I viewed this review project as an opportunity to assess the degree to which archaeologists have been able to transcend what Gary Feinman (Eurasia at the dawn of history, p. 146) refers to as “impenetrable academic silos and rigid adherence to entrenched ideas”. Happily, I found ample evidence of transcendence, with the exception of Modes of production and archaeology. Historians properly recognise Karl Marx as an important contributor to Western thought in a time of economic turmoil one and a half centuries ago. Especially, his efforts to motivate opposition to an exploitative economic system are highly regarded—I, for one, have made a pilgrimage to view his work-space in the British Museum reading room. And I agree that ideas influenced by Marx and Engels (considering the work of Childe, White, Wittfogel, Polanyi and the like) have been so thoroughly internalised that they amount to a kind of “disciplinary common sense” (in the introductory chapter by Robert Rosenswig and Jerimy Cunningham, p. 1), perhaps better characterised as ‘entrenched ideas’. From the perspective of contemporary anthropological theory, however, I find it difficult to understand why researchers might insist on bringing notions from Marx and Engels directly into today's archaeological thinking and practice, but this is exactly what most of the contributors to Modes of production and archaeology have done.

The EARMEDCASTILE project, based at the University of the Basque Country, has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action (grant agreement 656540); http://earmedcastile.blogspot.com).

The discovery of a colossal ‘statue group’ in the cliffs at Deir el-Bahri sheds new light on the ways in which pharaonic Egyptians experienced the dynamism of their physical environment, and made appeal to it in validation of royal legitimacy; suggests re-interpretation of the symbolic function of the memorial temple of Queen Hatshepsut; and defines a previously unrecognized tradition in rupestral architecture, spatially distributed from the Arabah to the Sudan.

Earlier this year, a BBC television series dived into the regions where underwater archaeology fades into the murkier waters of treasure-hunting. This is an opportune moment to review an archaeologist's account of his rôle in the richest of recent recoveries, the gold from the Spanish galleon Atocha.

This is where Mr Myres and I don our cardboard armour, rattle our wooden sabres, and join battle to the death or tea-time.

Let me parry blow by blow, and, first, that one about the street-plan. I give that precedence because Mr Myres is (relatively) so serious about it. He regards the ‘chaos of curvilinear lanes’ which is the medieval street-plan of London as, above all, a ‘piece of positive evidence’ which makes any survival of Roman London through the Dark Ages ’extremely improbable’. As Mr Myres well knows, this argument goes back through William Page to Noah, and the only surprising thing about it is that Mr Myres should still find himself using it in this year of grace. The reply, in part at least, is almost equally ancient, but has never perhaps been developed as fully as the argument appears to deserve.

The record is put straight in a matter of who deserves credit for what in southern African archaeology.

Kate Fielden, archaeologist and free-lance editor, has taken an active interest in planning at Stonehenge and Avebury since moving to Wiltshire in 1988.