Much archaeology is publicly funded, but rarely as a venture that is the personal initiative of a head of government. In this invited contribution, John Waddell (National University of Ireland, Galway) reports on the vigorous initiative of the Irish Discovery Programme since its 1991 launch. (And ANTIQUITY's editor notes the speedy rhythm of publication, in which John Waddell has had a role!)

Since her death almost 30 years ago, researchers interested in the life and work of one of the greatest prehistorians of her generation have searched, largely in vain, for material additional to Dorothy Garrod's published work. It seems they need search no longer.

A decade ago, the crammed burial-vaults under Christ Church, Spitalfields, a fine English Baroque church in east-central London designed by Hawksmoor, were archaeologically excavated. This pioneering work in the post-medieval archaeology of our own culture's burial practice has not been followed up. Why?

A Society for American Archaeology survey (1997) reports that its membership is overwhelmingly ‘European American’. Although it is no longer true that archaeology in the US is simply man's business rather than woman's, where are the practising archaeologists descended from historically marginalized groups so much of archaeology studies?

Most archaeology and anthropology departments are grouped as Humanities or as Social Sciences in university organizations. Where does that place the archaeometrists who approach the materials with the methods of physical and biological sciences? And where does it place the archaeologists themselves — especially when archaeometric studies have a large place in contract archaeology?

The Fenland Research Committee, founded in 1932, guided research in the low wetlands north of Cambridge in east England. Its work marked a turning-point in the developing prehistory of Sir Grahame Clark, a change so profound it is here called a ‘new archaeology’. A leading approach now as ‘ecological archaeology’, it is here shown to have its conception in certain goals, definitions, concepts, and assumptions — and in the field circumstances which promoted a then-new approach to prehistoric materials.

Publication of a new volume on the beginnings of Old World farming (Harris 1996) has provided a compendium of current views on this critical inflection-point in human inhabitance of the world. Was it driven by climatic change, as Gordon Childe suggested? And what of the earlier emergence of modern human behaviour: were these two chapters in the same story?

Amongst the most striking and the most handsome of ancient Australian relics are the Bradshaw paintings of the Kimberley, in the remote northwest of the continent, uncertainly dated but seemingly most ancient. According to one published view, the Bradshaws are not so much ‘early Aboriginal’ as ‘pre-Aboriginal’. Issue is taken with that notion, in light of European attitudes to Aboriginal accomplishment over the last two centuries.

The editor of ANTIQUITY remembers travelling, as a child, on the main A1 highway to see relatives in southeast England, watching the banks of sharp-nosed Bloodhound missiles ranged close by the road – pointing east, to meet incoming Soviet bombers. The obsolete monuments of the Cold War, and before that of the Second World War, are history now, famously the Berlin Wall (Baker 1993 in ANTIQUITY). Many, like the concrete runways of the airfields, are so solidly built they are not lightly removed. These remains of England's 20th-century defence heritage are not well understood. However, and contrary to popular belief, they do have a large documentation; and it is this, the authors argue, that should form the basis for systematic review.

Like the cultures of Neolithic Europe — ‘Glockenbecherkultur’, ‘Trichterbecherkultur’, ‘Linienbandkeramik’ — the ‘Lapita culture’ of the western Pacific is defined by its distinctive ceramics. What that ‘ceramic culture’ amounts to in human terms has been a key question in the region's archaeology — complete with a quest for a Lapita homeland. This fresh review focuses on the pottery, the defining stuff itself of the affair.

Is the meaning of prehistoric art beyond recovery — especially the meaning of early art in deep caves, a remote and strange location which itself suggests some out-of-the-ordinary purpose? David Lewis-Williams has been extending his explorations of meaning in later southern African rock-art to the famous enigma of the European Palaeolithic, here in the particulars of a single distinctive motif.

Most of what is heard in the West of Chinese archaeology is about the physical stuff — the astonishing string of major finds; some, like soldiers from the Terracotta Army of the First Emperor's tumulus, have been exhibited outside China. All archaeological material is excavated, described and explained by reference to some frame of ideas. This essay on the thinking of a leading Chinese archaeologist of our day, Su Bingqi, is accompanied by an article of his in translation.

The Lapita ceramics that define the ‘Lapita’ cultural complex of the southwestern Pacific are named for the type-site of Lapita, on the south Melanesian island of Nouvelle-Calédonie (New Caledonia). The island archipelago's early sites are central to shaping what Lapita is, and — if Lapita is not alone — to how it meshes with the other precocious ceramics made by voyagers of the western Pacific. Varied radiocarbon determinations need to be collated, and some stratigraphic complications resolved.

This article, first published in Zhongguo jianshe [China Reconstructs 1987(9)], became particularly well known when it was selected for the ‘Language and literature paper’ in the 1988 national university entrance examinations. This English version is translated and footnoted byu Wang Tao.

The English Fenland, a million acres of drained wetlands in eastern England, is on the doorstep of Antiquity's present office. But no local excuse is needed to report once more on work in a classic region; from large-scale survey the focus has moved to assessment of what survives, and now to managing for its better future that discouragingly small proportion of its old archaeological wealth which is still with us.

Grinding-stones as a technology are seen as a key element in the artefactual transformations of the latest Pleistocene – both for themselves and the foods which were ground on them. In Australia, as in other regions, their age and status is also material to what (if any) kind of a broad-spectrum revolution in foraging accompanied them.