Profound books are always worthwhile. If we agree with them, their ideas become a direct contribution to our knowledge. If we disagree, they impel us to examine the basis of disagreement and to develop our own counter-ideas, and thus they make an indirect contribution to our knowledge. R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1946) is the most penetrating work on the foundations of historical method known to me, but I find it unacceptable. My major difficulties result from his ontological idealism and his dichotomy between mind and nature.

You didn't need to be an archaeologist in 2008 to know that things were happening at Stonehenge. For years controversial plans to improve the Stonehenge environs (costed at £600m) had dominated media and much academic debate, but in November 2007 the British government announced that it couldn't afford them (Pitts 2008a). The plans were dropped (much cheaper changes are now being implemented to make Stonehenge look nice for the 2012 Olympics: English Heritage 2008). There are new broadcasts and press stories featuring the stones every year, but 2008 was different. As road protests diminished, real archaeologists took the stage.

In early 1988 my grandfather, Robert Barron Kerr Stevenson (1913—1992), former Keeper of the National Antiquities of Scotland, was asked about his recollections of his former teacher and colleague Vere Gordon Childe. “There is”, he wrote in reply, “very little that I can say of use to you”. The reason for such a statement seems to be that my grandfather felt that his contacts with Childe had never been concerned with the broad historical and philosophical concepts that scholars were so interested in, believing rather that his own academic perspectives were more from the “worm's eye than the bird's eye view”. Yet what my grandfather knew was a more personal side to Childe that does not come across in his published works.

Andrew Fleming's 1987 paper identified coaxial field systems in the British landscapes that could be dated over a long time-period, from Neolithic to Roman. What does that time-span imply and amount to?