For centuries, scholarship in the western tradition has centred on printed books as the defining medium by which it expresses and preserves knowledge. Ask in the rare-books library for a source of scholarly understanding about Stonehenge which is a full five centuries old, Caxton’s Chronicle of England of 1482, and you find a printed volume which as a physical object astonishingly resembles a book about Stonehenge of 1982 or of 1998 — in its alphabet of standardized letters adapted from hand-written forms, in its black ink on folded paper, in its binding, in the size, the shape and the number of pages, in the type-size, the line spacing and the margins to the page, in the divisions by paragraphs and chapters, in the ordering, indexing and conventions of its contents. Already old in the 15th century — for these conventions derived from the habits of the copied manuscripts — that standard format shapes scholarly knowledge to this day.

The complete decipherment of Mayan glyphs is an event that neither we, nor perhaps our children, shall ever see: the script is tortuously complicated, as many hieroglyphic writing systems are, and hardly susceptible to rapid and unequivocal ‘codebreaking’. Nevertheless, good progress has been made towards reading the glyphs, with many solid achievements in reconstructing the genealogies and political interaction of royal dynasties of the Classic period (e.g. Berlin 1959; Proskouriakoff 1960). The focus of the present paper is another, more controversial feature of Mayan glyphs: a set of ‘phonetic’ or syllabic units used in spelling Mayan words. Virtually all glyph specialists now accept the validity of these units, but the path to consensus has been difficult and acrimonious. We shall examine here why many good scholars resisted ‘phoneticism’ in Mayan script, and why additional evidence so impressively confirms its existence.

More on whether the prehistoric pottery vessels from Eridu, in Mesopotamia, are models of precocious boats, or as was argued in a recent ANTIQUITY, spinning bowls.

Here is a story to strike a chill of anxiety into the hearts of editors and their peer-reviewers. Do we, should we, need we check our submissions with greater rigour?

Desmond Clark, who has just retired from his Chair at the University of California at Berkeley, and in whose honour a special congress on African prehistory was held in his own department a few months ago, here looks back at his life in archaeology and at archaeology in his lifetime. It is the tenth and last in our series. All ten articles are being republished by Thames and Hudson.

Atholl Anderson's comment (above) on the recent finds from Jerimalai draws attention to the dangers of over-interpreting the wider significance of marine resources present in Pleistocene coastal sites without careful evaluation of at least three variables: (1) the accurate identification of the species represented and hence of their behaviour and accessibility to capture; (2) the actual quantities and rates of accumulation of the marine food remains; and (3) local ecological and oceanographic conditions. To these I would add a fourth variable: the bathymetry and submerged topography of the marine environment adjacent to the sites in question—the physical structure of what one might call the 'offshore catchment'—and changes resulting from relative sea level variation (including eustatic and isostatic/tectonic effects).

Another contribution to discovering the history and origin of words for ‘prehistory’ comes from Sweden, a critical land for 19th-century archaeological ideas.

To the anthropologist, the dating of the fossil remains of prehistoric man in the Far East has always seemed a vague and haphazard business. So far as Europe is concerned, we have accepted the correlations between cultural sequences and stratigraphical data which have been worked out after many years of intensive work by geologists and archaeologists. Indeed, so well has the evidence been clarified for us that we even feel we can to some extent assess the validity of arguments put forward for the chronological position of this or that piece of human fossil. But the Far East is very different. The cultural sequences characteristic of Europe are not to be found there, the animal and plant remains found at different stratigraphical levels have a strange oriental appearance and differ specifically too much from those in the European Pleistocene to permit of direct faunistic correlations, and in the tropical regions such as Java the fluctuations of climate related to the glacial periods were not striking enough to provide a reasonable time scale by reference to any deposits so distinctive as boulder clay. Thus the anthropologist in the past has simply noted the personal opinion of local geologists on the antiquity of fossil man or palaeolithic cultures in the Far East, without really being clear as to the evidence on which the opinion was based (and suspecting, sometimes, that the geologist was not always quite clear himself).

The Archaeological Site Index to Radiocarbon Dates for Great Britain and Ireland, pioneered by the Council for British Archaeology in 1971, is now being prepared as a fully computerized database. This note describes the genesis and format of this invaluable new tool.

Recent excavations at the Archbishop's Palace in the city of Trondheim, Norway, have brought to light mint workshops of the period 1458/1483–1537. Surviving internal arrangements, analogous with features portrayed in contemporary illustrations, are uniquely illuminative of late medieval minting.

In 1872 the name ‘Campigny’ appeared in archaeological literature for the first time, and the industry to which this site gave its name has been a subject of controversy ever since. At Campigny (Seine-Inférieure) were discovered pits containing worked flint and the remains of crude pottery. In a short time similar flintwork was discovered on other sites in north France. The typical implements were axes with the cutting edge formed by a transverse blow and heavy picks. Mortillet was the first to illustrate the analogy between French tranchet axes and those from Danish kitchen middens. In time typologically similar material was found from Britain to the Soviet Union.

We published in 1962 an account of the work of the British Schools of Archaeology and History abroad (ANTIQUITY, 1963, 36); and last year (ANTIQUITY, 1964, 7) an account of their work during 1963 together with a report on the work of the Egypt Exploration Society. Here the Directors of the Schools and the Field Director of the Egypt Exploration Society provide a summary account of the work of British official archaeological institutions abroad during 1964, and we are glad this year to be able to illustrate some of the more notable finds. As before the reports of the Schools are printed in the order of their establishment.

As noted by Geoffrey Chamberlain, the two baby girls found in Tutankhamen's tomb were probably his stillborn heirs. More controversially he suggested that they were twins, although one appeared to be larger than the other. Here new research on estimating the age of a fetus is shown to support the twin hypothesis, while recent work on Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome explains why they could be such different sizes.