The interesting discovery of a spear-thrower in central Africa was made in 1937 by Mr J. S. Owen, then Assistant District Commissioner El Fasher, who heard of one being used in the Daju hills of Southern Darfur, and obtained two examples from Harun Yasīn the man who introduced the spear-thrower to that area. It had not come into general use among the Darfur Daju; and there was uncertainty as to its origin, when I was asked to find out from where it came.

We have not hitherto considered the East Angles as a showy and conspicuously prosperous folk. In the Settlement Period we find them, as Mr Myres says, 'a federation of several smaller peoples' living in groups that were geographically isolated and to a certain extent independent of each other. Their material wealth would be judged by such a cemetery as Caistor-by-Nonvich, and on the evidence available before the Sutton Hoo discovery we should not have credited them with any unusual skill in the crafts or with the possession of notable riches. But we now know that in the early seventh century the folk inhabiting the coastal area between the Orwell and the Alde were the subjects of a prince whose grave contained one of the most magnificent and costly furnitures that has ever been found in a Teutonic tomb. Hitherto, when we have wanted to show off the richness of Anglo-Saxon England, we have looked to Kent. Now we have learnt that in one limited area of Suffolk, where lies Rendlesham, a vicus regius of the East Anglian ruling dynasty, the maximum brilliance of Kentish archaeology was not only equalled, but surpassed in splendour ; and we realize that the house of Wuffa (the sixth century grandfather of Redwald) thus put to shame the rich royalties of Kent, at the time of, or only shortly after, the reign of Kent's greatest king, Ethelbert.

Since 1984, underwater archaeological excavations have studied the Amsterdam, a ship of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Three annual reports (Gawronski 1985; 1986; 1987) have been published by the VOC Schip Amsterdam Foundation covering excavations and research in 1984, 1985 and 1986. Rooij – Gawronski (1989) presents a detailed account of the history, methods and results of the Amsterdam project and background information about the ship and the VOC.

The Amsterdam, built in 1748 in Amsterdam, was lost during her maiden voyage, outwardbound for Batavia, the modern Djakarta, in January 1749 near the little town of Hastings on the south coast of England (FIGURE 1). The excavations form part of an integrated historical and archaeological programme to create relevant historical models for understanding the ship and its contents. This project aims to contribute to a more detailed and realistic view of the shipping and trade of the VOC in the 18th century.

The interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls propagated by the overwhelming majority of Scrolls scholars start with the assumption that the Scrolls are not later than the second half of the first Christian century—more precisely, not later than June, A.D. 68—the only exceptions being those of one or two scholars who prefer a slightly later date. The exact terminus ad quem is not, however, based on any evidence contained in the Scrolls themselves, but was propounded by Père de Vaux as a conclusion derived from his excavations of the Qumran building and was taken over from him by the Scrolls scholars.

For those in search of current perspectives on the Aztec with a focus on matters economic, I heartily recommend a deep dive into these three volumes. Each book offers an insightful vantage on what we presently know about this pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican empire, as well as how new discoveries over the last 60–70 years force serious rethinking of both the long-term history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and key tenets that underpin pre-industrial political economies more broadly. Empires were a relatively rare phenomenon in the pre-industrial world, especially in the ancient Americas, and few have been so skilfully studied through a multi-disciplinary approach that integrates both historical texts and archaeology.