse, while plans or detailed directions for access are almost entirely lacking. In these circumstances the following notes may be of use. The accompanyingplans, save where noted, are merely pace-and-prismatic sketches, but give a better indication of the character of the remains than would be possible by description alone; for ease in comparison, they are reproduced to 1/2500 or some simple multiple. They are believed to be fairly correct representations, but it must be noted that many of the sites are very thickly overgrown. It must be emphasized that this is in no way a systematic study of French hill-forts, but merely the results of a brief tour made in 1966 to gain some personal knowledge of what the sites are like, supplemented by a few additional notes made during other visits.

The building of a replica classical warship, the Athenian trieres, is the most ambitious project of experimental archaeology so far. The ship is building in a Piraeus yard to a design worked out from original sources and using the experience of the partial replica illustrated in ANTIQUITY in 1985 (Morrison & Coates 1985; and for the full story Morrison & Coates 1986, reviewed in this number). But how authentic is the replica? The project leaders set out here how their trireme will differ from the real thing. The result, they believe, is a craft which will faithfully copy a new and well-built ship. But it does use some modern materials; it should last much better than did the classical ships; and it will carry some wholly modern gear. It is no part of their experiment to see how fast an ancient ship rotted or how nastily an Athenian crew drowned when the rotting was complete.

The Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit came into operation during 1983, at about the same time as the sister machine at the University of Arizona, Tucson. A conference in October 1985 explored its first two years' work; a review of that conference's proceedings is the occasion to see how much momentum AMS dating is generating.

The discovery of the extraordinary Hirschlanden figure was reported in this journal in 1964. Since then the statue has featured in numerous discussions of Iron Age art and society, to the extent that it has become one of the iconic images of the European Iron Age. It has become almost taken for granted that the Hirschlanden figure is an ‘intensely masculine’ warrior statue representing the heroised dead. However, certain aspects of the figure suggest a rather deeper, more ambiguous symbolism. The authors use their up-to-date critique to raise questions about the eclectic character of Iron Age spirituality.

The exhibition, Rome and the Barbarians: the Birth of a New World, in Venice, meditates on Europe's cultural genealogy. Europe, it argues, is a concoction of disparate traditions conceived and developed by the will of admiring immigrants to the Roman world from the east and north. It raises a range of issues left latent in the gallery. How can we create an appropriate narrative for the first millennium AD, particularly with archaeological finds? How, for that matter, can Europe's tradition be defined; and what prompts the issue?

Our dictionaries tell us that ‘Philistine’ denotes ‘an uncouth or uncultured person’. Archaeologically, this definition is quite unjustified for the Philistines were the main civilizing influence on the Hebrews during the critical period when Israel emerged from rude tribalism to forge a cultured empire. The magnitude of the Philistine impact is reflected in the name of ‘Palestine’ (= Hebrew peléšet ‘Philistia’) which clings to the country after more than three millennia.

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.

I thank all the authors for their thoughtful responses to my paper. I believe they effectively highlight some of the diverse opinions about the concept of the Anthropocene and underscore the challenges faced by the ICS subcommission.