It is widely recognized that a knowledge and understanding of the origins and development of human societies is of fundamental importance to humanity in identifying its cultural and social roots.

This is an excellent and tightly written argument against the indiscriminate and essentialist extension of invented anthropological typologies, such as ‘the San’, back into the Pleistocene. While analogical arguments that relate similarities in excavated tools, poisons and so on to the repertoire of items used by extant peoples in order to interpret their function is a common approach in archaeology, as the authors rightly point out, the extension of these analogies to include particular cultural and linguistic forms is ‘a theoretically flawed exercise’.

Under the old Treasure Trove laws, small, single items of precious metal were frequently dismissed by Coroners as casual losses (although they still had to be reported). This meant that numbers of small items never went to inquest, as one of the criteria for Treasure was that in all likelihood objects had been buried with the intention to recover them (the animus revertendi). This criterion was removed when the new Act was passed some five years ago. The extension of the law to cover such items has thrown up at least one problem of definition.

A later Bronze Age gold penannular ring was recently found not to be treasure at inquest, because the piece was held to be a coin. Single, stray finds of coins are not counted as treasure, whereas any ornament of precious metal at least 300 years old, small or large, is now eligible under the 1996 Treasure Act. This raises two issues. The first concerns the definition of ‘coin’ as explained in the Code of Practice; the second is about terminology, and specifically the use of the term ‘ring-money’ to describe such objects.

The study of Anglo-Saxon pottery in the pagan period in England has probably received less attention, and has certainly made less progress, than that of any other archaeological epoch. Our knowledge of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age ceramics has been revolutionized in the last ten or fifteen years, and it is now possible to use the pottery of these periods, as it should be possible to use the pottery of any period, as the most ignificant and sensitive element in the cultural evidence for the time. With some types of Roman pottery it is possible to go still further, and to treat them not only as a barometer to indicate the varying cultural pressures, so to speak, of different areas and sites, but even as a chronometer for the close dating of the different phases in their occupation. But with Anglo-Saxon pottery at present we can do none of these things. Apart from certain rare and peculiar forms recently studied by Roeder: we know about as much and about as little about it as was known when Neville published his Saxon Obsequies in 1852, or Kemble first drew attention to the continental parallels in a pioneer paper in Archaeologia in 1856.

It was in July 1952 that Mr Michael Ventris announced his solution of the fifty-year-old puzzle of the Minoan Linear B script. The announcement was at first received with proper scepticism, for many ‘solutions’ had already been published, none of which had proved convincing upon closer inspection. Most of them had been based upon quite inadequate collections of material, for it was not until the spring of 1952 that all the inscriptions in that script then known were published. Mr Ventris' theory, the first to be built upon broad enough foundations, has now withstood more than a year's testing, and its essential correctness has been vindicated by its successful application to new and unpublished material. Mr Ventris has generously made his work available to interested scholars, and an international group is now collaborating with him in pressing forward the decipherment of the tablets along the lines he has laid down. Although much remains to be done, the basis of the solution is no longer in doubt, and we can now offer a preliminary summary of the results of this remarkable discovery.

Some thirty years ago, I took part in the Seminar für Ur- und Frühgeschichte der Universität Basel's traditional field trip to La Tène. We discussed the various interpretations put forward for a site that had given its name to the later Iron Age in Europe: bridges, toll, battle, fort, refugium, accident, votive deposit, sanctuary. We berated the methods of investigation of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: they could not bridge the gap between what was found and what La Tène had come to mean in the ensuing century. Thirty years on, things have changed.

I would like to start with the contentious assertion that there is very little special about CD-ROMs; they are little more than overgrown floppy disks with a long shelf-life, and uncertain sell-by date. A CD-ROM can contain about 650 Mb (Megabytes) of digital information, the equivalent of 450 high-density floppy disks, A CD-ROM is much more durable than a floppy disk, if kept away from small children and dogs, and is certainly more convenient to transport and handle than 450 floppy disks. A floppy disk will fade and its contents will become unreadable after about 4 or 5 years. A shiny CDROM on the other hand will last physically for at least 30 years, we are promised. Unfortunately the CD-ROM is already headed for the scrap heap of our technological past and is set to join the burins and scrapers. Yes, the Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) is coming our way. It can contain up to 17 Gb (Gigabytes) — that’s 17 with nine zeros after it, the equivalent of 11,805 floppy disks full of data. Fifteen years ago, back in 1982, a 10-Mb hard disk was considered an expensive technological marvel with more than enough capacity (equivalent to 25 of the lowercapacity, 400-Kb floppy disks of the ‘80s). Nowadays, the CD-ROM, given away on the front of glossy magazines, and costing Sop to produce, contains 65 times that amount of information. My point is that I don’t think we should become obsessed with the technology and the means of delivery of data on some kind of disk. What is far more important is what is actually on the disk — the message not the messenger.

Antiquity is pleased to present a preliminary report on the stone statue of a Celtic warrior recently discovered at the celebrated excavation at Lattes, southern France, and dating to around 500 BC.

At the end of the last war it became known to archaeologists in this country that there had been published in Germany in 1943 the first part, itself in two massivevolumes, of a monumental survey of the Spanish chambered tombs by Dr and Frau Leisner. Die Megalithgraber der Iberischen Halbinsel-I Der Suden was sponsored and produced by the Romisch-Germanische Kommission, and for the first time the results of the excavations of Siret, Bonsor and others were presented to scholars in a manner which set a new standard in the publication of such material. The work is noteworthy not only for its detailed and informed discussion of the tombs and their contents, but for its scheme of total presentation of the evidence in visual form and to uniform conventions of scale and draughtsmanship, supported by photographs where necessary.