This paper presents direct radiocarbon measurements on horse skeletal remains from the Beaker period settlement at the site of Newgrange in Ireland, finds which have previously been argued as the earliest domestic horses in Ireland. The new determinations date the horse remains to the Irish Iron Age and shed important new light on the introduction of domestic horses to Ireland and to north-west Europe more generally. Although the new dates undermine the idea for the introduction of horses as part of a ‘Beaker package’, the early use of horse is not well defined archaeologically or chronologically and the earliest use of domestic horses in Ireland and Britain is still uncertain. This paper also identifies evidence for heavy bitting damage on the Iron Age Newgrange horse teeth and presents some possible parallels between the evidence from Newgrange and that at Tara, which has been previously linked with kingship rituals

The existence of a close relationship between Mycenaean Greece and Italy is known to us through two main kinds of archaeological evidence: Mycenaean pottery found in Italy—mainly in Apulia and Siciliy, although a few finds also come from the Tyrrhenian coast (1)—and bronzes of Italian type present in Greece and Crete.

The amount of information derived from these two groups is unequal. The majority of the Mycenaean pottery found in Italy has been readily identified and has offered a sound basis for the chronology of the Italian Bronze Age cultures, but the bronzes of Italian type found in the Aegean area have often been included in a group of ‘European’ elements, for years the object of discussions and controversial interpretations (2).

The almost exclusive concentration of Mycenaean pottery in coastal sites of continental Italy and Sicily clearly indicates that it was only transported by sea, and was not used for large-scale exchanges with the populations of the inland areas (3). From the distribution map of Mycenaean pottery in Italy we can therefore see a series of fixed points—actual settlements or traces of sea-passages—but lack the possibility of identifying any kind of movement linking the Mycenaeans on the coasts with the interior and northern regions of Italy. It seems probable, on the other hand, that such movements actually took place, since some at least of the Italian-type bronzes found in the Aegean certainly were not produced in the same areas of Italy where the Mycenaean pottery is concentrated. For this reason, a close study of the distribution, cultural significance and relative chronology of these types in Italy would be important to explain their presence in the Aegean.

The report on partial rescue excavations of the Collfryn enclosure between 1980–82 presents a summary of the first large-scale investigation of one of the numerous semi-defensive cropmark and earthwork enclosure sites in the upper Severn valley in mid-Wales. Earlier prehistoric activity of an ephemeral nature is represented by a scattering of Mesolithic and Late Neolithic or early Bronze Age flintwork, and by a pit containing sherds of several different Beaker vessels. The first enclosed settlement, constructed in about the 3rd century bc probably consisted of three widely-spaced concentric ditches, associated with banks of simple dump construction, having a single gated entranceway on the downhill side. It covered an area of about 2.5 ha and appears to have been of a relatively high social status, and appropriate in size for a single extended-family group. This was subsequently reduced in about the 1st century bc to a double-ditched enclosure, by the recutting of the original inner ditch and the cutting of a new ditch immediately outside it. The habitation area between the 3rd and 1st centuries bc probably focused on timber buildings in the central enclosure of about 0.4 ha, whose gradually evolving pattern appears to have comprised between 3–4 roundhouses and 4–5 four-posters at any one time. Little excavation was undertaken between the outer ditches of the first phase settlement, but these are assumed to have been used as stock enclosures. A mixed farming economy is suggested by cattle, sheep/goat and pig remains, and remains of glume wheats, barley and oats. Industries included small-scale iron and bronze-working. The Iron Age settlement was essentially aceramic, although there are significant quantities of a coarse, oxidized ceramic probably representing salt traded from production centres in the Cheshire Plain. The entranceway was remodelled in about the late 1st or early 2nd, century AD by means of a timber-lined passage linked to a new gate on the line of the inner bank. There is equivocal evidence of continued occupation within the inner enclosure continuing until at least the mid-4th century AD, possibly at a comparatively low social level, associated with domestic structures of uncertain form sited on earlier roundhouse platforms, and including some four-posters and possible six-posters. Drainage ditches were dug across parts of the site during the Medieval and post-Medieval periods, which were associated with various structures, including a corn-drying kiln inserted into the inner enclosure bank in the 15th century.

This article presents a comparative study of the arrowheads found in graves dating to between 2500 BC and 1700 bc in north-west France, southern Britain and Denmark. The aim is to characterise their modes of production and functions during a period which successively sees the introduction of copper then bronze metallurgy, the former accompanying the appearance of Bell Beaker pottery and associated practices in these areas. Several modes of production are proposed, from individual manufacture by Bell Beaker-using warriors to specialist production for elite use during the Early Bronze Age. Over and above their function as weapons – arguably associated more with interpersonal combat than with hunting – arrowheads served to portray and emphasise the social status of the individuals. In the case of the Early Bronze Age Armorican arrowheads, they should be regarded as ‘sacred’ objects, made for display and enhancing the power of the chiefs. Lastly, arrows are placed in the broader perspective of major trends affecting Europe during the Bell Beaker period and then the Early Bronze Age, while the distribution of arrowheads with slanted barbs suggests the operation of an Atlantic cultural complex.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the development of the Collared vessel from the Peterborough ceramic tradition and assess the contributions made by other non-Peterborough traditions; to define a series of vessels within the Collared Urn tradition which carry demonstrably early traits of only limited duration; and to suggest the limiting conditions within which this controlled typological analysis may be expected to apply. Since divergence of opinion exists in the literature as to terminology, the terms used in this paper can be briefly summarized.

For the sake of clarity it seems important to distinguish between descriptive terms, defining pottery traditions and functional, defining the uses to which vessels were put. In the past, the vessels which will be discussed below have been described variously as ‘Collared’, ‘Overhanging-rim’ and ‘Crowned’. In the following text the term ‘Collared’ has been retained for the whole tradition, and no distinction has been made between ‘Collared’ and ‘Overhanging-rim’.

To the north of Milfield, Northumberland the A697 cuts through a cluster of ring-ditches centred at NT933347. Discovered during aerial survey by Professor N. McCord, these were included in Dr A. Harding's survey of the ritual henges and related monuments of the Milfield Basin (Harding 1981, 101). Subsequent aerial reconnaisance by Mr T. Gates has increased the number of visible ring-ditches to at least eleven and, of these, three types may be tentatively isolated (fig. 1). The smallest appears to have a diameter no greater than 3.5 m, but with a ditch some 2 m in width (3 examples); in the second type the ditch appears less than a metre in width, but enclosing a larger area estimated at between 9 and 20 m (3 examples). A single example (Site 1 below) lies outside these dimensions and it was this, together with an example from the second group, that was chosen for excavation in 1982 and 1983.

Although among our most striking antiquities, the swords and daggers of the British Early Iron Age, with their accompanying scabbards, have received no systematic study in the light of recent archaeology. The artistic qualities of many of the ornamented bronze scabbards had led to their becoming collectors' pieces from the 18th century onwards, and the basic treatment of the types (and indeed the only publication of many examples) is that of A. W. Franks when he was engaged in defining the ‘Late Celtic’ art style in his articles of 1863 and 1880. On this basis, Déchelette was able to include the British material in his classic treatment of European La Tène swords in 1914, and this was followed and amplified by R. A. Smith in 1925. Since then, the British scabbards have received incidental mention by such students of Iron Age metal-work as Leeds, Ward-Perkins and Fox, but they have not been treated as a group. The purpose of this paper is to review the available examples, to attempt a classification, and to determine the relationships of these products of the armourers' craft in Early Iron Age Britain to what is known of the stylistic development of other decorative metal-work, and to the areas of settlement and trade interchanges of the various Iron Age tribal groups or distinctive communities. The absence of any recent comprehensive treatment of the enormous series of continental La Téne swords, and the distinctively insular character of the British groups, has led me to restrict this study almost entirely to the British evolution, with the minimum reference to prototypes or parallel developments on the European mainland.

In a slightly different form this paper was given as the Europa Lecture for 1994

The subject of this contribution is the origin of the diversity in the 19th century peasant landscape in the northern Netherlands. The first goal of the paper is to introduce a British audience to a line of research, which so far has been mainly reported on in Dutch and German. The second goal is to lay my finger on some basic properties of peasant landscapes elsewhere in the world. The third goal of my efforts in landscape archaeology is to identify ancient structures in today's landscape, which explain their identity, and to present this information to all those who are concerned with landscape conservation and landscape planning in the study area.

Bersu's war-time excavation of three ‘great’ Iron Age round-houses on the Isle of Man are considered. Their archive includes letters from colleagues (eg Hawkes and Childe) which offer unique insights into the construction of fieldwork context, particularly, in this case, a Celtic paradigm. Concerned with house studies and the possibility of ‘reconstruction’, Bersu's methodology is analysed. Site documentation shows him to be a ‘graphic archaeologist’, thinking and interpreting visually, and as such contrasts with concepts of ‘archaeology as text’.

The structures and artefact patterning of the Bronze Age settlement at Thorny Down are re-examined in the light of newly discovered documentation from the original excavation. Two phases of settlement are recognized, the earlier one pre-Deverel-Rimbury. Analysis of artefact patterns allows the functional interpretation of different structural types. Four settlement units can be identified, similar to recurring modules previously defined on Middle Bronze-Age sites in southern England.

The Pin Hole Cave was the first of the five caves forming the Creswell Group, in which excavation work was undertaken by the Rev. Magens Mello in 1875, and where his first discoveries were made. Operations at that time were confined to a limited area at the entrance of the cave and were mainly superficial; subsequent excavations ignored the cave entirely, and consequently the important deposits contained there have remained intact. This is a fortunate circumstance, because the Pin Hole, by reason of its position in the cliff face, is the only cave of the group in which a stratified record of the whole sequence of Creswell cultures has been preserved. Had it been excavated in 1875 much important scientific evidence would inevitably have been missed which the systematic excavation of the cave by modern methods has revealed, thereby providing not only valuable information respecting climatic variations during the cave period, but also a type cave-section for Britain.

Two beds of cave-earth are present—an upper, red, cave-earth, 6 to 7 feet in thickness, sealed beneath either crystalline stalagmite or breccia; and a lower, yellow, cave-earth, 10 to 11 feet in thickness, the total average depth of the deposit being 17 feet to the bed rock of the cave. The upper cave-earth contains a series of typical Upper Palæolithic industries ranging from Upper Aurignacian and proto-Solutrean at its base, to a late Aurignacian culture at the top, corresponding in time to the Magdalenian of France.

This paper presents the results of fieldwork and archive ‘excavation’ relating to the causewayed enclosure at Great Wilbraham near Cambridge. Initiated in 1975 by David Clarke and John Alexander, the project effectively ceased after one further season following Clarke's untimely death. Combining original data with new results from geophysical and environmental surveys, a reappraisal of the site and its landscape context is offered. ‘The archive provides a context in which to ask how the project might have developed had it not come to such an abrupt end. It also serves as a platform from which to review the assumptions that underpinned the formal approaches to landscape modelling that were so popular in the 1970s and the methodological principles which informed New Archaeology ‘in the field’.

This paper is concerned with the earliest use in Britain of copper and bronze, from the first artifacts of copper in the later Neolithic until the transition from the Early to the Middle Bronze Age, as marked by palstaves and haft-flanged axes. It does not attempt to deal with all the material, but instead certain classes of evidence have been chosen to illustrate some of the main styles of workmanship. These groups have been considered both from the point of view of their archaeology, and of the technology they imply.

Such an approach requires on the one hand that the artifacts are sorted into types, their associations in graves and hoards studied, their distributions plotted, and finally a consideration of the evidence for their affinities and chronology. On the other hand there are questions also of interest that need a different standpoint. Of what metals or alloys are the objects made? Can their sources be located? How did the smiths set about their work? Over what regions was production carried out? If we are to understand as much as we might of the life of prehistoric times, then surely we should look at material culture from as many view-points as possible—in this case, the manner and setting of its production as well as its classification.

A total of 190 axe-hammers and 82 battle-axes from all over Scotland were studied. Attention was focused on the key question of whether the implements were made from cobbles or from scree-outcrop blocks. In glaciated regions such as Scotland, the nature of the source exploited is critical, since the area from which a rock-type may be obtained is greatly enlarged if cobble-blanks were used. Exhaustive petrological and typological studies suggest that a rather haphazard exploitation of suitable-looking locally available rock-types took place. The manufacturing experiments described here were designed to discover how the implements were made, and the essential properties required of the blanks. They showed that a blank should be (a) free of flaws, (b) of a suitable rock-type, and (c) close in form to the implement required. Thirty-one timed searches were made of cobble-deposits and scree/outcrop sites within the areas of distribution of the artefacts. Cobbles, because they are more often free of flaws and better-shaped, proved much superior to scree/outcrop blocks as blanks. The main conclusion of this paper, therefore, is that the great majority of Scottish battle-axes and axe-hammers were made from cobbles. There is evidence to suggest that this conclusion may be extended to the rest of Britain, and to other types of implement made by pecking and grinding, including some unperforated stone axes.

The post-Pleistocene archaeology of southern Italy is a rapidly developing study and for this reason, while many facets of it are still little known, others are undergoing fundamental changes as new discoveries are made. Particularly notable contributions have been made in the last 20 years by, among others, L. Cardini, P. Graziosi, A. Palma di Cesnola, E. Borzatti von Löwenstern, O. Cornaggia Castiglioni and F. Zorzi in the palaeolithic and mesolithic field, R. B. K. Stevenson, L. Bernabò Brea, D. Trump and S. Tinè in the Neolithic sphere and D. Trump, S. M. Puglisi, R.Peroni, F. G. Lo Porto and H. Muller-Karpe for the bronze age. As a result of this work it is now possible for us to reconstruct in outline the later prehistory of southern Italy. Most of the work that has been done has been on individual topics, and, while some attempts at synthesis have been made (most notably those of A. M. Radmilli, D. Trump and R. Peroni), these have taken the form of a culture-by-culture description, as it were a commentary upon a vast composite stratigraphy of the area. No attempt, however, has yet been made to produce a history of the human occupation of the land and it is towards this aim that my paper is directed.

The emphasis in this paper is on settlement and economy in relation to environment. It is through the techniques of his subsistence economy that man deals with (or in evolutionary terms, adapts to) his environment, and in this sense it can be regarded as the most important factor contributing to the nature and development of society.

Thermoluminescence analysis can reveal when archaeological lithics especially siliceous stones such as flint, chert and the like have been subjected to heat treatment prior to chipping. This determination can serve as the first step in the dating of these stones, as well as stones exposed otherwise to heating, utilizing the same principles as for the thermoluminescent dating of pottery. The oldest known example of heat treatment verified by this method comes from the Solutrian industry of south-western France (ca. 15000 bc).

Error is an occupational hazard of the literary life. As soon as a man sets pen to paper he sets himself open to two sorts of error: one, his own, which is bad enough; and, two, the misunderstanding of those who read him, which is infinite. (Allan 1952, ix)

This paper explores some of the ways in which the cultural and political history of the United Kingdom has affected writing about the Neolithic in what is now Scotland. It uses the terms ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ as they have been applied by historiographers writing about the operation of the cultural and political relations within the United Kingdom in the last three centuries. The paper is in two parts. The first part presents a summary of relevant literature generated by 20 years of debate about Scottish and ‘British’ identity, history, literature, and culture. The second part considers the ways in which the general issues have affected the writing of Scottish prehistory, concentrating on the Neolithic of lowland Scotland and examining in particular the writings and influence of Fox, Childe, Piggott, and Atkinson.

In view of the theories of the astronomical significance of standing stones proposed by Alexander Thom, extensive fieldwork was undertaken during the 1970s and early 1980s in the west of Scotland to reassess the field evidence. Two groups of sites were identified from this work that seemed to support an astronomical interpretation, but the poor condition of many of the sites made identification of their original orientation problematical. Excavations were carried out at two damaged sites in one of the groups, in northern Mull, in order to identify the original positions of the stones. Radiocarbon dates from one of the sites, the first for a Scottish stone row, suggest construction in the Late Bronze Age. The alignment of the excavated rows, and the results of detailed theodolite surveys at and around the north Mull sites, suggest a more complex relationship between site locations, astronomical events, and the landscape than has hitherto been appreciated.

The physiographic approach to the problems of Pleistocene chronology has often been under-rated and sometimes completely ignored.

It will be well to begin this paper with a quite general statement of the basis on which this approach depends. In simplest terms it rests on the fact that the deposits with which we are concerned and to which it is sought to apply the method of palaeontological or archaeological dating were all accumulated on land-surfaces. These surfaces are themselves a proper subject of study by geomorphologists. The deposits are an integral part of the developing surface of the land. Any conclusions concerning their age and origin must be consistent with the general physiographic sequence. Physiographic considerations do not in themselves provide a very close or detailed chronology, but their indications are evidently worthy of consideration in any general purview of the difficult chronological problems concerned. Your ‘geo-chronologist’ needs to be, to this extent, a geomorphologist, as well as a palaeontologist or typologist. River-gravels and glacial ‘Deckenschotter’ mark, in general, old valley-floors and the movement of ice, in part at least, is controlled by the form of the underlying surface, subject to the evident fact that ice can, in some circumstances, move uphill.