In the 1964 Proceedings a preliminary report was published of an initial sounding at this site, discovered and named (after a nearby village) in 1962. The main excavation, in the summer of 1964, was undertaken with the kind permission and co-operation of the Iranian Government and authorities, and with the financial assistance of grants from the British Academy and the Crowther Beynon Fund of the University of Cambridge. Subsequent laboratory analysis has been carried out mainly in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Cambridge.

Since the geographical situation of the site forms an essential factor in its interpretation, the main features may be repeated here for convenience. The cave is eroded in the base of an escarpment which follows the foot of the Elburz range where it bounds the coastal plain along the southern shores of the present Caspian. The mountains rise abruptly in an impressive series of ridges to over 10,000 ft; the plain extends to the north to the modern sea-shore now some 8 miles away from the site and rapidly retreating. It is known however that in the recent geological past this situation has varied greatly. At times the sea lapped the base of the hills leaving traces in the form of escarpments and raised beaches, while at others it retreated scores of miles to the north and may even have disappeared altogether.

The Early Iron Age enclosures and associated sites on Sutton Common on the western edge of the Humberhead Levels contain an exceptional variety of archaeological data of importance not only to the region but for the study of later prehistory in the British Isles. Few other later prehistoric British sites outside the East Anglian fens and the Somerset Levels have thus far produced the quantity and quality of organically preserved archaeological materials that have been found, despite the small scale of the investigations to date. The excavations have provided an opportunity to integrate a variety of environmental analyses, of wood, pollen, beetles, waterlogged and carbonised plant remains, and of soil micromorphology, to address archaeological questions about the character, use, and environment of this Early Iron Age marsh fort. The site is comprised of a timber palisaded enclosure and a succeeding multivallate enclosure linked to a smaller enclosure by a timber alignment across a palaeochannel, with associated finds ranging in date from the Middle Bronze Age to the Roman and medieval periods. Among the four adjacent archaeological sites is an Early Mesolithic occupation site, also with organic preservation, and there is a Late Neolithic site beneath the large enclosure. Desiccation throughout the common is leading to the damage and loss of wooden and organic remains. It is hoped that the publication of these results, of investigations between 1987 and 1993, will lead to a fuller investigation taking place.

An archaeological evaluation and excavation were carried out prior to a housing development in 1992, at Bramcote Green, in the London Borough of Southwark. Up to 3 m of organic rich, alluvial clay silts were deposited during the late Glacial period between about 12,000 BP and 9000 BP. A wide, shallow channel flowing south towards the Thames cut through the clay silts during the early Holocene and was filled with a series of clay and peat layers. Between 6000 BP and 4000 BP fast moving water channels formed on the marshy ground on the east side of the site and broader channels on the sand and gravel outcrop on the west side of the site. A subsequent rise in water levels, possibly seasonal, deposited inorganic muds across most of the site until c. 3500 BP. Over the filled-in channel were laid two phases of a wooden trackway which may have been laid across the marsh between high ground to the south and Bermondsey Island to the north. The earlier trackway consisted of two parallel lines of alder logs held in place by alder stakes. The second consisted of a single line of oak logs with alder stakes along one side. Radiocarbon dating of the second trackway places it in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. The site was covered by a thick layer of peat dated to the Late Bronze Age.

Analyses have been directed towards providing an objective basis for the untested assumption that interrupted ditch enclosures, discovered in riverine situations by aerial reconnaissance, are related to the high-lying neolithic causewayed enclosures. The results of a series of attribute analyses appear to justify the unity of the enclosures, while at the same time suggesting a division into four geographical groups. Aerial photography has been used to provide data for comparative studies. In this case, sites known only from the air have been compared with excavated enclosures which show similar characteristics. The resulting classification is thought to demonstrate the feasibility of such an application of aerial photographs.

‘Esoteric knowledge is knowledge of the unusual, the exceptional, the extraordinary; knowledge of things that in some way lie beyond the familiar everyday world’ (Helms 1988, 13)

This paper explores the ways in which Bronze Age bronze artefacts may, on occasions, have been used in the commemoration of place during the southern British Iron Age. The chronologically-based typological systems adopted by archaeologists indicate that these artefacts occur out of their time as they were already several centuries old when they were buried, but it should not be supposed that Iron Age societies necessarily viewed these items entirely in terms of a linear sequence of time. While broadly similar in form and material to items in the cultural repertoire of contemporary society, the bronzes were also quite distinct in the particular forms that they adopted. That these items often appear to have been deposited at sites with a pre-existing monumentality may suggest that objects and places were felt to share ‘otherworldliness’. These items and places may have been used to construct esoteric knowledge through reference to spirits but it is also likely that particular acts of curation and deposition created genealogical associations, incorporating ideas of the mythical past into the context of the present. Drawing on the evidence for the form and contexts of depositions of these objects, this paper addresses the connected topics of what Iron Age society did to objects and sites derived from its own past and what we, in turn, do to (and can do with) the information derived from the Iron Age.

The environmental impact of the Late Iron Age and Romano-British ironworking hillfort of Bryn y Castell in upland southern Snowdonia was investigated by multiple profile pollen and charcoal analysis of nearby valley mire and blanket peat deposits. Pollen data, collected from five radiocarbon dated profiles within a 1.5 km radius of the hillfort, indicate that ironworking activities apparently had only localised impact on the environment. Small-scale declines in certain arboreal taxa can be correlated with occupancy of the site. Betula and Alnus appear to be most affected, with minor loss of Corylus and Quercus. The pattern of arboreal taxa and charcoal values during the ironworking period is considered in the context of evidence for deliberate woodland management, the scale and duration of ironworking, and alternative forms of human disturbance. Overall, the results of the pollen analysis suggest that woodland recovered to its pre-ironworking level except in the immediate vicinity of the hillfort. Integration of the archaeological and palaeoecological data allowed understanding of the resource-based aspects of this prehistoric industrial site and the results have wider implications for the field of experimental industrial archaeology.

The culture of the Neolithic Age in Britain established itself particularly firmly in the chalk districts which have their centre in, and radiate from, Salisbury Plain, as is shown by the distribution of some of the most characteristic monuments of the culture, the Long Barrows. Here the open or thinly wooded downland offered every advantage for the pasture of flocks and herds and for early experiments in agriculture, while flint, essential for the tools and weapons of the time, was readily obtainable.

One extension of the chalk, running south-west from Salisbury, forms the great ridge of the Dorset downs. This ridge falls abruptly on its northern side, but to the south it slopes more gently, and is furrowed by a number of pleasant valleys, which eventually find their way to the sea either at Christchurch or Poole Harbours.

At Blandford, the ridge is cleft by the narrow valley of the River Stour, and the whole area between Salisbury and Blandford lies within the ancient bounds of Cranborne Chase.

On this part of the ridge, which rises to 911 feet at Win Green, is an important concentration of Long Barrows. They number 32, and all except four of them are on the southern slopes, roughly between the 400 and 200 feet contours. They are frequently, but not always, situated on the summit of the spurs of the main ridge which separate one side valley from another.

The small causewayed enclosure on Offham Hill, East Sussex, being one of the only five surviving Neolithic enclosures in Sussex, was excavated in 1976 prior to its final destruction by ploughing. The enclosure consisted of two incomplete circles of discontinuous banks and ditches. Molluscan analysis indicated that the structure was built in a woodland clearing and that the ditches were not contemporary. A few pot sherds and flint tools were found in the shallow ditches, together with a crouched burial and disarticulated human bones. No conclusively Neolithic features were found in the interior. The possibility that this enclosure, together with others of similar type, may have been areas defined for exposure burial is discussed.

Lead isotope analyses of 50 Irish Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age gold artefacts favour a gold source in southern Ireland. However when combined with major element analysis, the artefacts are not consistent with any Irish gold deposit analysed to date. Understanding the lead isotope signatures of ore deposits within a study region allows informed inferences to be drawn regarding the likelihood that an unanalysed ore deposit was exploited in the past. If an Irish gold source is assumed, then the gold is most likely to have originated from deposits hosted by Old Red Sandstone in the Variscan ore field of south-west Ireland. However, based on our current understanding of mineralisation in the region, this scenario is considered unlikely. A non-Irish source for the gold is therefore preferred – a scenario that may favour cosmologically-driven acquisition, ie, the deliberate procurement of a material from distant or esoteric sources. Available geochemical data, combined with current archaeological evidence, favour the alluvial deposits of south-west Britain as the most likely source of the gold.

At the onset of the 2nd millennium bc, a wool economy emerged across continental Europe. Archaeological, iconographical, and written sources from the Near East and the Aegean show that a Bronze Age wool economy involved considerable specialised labour and large scale animal husbandry. Resting only on archaeological evidence, detailed knowledge of wool economies in Bronze Age Europe has been limited, but recent investigations at the Terramare site of Montale, in northern Italy, document a high density of spindle whorls that strongly supports the existence of village-level specialised manufacture of yarn. Production does not appear to have been attached to an emerging elite nor was it fully independent of social constraints. We propose that, although probably managed by local elites, wool production was a community-based endeavour oriented towards exports aimed at obtaining locally unavailable raw materials and goods.

At the Third Pan-African Congress on Prehistory, held in Livingstone in 1955, there was a symposium on the early Pebble Cultures of Africa. It became apparent from the discussion that followed that there was considerable divergence of opinion among prehistorians as to the criteria that distinguished artificial from natural fracture. Specimens that were acceptable as artifacts to some were not acceptable to others and it became clear that considerably more research was necessary into the way in which nature can fracture stone by percussion and in particular into the natural fracture of pebbles. It is especially important to know whether nature can simulate Kafuan- and Oldowan-type pebble tools. This is because the great majority of Kafuan tools from the type areas are abraded, often considerably, although Lowe mentions that Kafuan tools occur unrolled in the 175-foot terrace in the Kafu river as also in the 270-foot terrace in the Kagera Valley.

Bryn Celli Ddu is one of only two developed passage tombs in Wales, and has occupied a pivotal place in narratives of this region since the publication of excavations in the 1920s by W.J. Hemp. The construction sequence at the site has been at the centre of debate on several occasions with previous models raising important issues about the sequence of major monument types (notably the henge and the passage tomb) and the inter-regional links of the tomb's builders. This paper presents a new interpretation of the site's construction history, drawing on several sources, including: the recent demonstration that the tomb is aligned on the midsummer sunrise; Hemp's unpublished archive; and the results of a radiocarbon dating programme. The result is a two phase model which shows the tomb to have been built between 3074 and 2956 calbc, and which sheds fresh light on the ritual practices of the community which built it.

The sediments of Kirkhead Cave, a truncated phreatic conduit in the Morecambe Bay karst of northern England, have been investigated by scanning electron microscopic, granulometric, petrographic, palynologic and stratigraphic methods. These show that almost all the deposits in the cave are glacigenic sediments, reworked into the cave by a variety of transporting agencies. Investigation of the deposits by radiometric, magnetostratigraphic and biostratigraphic methods suggests that the fill represents a near-continuum of deposition from at least pollen zone III of the Late-glacial until modern times. Within the deposits is evidence of use of the cave by man from later upper palaeolithic (Creswellian) times onwards. However, no definite evidence has been found of later upper palaeolithic use of the cave prior to the middle of pollen zone III. It is therefore suggested that the occupation of marginal areas of upper palaeolithic colonization, such as the far north of northern England, after the last glaciation may have taken place somewhat later than has previously been recognized.

The site described in this paper lies on the Yorkshire Pennines, slightly over 1,200 feet O.D., half a mile north-west of Stump Cross Cavern and five miles east of Grassington (Nat. Grid 082640). The solid rock there is an eastward extension of the Great Scar Limestone, pitted by numerous swallow holes and clothed by a thin and intermittent mantle of clayey glacial drift. Only a hundred yards to the north and half a mile to the south-east of the site the Millstone Grit replaces the limestone at the surface. In the vicinity of the site the vegetation is dominated by Calluna vulgaris and Eriophorum vaginatum growing over a podsol or a shallow, highly humified, peat.

Ever since the publication of Gordon Childe's Danube in Prehistory, almost fifty years ago, the first neolithic colonisation of temperate Europe through the Balkans has been one of the cornerstones of European prehistory. There is still a consensus of opinion in most of the recent literature on the general character of this process: that it involved the transmission of farming techniques and probably the movement of groups of peoples—the first farmers. Farming was ‘carried into central Europe up the Danube … a stone-using agricultural peasantry was widely established in eastern Europe by 5000 B.C.’ (Piggott 1965, 46). However, it has been extremely difficult to proceed beyond this kind of general statement, because there is still an alarming shortage of detailed economic evidence from early neolithic sites in the Balkans. Plant remains and animal bones have been reported from neolithic sites scattered across the area (Murray 1970; Renfrew 1973), but in many cases the recovery of this kind of economic evidence was not the primary objective of excavation and, as a result, the methods employed to gather such evidence have rarely been sufficiently refined to meet the stringent requirements of modern faunal and plant analysis. Alexander (1972, 34) noted recently that, in the case of the First Neolithíc of Yugoslavia, ‘there is as yet no detailed analysis of the animmal bones from any site’ and adequate faunal and botanical reports from early neolithic excavations are still all too few in the Balkan area as a whole.

A small-scale excavation, undertaken in advance of building works at Faraday Road, Newbury, Berkshire, encountered an apparently intact Early Mesolithic layer containing abundant worked flint directly associated with animal bones. The site lay on the floodplain of the River Kennet in an area already well-known for Mesolithic remains and certainly represents an extension of the site found at nearby Greenham Dairy Farm in 1963. The flint assemblage was dominated by obliquely-blunted microlithic forms accompanied by a restricted range of other items. The animal bones were, unusually, dominated by wild pig with clear evidence of both primary butchery and food waste. Spatial analysis of the bone and flint assemblages indicated discrete activity areas, possibly associated with hearths. Both pollen and molluscan data were recovered which, together with the results of soil micromorphological examination, confirmed an Early Holocene date for the formation of the Mesolithic layer. Radiocarbon dates place the site in the late 10th–early 9th millennium BP. The paper re-examines the nature of known Early Mesolithic activity in this part of the Kennet valley, with particular reference to the specific environmental conditions that seem to have prevailed. It is concluded that the Faraday Road site represents one part of a continuum of Early Mesolithic occupation that stretches along a considerable length of the floodplain, with each focus of activity witnessing repeated, but intermittent, occupation spanning a period of more than a millennium.

Developer-funded archaeology on the Isle of Sheppey resulted in the discovery of not one but two Neolithic causewayed enclosures on the same hilltop in very close (c. 300 m) proximity. In the later Bronze Age enclosures and cremation cemeteries were constructed immediately to the east, followed by Iron Age enclosures and, ultimately, field systems dating to the later Iron Age onwards.

A radiocarbon programme enabled the chronological sequence and hiatus between all of these events to be discerned, but the majority of this paper explores the physical, chronological, and social relationship between the two Neolithic causewayed enclosures. These were of different forms and, although on the same hilltop, they each seem to have had distinctly different viewsheds over the Thames and the Swale respectively. There are subtle, but potentially significant, differences in the material culture and deposition which allow exploration of the possible functions and role(s) of the two largely contemporaneous sites. Questions may be addressed such as whether they performed the same functions for two communities or had separate and distinct roles for a single community. Beyond the Neolithic, the paper also explores the nature of the later use of the hilltop. The Bronze Age enclosures, though agricultural in function, clearly seem to respect their Neolithic predecessors invoking a remembrance of space, which is lost by the Iron Age. The shift away from the special function of this landscape in the Neolithic to a subsequent agricultural use is explored, as is the hiatus in use and subsequent re-use of the area.

Radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modelling, undertaken as part of the investigation by the Times of Their Lives project into the development of Late Neolithic settlement and pottery in Orkney, has provided precise new dating for the Grooved Ware settlement of Barnhouse, excavated in 1985–91. Previous understandings of the site and its pottery are presented. A Bayesian model based on 70 measurements on 62 samples (of which 50 samples are thought to date accurately the deposits from which they were recovered) suggests that the settlement probably began in the later 32nd century cal bc (with Houses 2, 9, 3 and perhaps 5a), possibly as a planned foundation. Structure 8 – a large, monumental structure that differs in character from the houses – was probably built just after the turn of the millennium. Varied house durations and replacements are estimated. House 2 went out of use before the end of the settlement, and Structure 8 was probably the last element to be abandoned, probably during the earlier 29th century cal bc. The Grooved Ware pottery from the site is characterised by small, medium-sized, and large vessels with incised and impressed decoration, including a distinctive, false-relief, wavy-line cordon motif. A considerable degree of consistency is apparent in many aspects of ceramic design and manufacture over the use-life of the settlement, the principal change being the appearance, from c. 3025–2975 cal bc, of large coarse ware vessels with uneven surfaces and thick applied cordons, and of the use of applied dimpled circular pellets. The circumstances of new foundation of settlement in the western part of Mainland are discussed, as well as the maintenance and character of the site. The pottery from the site is among the earliest Grooved Ware so far dated. Its wider connections are noted, as well as the significant implications for our understanding of the timing and circumstances of the emergence of Grooved Ware, and the role of material culture in social strategies.

A programme of archaeological assessment, funded through the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, was undertaken at the Valdoe Quarry in West Sussex ahead of a renewed and final stage of gravel extraction at the site. This paper gives an account of the evidence for human activity recovered in the course of this work. The analysis demonstrates that the Valdoe Quarry contained archaeology relating to the transport and modification of bifaces. These signatures formed part of wider patterns of land-use operated by the same hominin groups found at Boxgrove, within a single, developing palaeolandscape. It is concluded that further activity sites remain to be discovered within the general environs of the Valdoe and the parish of East Lavant where historically there have been surface finds of bifaces.