Opinion as to the nature of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in the British Isles has varied with changing ideas about the overall pattern in northern Europe, and with interpretations of the securely dated evidence—which continues, sadly, to be both slight and ambiguous. Here a new assessment is made, by a researcher who comes to the question from an antipodean perspective.

The Sutton Hoo Project took up work again at that most famous of British early medieval sites two generations after the excavation of its ship-burial in the summer of 1939. As befits a field project of two generations later, much of its emphasis has been on the context of the site, as well as the barrow-field itself. Here is published a surface find from that wider context.

The classification of man-made features recorded on aerial photographs depends on a combination of morphological comparison and functional interpretation. Here, a computer-based method of morphological recording and classification is described, and its advantages argued. It has special relevance in England, where the Monument Protection Programme needs to assess the relative value and importance of many thousands of buried archaeological sites that are known only from the evidence of aerial photography.

The identification, partial excavation, and covering-up again of the Rose Theatre in London this summer roused public interest unparalleled since the discovery of the Temple of Mithras 35 years ago. How is it that the future of an archaeological site of such importance has still to be resolved under threat in a flurry of direct action, injunctions, and media attention? Martin Biddle was almost the only archaeologist not directly involved who was prepared publicly to explore the issues in the press and on radio and television. Here he sets out his views of the lessons of the Rose.

The old importance of the eastern coastal region of the Mediterranean for the later Palaeolithic has been recently reinforced by remarkably early TL dates for modern hominids there. This important series of dates for the early Upper Palaeolithic at a Lebanese site adds to the story.

The Canary Isles, scattered in the Atlantic off the Sahara coastline of southern Morocco, have a remarkable archaeological heritage. Initial settlement, for which mummified bodies from caves are important evidence, relates to the Berbers of the Maghreb, and the islands' distinctive culture was not overwhelmed until the European impact of the 15th century AD. Explanation is given of the special value of Canarian archaeology, and of the efforts now being made more properly to protect it.

The Egyptian mammified bodies and the Egyptian texts between them offer a unique insight into the medical skills of an early civilization. Here the evidence for surgery is surveyed, and a pattern of rise and decline identified in its accomplishment.

The ‘radar rivers’ of the southern Eastern Sahara are systems of aggraded valleys containing inset drainage channels, now entirely obscured by wind-blown sand in the dry and hostile open desert. These features, first recognized on radar images, are remnants of the very different and moister landscapes of the Pleistocene and early Holocene. Proof of their attraction for early human settlement are the Acheulean artefacts that are found buried in alluvium that completely fills these old valleys and at the surface, along with Neolithic sites. The distribution of these sites follows, with good reason, the order of the radar channels.

The British Isles, at the northern fringes of human occupation in Pleistocene Europe, offer a collection of Upper Palaeolithic sites which cannot match the riches of the continental mainland. And many of its sites, studied in the 19th century, have been much quarried or even quarried out. New finds from Gough's Cave — one of the classic sites that was almost emptied in the work that made it classic-show, nevertheless, that important new discoveries are still being made from such deposits as remain.

Perhaps more than any other country Israel is a state founded on a consciousness of history. How does this special place for history (especially for early history, where archaeology provides much evidence) influence the purpose and the manner of Israeli archaeology?

The Hjortspring boat, from south Denmark, is an early case of the successful excavation of a wooden boat, and its more-or-less successful conservation. Sixty years on, further conservation work has given some new observations and a radiocarbon date.

The Queen's Hotel development site in York was in the news early in the year as yet another urban rescue project where a developer's building schedule left very little time for archaeological investigation of, in this case, a palatial Roman building. As always, the question was, where best to dig to learn much and quickly? A guiding answer came from a new application of subsurface radar.

Notice was taken in ANTIQUITY last year of the Australian bicentennial, and in particular of the remarkable ‘art of the First Fleet’, the ethnographic record provided by the watercolour artists of the contact years around Botany Bay. This note, held over into the bicentennial-plus-one year, finds further insight by tying closer together the painter's record, the ethnographic collections, and the archaeological record.

Ritual, or apparently ritual, burials of Iron Age date are not uncommon in Britain. However, most of those for which records survive were recovered in less than ideal circumstances or from sites which are not securely dated. This example was recovered in recent excavations of a well-dated site, and from an area of Britain for which evidence of Iron Age burial practices is unusually scanty.

The steppe region, the temperate grassland of the Asian land-mass that runs the thousands of kilometres practically from the coast of the Atlantic to the coast of the Pacific, is one of the great zones of human settlement. It offers archaeology on the large scale, where local adaptations link to a grander picture. Most of the steppe falls in the Soviet Union and is studied by Soviet archaeologists, much of whose work is inaccessible to those many of us who have no Russian.

The steppe is novel in a second way also, for Soviet archaeology has a distinctive flavour in its ideas and how it works with them; there are concerns and terminologies that do not quite correspond with the common concepts of west European scholars.

Megaw & Megaw, in the December 1988 ANTIQUITY, published a new study of the carved stone head from Mšecké Žehrovice. Here the excavator of the site adds new information about the archaeology of this remarkable find-spot.

How old is the samovar, that ceremonial apparatus traditionally associated with the serving of tea in (old) Russia and the Near East? This new find from Anatolian Turkey provides further evidence for the use of this kind of vessel for making hot drinks back in Roman times.