With the use of grain comes a variety of parasitic fungi – some benign, others dangerous and even toxic. Here are surveyed some of the fungi to which ancient and modern grain is subject, and some of the consequences for human populations. More specifically, several parasitic fungi, Claviceps, purpurea, C. Paspali, Ustilago maydis and U. esculenta, have infested cereal grains and grasses in ancient and recent times and may have served as a source of human foods or medicine.

The discovery of the Qin dynasty terracotta army at Mount Li near Xianyang has provided an interesting insight into the equipment of 3rd-century BC Chinese soldiers, and also opens up a number of issues of interest to students of armour from other regions and periods in the ancient world, particularly concerning the use of evidence.

Two generations ago, Sir Mortimer Wheeler made himself the master of public relations in archaeology. He found some of the funds for digging Maiden Castle from opening the site to the visitors, who were able to buy souvenirs for a few pennies. After a period when the public have seemed a nuisance on-site, the fashion has come back — with added urgency in Britain where the pipeline of funding from public sources no longer flows so easily and where responding to some apparent public demand is becoming a new essential.

Flag Fen, in the wetland of eastern England, is being seen as a model of the new approach. It is conspicuous in the pages of Visitors welcome, the new English Heritage guide for excavators, which is reviewed warmly from across the Atlantic elsewhere in this issue. Here the Wheeler of the Fens explains what he is doing there and way.

Where London was in the Roman and later medieval periods is clear enough: largely in the walled city, now under the modern financial district that is the City of London. But what of the period between? New evidence is assessed on this longstanding problem.

Most large-scale excavation projects are computerized, more-or-less, now in their methods of data recording. Here is described one which is computerized with more conviction and on a larger scale than most, with reflections on what that can and should amount to.

This report of a tradition of Copper-Age stone sculpture from the Caucasus introduces a wider discussion of the place of stone sculpture in the artistic traditions of early Asiatic civilizations. It underlines once more the special place of evidence from the Soviet Union, the northern periphery of the regions of early states.

As it is written in site reports today, the modern language of archaeology is not a handsome tongue, efficient though it may be at conveying neutral data (another horrid word). Are there lessons to be found in the beguiling style of site reports from a couple of centuries ago? And is there more to their charm than antiquarian romance?

What is the connection between storage and sedentism in hunter-gatherer societies? What is the pattern of ethnography? What other patterns show themselves in Late Palaeolithic Eurasia, in those late hunter-gatherer adaptations that are precursors of Holocene food production? And is material storage a necessary and a sufficient condition for hunter-gatherer sedentism?

‘Pete Marsh’, the bog body from Lindow Moss in Cheshire that is properly called ‘Lindow 2’, has given remarkable research opportunities. One of these-perhaps less expected-has been the study of the considerable discrepancies in the suites of dates for the body obtained by two radiocarbon laboratories. The laboratories think this is a specific anomaly which has no implications for any other dates, but one may wonder how many other anomalies would declare themselves if more sites had so many determinations that should relate to the same event.

The oxygen-isotope curve, derived from the record of organisms stratified in the deep ocean ooze, has replaced the old pattern of four glaciations with a more complex record of cool and warm events. Since people live by their local sea-level, rather than an abstract world average, that global pattern is itself mediated by other geological forces, on several scales, before it directs the possibilities of human settlement. Here the effect of those forces is unravelled and illustrated.

Handsome four-wheeled wagons — finely crafted and decorated — are among the more remarkable large artefacts of later prehistoric Europe. Their find-contexts and condition certainly do not suggest everyday use or heavy wear. But when and how were they used? What did they stand for?

Everyone who has dug up anything knows the excitement of bringing an ancient object to its first light for centuries. Everyone who has directed an archaeological excavation knows the excitement of finding sense in the pattern of many ancient objects revealed. Why is it, then, that the publication of that pattern in a site report is a more wearisome business when—if ever—it take place? Is that just the nature of the business, or is there more to be revealed?

With the great 19th-century restorations of British cathedrals went the first great campaigns of cathedral archaeology. British cathedrals are, characteristically, multiperiod structures where major elements of earlier phases have been swallowed into a later-medieval or post-medieval fabric. So an important element in cathedral studies in the last century was the close observation of clues within the standing building. It remains a major element, in which new methods like the oak dendrochronology for medieval England run alongside that oldest archaeological tool, the observant eye.

Mr Wrigley (Reader Emeritus in History, University of Sussex) presents himself as a witness to British prehistory ‘from without’, because he is a ‘historian ofsorts’ rather than archaeologist. Surprised to see prehistorians turning to ethnography and contemporary social theory, more than the history of intervening centuries, he offers here a different perspective.

Australia and the Americas provide the two case-studies of the late human settlement of a continent by, it seems, Homo sapiens sapiens. At one time the corollaries of first occupation of the Americas, at perhaps 12,000 b.p., were a similarly late settlement of Australia and the need for a land-bridge across the Bering Straits. But now the pattern of occupation in New Guinea and its offshore islands proves that a long sea-crossing was made there before about 40,000 b.p. Here an Australian researcher looks across the Pacific to the evidence that has been offered for a Pleistocene occupation in south America, of a date comparable with that in Sahul.