The wonderful find at Trelleborg: near Slagelse in Denmark is all too little known in this country. In fact the name of Trelleborg itself is practically unknown, or confused with the town of the same name in Sweden.

The site is one of the most important earthworks in Denmark. The rampart measures 25 metres in thickness. It lies on the eastern shore of the Great Belt, and as Herr Poul Nörlund, the explorer of the site, himself says of it: ‘Trelleborg lies even now so much out of the way that there are few places in the much built-up coast of Vestsjæland which are so difficult to find, with no direct road leading to it’.

In the last few years, widely ranging reconnaissance flights sponsored by the Committee for Aerial Photography in the University of Cambrike have been made over Wales for the purpose of archaeological and other research. Here Dr St. Joseph, the Curator in Aerial Photography at Cambridge, who planned these flights and undertook the photography, discusses some of the outstanding results of air photography in a region which has hitherto been neglected from this point of view.

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.

For most archaeologists across the globe, mention of Africa in the context of archaeological research will probably bring to mind the important discoveries of early stone tools and hominid remains in eastern and southern Africa, the spectacular stone-walled enclosures and other structures at Great Zimbabwe, and images of ‘tribal’ culture, subsistence practices, artefacts and housing that, to some Western eyes at least, can seem reminiscent of a more distant non-African past. For some, the architectural and artistic splendours of Egyptian civilization may also form part of this image of archaeology on the continent, although for complex geopolitical, historical and academic reasons the study of Egyptian archaeology, in all but a few instances, continues to be regarded as distinct from that of the rest of Africa. While accepting that the preceding sentences are something of a caricature of the non-Africanist’s understanding and perception of the work of archaeologists on the continent, and that general introductory texts on archaeological methods and theory nowadays give wider coverage of African case-studies than was the case even a decade ago (e.g. Renfrew & Bahn 1991; Fagan 1995), the level of awareness of the breadth of African archaeology, current discoveries and research issues, as well as the many problems that practitioners and managers face on a daily basis, remains abysmally low.

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?

Thirty years after his death, on 19 October 1957, V. Gordon Childe's ideas seem full of life. Peter Gathercole has watched the Childe literature grow – with three biographical studies, any number of articles and a major conference in Mexico last year (its proceedings will be reviewed in the next number) – and has contributed to it himself. ANTIQUITY invited him to make the points that seem most pertinent about Childe today.

The dictum of Clark Wissler that ‘New World culture is [thus] a kind of pyramid whose base is as broad as the two Americas and whose apex rests over Middle America’ is one of those brilliant generalizations which at once sum up the conclusions already reached, and point the way to further progress.

From the vantage of today one may agree with A. V. Kidder (22, p. 145) that American archaeologists have been unduly neglectful of the broad base of their pyramid. Yet itwould be churlish to blame them when the apex was so enticing, so rich, so bizarre and above all so enigmatic. Indeed, when men first descried the peaks of Maya, Mexican and Peruvian achievement, it seemed hard to connect them with the lowly foot- hills of cultural attainment familiar in the temperate latitudes of the western hemisphere. Until the underlying unity of civilization in the New World was recognized, its pyramidal structure could hardly be appreciated; in default of this it is easy to understand how archaeologists tended to neglect cultures, which, however interesting they may appear to us from the historical angle, must have appeared to them as intrinsically poor and dull. Then again it was only on the edges of the pyramid that the foundation layer was visible; elsewhere it was buried under a superstructure, massive in proportion to its attractiveness.

The ability to recognize the traces of ancient cultivation is essential to all students of earthworks and field-workers. The scope of our study is being widened, so that we are interested not merely in fortifications but in any kind of interference with the surface soil resulting from man’s activities in the past. It would be purely an arbitrary distinction to be interested in a hill-fort and not in the surface traces of an agricultural village of the same date, and these same surface traces consist very largely in lynchets, or cultivation terraces, the presence of which is often the sole clue to the site of the settlement.

It is a matter of observation that agricultural processes at different periods may leave quite distinct and separate kinds of traces on the ground. This depends on the kind of plough used, and on different habits with regard to the shape, size, and outlay of the fields. The one feature that is common to most ancient fields is the tendency to form terraces on sloping ground, due to the way in which the soil creeps downhill under the influence of ploughing and rain-wash, forming an accumulation along the lower edges of the plot.

Peculiar to the red clay plain of northwest Syria are the ‘beehive’ villages called ‘Campo di Melle’ by the early Venetian and Genoese traders. The characteristic beehive name and shape is a purely Western concept as the local beehive is a small mud cube. These village houses, built of mud brick, are ideally adapted to their environment ; they are warm in winter and cool in summer. The villages cluster about ancient ‘tells’ or dot the plains from Aleppo south to Homs, occupying a total area of roughly thirty by one hundred and fifty miles (PLATES v and VI). To the north and east this distinctive type of building gives way to the square mud brick house with flat mud roof supported on poles and brush, while to the west the rocky outcrops of the Lebanon range provide an easily worked stone for houses and barns.

New archaeological evidence, principally from rural settlements, questions previous conceptions of the economic background to the transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages. In particular, finds from the Balkans, a geographical ‘hinge’ between North and South and East and West, is discussed. The major periods of change are both the 5th and the 7th centuries AD.