For its importance in throwing light upon a dark period of history, and for the intrinsic beauty and archaeological significance of its contents the Sutton Hoo Ship burial has been rightly described as the greatest find ever made in England. The Ship was fully excavated in July and August 1939, and the treasures found therein were taken to the British Museum, where the most urgent preservative measures were immediately undertaken. During the War these valuable finds were hidden underground. Recently they were returned to the British Museum, where they are now being unpacked, cleaned, and made ready for exhibition. In anticipation of their full publication it has been decided to make a report upon some individual pieces when, from time to time, they become available for exhibition.

In the 15 years since the decipherment of the so-called ‘Linear B’ script as Greek, I have often been asked what was the most important resulting gain in our knowledge of ancient Greece. I have always put first the final and conclusive proof that the Mycenaeans, the people who produced a brilliant civilization in Greece between the 16th and 12th centuries BC, were Greeks. Previously there had always been room for argument, and although most people accepted this as a fact, it was always just possible to assert that the Mycenaeans were a non-Greek people, whose deeds and legends had been appropriated by the Greeks as their own.

At the beginning of the Christian era, potterymaking groups started occupying the southern region of Brazil (the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Paraná: FIGURE 1), their origins closely related to former inhabitants, mainly hunters and gatherers. Two major groups are recognized, from the hundreds of identified sites. Vestiges of the first, dispersed in settlements in the southernmost area and in the low savanna landscape, show that settlers of mounds — cerritos — were nomadic, their economy based on hunting, fishing and gathering. In the second, dispersed in the plateau and along adjacent coastal plains, settlers depended on gathering; at least in a few areas and in more recent periods they were sedentary, with the rudiments of more complex social and political patterns. The two settlement systems are in very different environmental, cultural and temporal contexts. Current research takes a normative view of culture, in which pottery has a place of honour and is classified by archaeological ‘traditions’ and ‘phases’. Yet both groups present pottery industries rather matched in time and space, obscuring evidence of internal differentiation or cultural change processes.