In recent years increasing attention has been focused on the palaeoeconomic interpretation of prehistoric sites, and a number of projects have been carried out both in Britain and abroad on plant and animal remains from archaeological sites with a view to interpreting subsistence patterns and activities of early communities. Though large-scale, systematic sampling and recovery of palaeoethnobotanical data has been carried out on several sites in the last ten years, the practice is still not widespread and has yet to be judged by its results. Fundamental issues relating to sampling, recovery and data presentation still require attention. Although studies of palaeoeconomic material have been done on Iron age sites in southern Britain, for example at Portway (Murphy 1977a) and Abingdon (Parrington 1978), as yet little evaluation of this evidence has taken place. The aim of this paper is to present, assess and compare the evidence from two such studies of different types of Iron Age site.

The passage tomb at Newgrange served as a focus of ceremonial activity in the Late Neolithic and Beaker periods. A complex of monuments was constructed around the mound, consisting of a timber circle or woodhenge to the south-east and a smaller, possibly roofed, timber circle to the west; an enclosing bank constructed along the southern and western sides, and a free-standing circle of great stones encircling the monument. In this paper the view that the faunal and material remains from the Newgrange excavations are domestic refuse is questioned. The deposition and spatial patterning of the faunal material is interpreted as having a ritual significance and the use of this material as representative of the Late Neolithic/Beaker period economy is rejected

More than 70 years ago an early Predynastic culture was discovered in the Badari region near Asyut. It was named the Badarian and it represents the oldest known agricultural tradition in the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt. However, much remains to be learned about the Badarian as well as subsequent Predynastic developments in the region which may be expected to throw light on the adoption of agriculture in the Nile Valley and the rise of the Egyptian state. Consequently, new field investigations were initiated in 1989. A large part of the area was field surveyed and test excavations were carried out at the site of Hemamieh, originally excavated by Gertrude Caton-Thompson in the 1920s and famous for its stratified sequence of Predynastic levels.

During the 1989 season, the authors visited 42 sites, the majority of which have Predynastic remains. Most of the Predynastic occurrences date to the Badarian or Gerzean phases. Very little material was seen that could be assigned to the intervening Amratian phase, raising the possibility that elements of the Badarian culture remained prevalent in the Badari region at a time when only the Amratian was represented elsewhere in Upper Egypt. Our test excavations at Hemamieh revealed a stratigraphy similar to that described by Caton-Thompson with cultural deposits sandwiched between a surface scree layer and a cemented Limestone gravel deposit or ‘breccia’. The pottery recovered shows a continuous sequence beginning with the Badarian and ending with the Gerzean. Four radiocarbon dates were also obtained. Two of these are on samples from levels with Badarian ceramics and provide calibrated age estimates spanning c. 4400–4000 BC.

A part from its successes in the Somerset Levels, environmental archaeology has made little headway in studies of the South-west of England. On the uplands this is partially due to the lack of preservation of bone and most other organic remains in the acid soils now present. Again, in the region generally there has been little deposition in basins of the muds, marls and peats accumulated during the Post-glacial that are so valuable for reconstructing the botanical environment and the effects of early man on soils and vegetation; this is largely a consequence of the peninsula's escape from Pleistocene glaciation. Further, the published material on archaeology has until lately been so scattered that it has been difficult to compile a coherent outline of the settlement and economy of the region in pre-Roman times, a situation only recently remedied by the publication of Lady Aileen Fox's book South West England, providing a personal synthesis of the prehistory of that area.

The later prehistoric rock-engravings of Mont Bégo, in the Maritime Alps on the French–Italian border, provide a rare possibility of grasping the meaning of a group in prehistoric art. Two elements in their limited repertoire of forms are daggers and halberds, which also occur as physical objects or as images in the contemporary sites of adjacent north Italy; their contexts show they are, in that area, associated with the status of adult males in society. That same interpretation is applied to the Mont Bégo figures, and this is found congruent with other motifs — especially ploughs and cattle — in the repertoire. It may explain also the other common motif, a geometrical form interpreted as a map of a prehistoric farmstead, by associating it with plough agriculture and land division. The insights developed from the study for what ‘meaning’ amounts to in the study of prehistory are set down.

The main object of this paper is to draw attention to the existence of Late Stone Age sites in South West Africa where perishable organic remains are preserved, and in particular to the ‘Big Elephant Cave’, discovered by Dr E. R. Scherz in the Erongo Mountains.

These lie some 10 to 15 miles north-north-east of Usakos, at approximately 21° 40′ S., 15° 40′ E., in a region of open grass steppe with stands of thornbush, mainly Acacia, with low sclerophytic scrub supported by an annual rainfall of between 150–200 millimetres. These mountains rest on Basement Complex rocks and consist of Karroo sediments through which have been introduced granites of post-Karroo Age. The western face of the Erongo forms the edge of the plateau escarpment, and looks out to the Namib Desert and the Atlantic Ocean.

The cave, to which we were conducted in May, 1959, by Dr Scherz, is situated in a commanding position on a kopje of rounded granite boulders near Ameib. It was first shown by its discoverer to the Abbé Henri Breuil when he was copying the Erongo rock paintings, but no study of the settlement was made and it was not revisited in the interim. Although the name ‘Big Elephant Cave’ has been adopted from Dr Scherz, it is, in fact, a deep rockshelter rather than a cave. It contains no paintings, but a line of male and female figures, in faded red paint, is drawn low down on a protected rock at the north side of the kopje. These have been published by the Abbé Breuil.

With one notable exception, the study of Italian prehistory has developed with little emphasis on the economic interpretation of cultures. The exception has been the so-called ‘Apennine’ Bronze Age of central and southern Italy, which has commonly been defined as a cultural phenomenon involving an economy of pastoralism and large-scale stock-keeping. In 1959 Professor S. M. Puglisi published his major examination of the Apennine Bronze Age, which has remained the principal statement of the ‘pastoralist’ hypothesis (Puglisi, 1959). In recent years the Swedish Institute in Rome has carried out an important series of excavations on the acropolis of Luni sul Mignone in northern Lazio (Östenberg, 1967). The excavations discovered imposing house foundations cut into the soft volcanic tufo or tuff; from this architectural evidence, as well as the analysis of faunal and plant remains from Luni and other sites, Professor Östenberg concluded that ‘the Apennine culture had a mixed economy with agriculture and stock-breeding as basic components … pastoral nomadism cannot therefore be looked upon as the primary characteristic feature of the Apennine culture’ (Östenberg, 1967, 260). Puglisi based his argument upon both ethnographic and archaeological evidence.

The Polden Hill hoard, first noted in 1803, has never been fully published. The hoard consist of many elements of horse gear and trappings of the first century A.D.

The perception of and interaction with ancient relics in past societies has been intensively debated in the archaeology of north-western Europe. This paper aims to make a contribution to this debate by reconstructing the long-term history of late prehistoric barrows and urnfields in Flanders (Belgium). The period between the Late Bronze Age and High Middle Ages (c. 1100 cal bc–ad 1300) is centred on. Contrary to Germany, Scandinavia and especially Britain, data from the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) have so far barely played a role in wider international and theoretical discussions on the role of the past in the past. Previous studies on reuse practices in the Low Countries mainly focused on the Meuse-Demer-Scheldt region of the southern Netherlands and north-eastern Belgium, which partly overlaps Flanders. These studies are combined and summarised. Their main outcomes are tested by means of a detailed inventory of reused late prehistoric cemeteries in Flanders. This study differs methodologically from most others in that it both offers an evidence-based overview of regional diachronic trends (documented at 62 barrow cemeteries and 13 urnfields) and discusses the developments at six sites yielding high resolution data. The observed reuse practices and site biographies appear to be remarkably dynamic and more diverse than previously suggested.

The Broom Lower Palaeolithic locality, on the river Axe at the Devon/Dorset border in south-western Britain, yielded an assemblage of at least 1800 Acheulean artefacts between the 1870s and 1940s through gravel quarrying and antiquarian collection. The bifacial material, predominantly produced in chert but including a small flint component, is characterised by considerable typological diversity and a distinctive asymmetrical element. While aspects of the assemblage have been reported before, this paper presents new work on the artefacts of the C.E. Bean collection and the sample from Exeter Museum. The Bean archive indicates that the artefact patterning is not due to fluvial mixing of separate, typologically-discrete, assemblages. Analysis of the artefacts suggests that hominin knapping strategies were not notably constrained by variations in raw material granular quality, but that the typological variability strongly reflects blank form and shape. However, while the influences of blank form and resharpening, including the use of tranchet flaking, partially explain the assemblage's asymmetrical component, a significant proportion of those artefacts cannot be understood in these terms. The existence of local, short-lived manufacturing traditions, perhaps reflecting the idiosyncratic approaches of individual knappers, is argued to best explain the distinctive asymmetrical element of the Broom assemblage. This interpretation is further supported by (i) the geoarchaeological model of assemblage formation, which assigns the majority of the artefacts to a single phase of occupation, and (ii) the OSL ages of the Broom fluvial deposits (predominantly MIS-9 and 8) and the atypical character of the assemblage in relation to other British late Lower Palaeolithic material, which oppose the notion of longer-lived, locally, or regionally-maintained, traditions.

Excavations were carried out intermittently between 1982 and 2005, by various excavators, in advance of quarrying activity at Upper Largie, Kilmartin Glen, Argyll & Bute. They revealed abundant evidence of prehistoric activity, dating from the Mesolithic to the Middle Bronze Age, on a fluvioglacial terrace overlooking the rest of the Glen, although some evidence was doubtless destroyed without record during a period of unmonitored quarrying. Several undated features were also discovered. Mesolithic activity is represented by four pits, probably representing a temporary camp; this is the first evidence for Mesolithic activity in the Glen. Activity of definite and presumed Neolithic date includes the construction, and partial burning, of a post-defined cursus. Copper Age activity is marked by an early Beaker grave which matches counterparts in the Netherlands in both design and contents, and raises the question of the origin of its occupant. The terrace was used again as a place of burial during the Early Bronze Age, between the 22nd and the 18th century, and the graves include one, adjacent to the early Beaker grave, containing a unique footed Food Vessel combining Irish and Yorkshire Food Vessel features. At some point/s during the first half of the 2nd millennium bc – the oakbased dates may suffer from ‘old wood’ effect – three monuments were constructed on the terrace: a pit, surrounded by pits or posts, similar in design to the early Beaker grave; a timber circle; and a post row. The latest datable activity consists of a grave, containing cremated bone in a Bucket Urn, the bone being dated to 1410–1210 cal bc; this may well be contemporary with an assemblage of pottery from a colluvium spread. The relationship between this activity and contemporary activities elsewhere in the Glen is discussed.

Prehistorians have unreservedly extended the Early Iron Age in territories north of the Roman Empire to include, in addition to a pre-Roman Iron Age, a Roman Iron Age during which the native barbarism evolved without a break though not unaffected by the Empire. That a Late Iron Age continued in Scotland, as in Scandinavia, during post-Roman times has been less readily realized. Professor Childe nominally ended his Prehistory of Scotland with the 4th century A.D. and spoke of an unbridged chasm thereafter, four or five centuries long, to which few and undecisive relics were attributable. The extent of archaeological perplexity 30 years ago was such that J. G. Callander maintained that Skara Brae represented the same Iron Age culture as the brochs and earth-houses. Following the studies of brochs and wheel-houses by Lindsay Scott and Lethbridge, which agreed that they formed a single culture datable to the first three centuries A.D., the latter wrote recently that the culture of the Western Isles between the 3rd century and the 9th ‘is completely unknown and I think unsought’.

When C. E. Moss (1907) first described the vegetation of the peat areas of the Somerset Levels, he referred to them as ‘moors’, a term offering no distinction from upland peats such as those of the Pennines or Dartmoor. It was not until much later that they were recognized as the remnants, much degraded and dissected by peat-cutting, of an extensive complex of raised bogs (Godwin 1941). This was a conclusion of considerable significance since raised bogs belong to the category of ombrogenous mires, that is to say, of peat structures built up in almost total dependence on rain and snow falling directly upon them, and drawing not at all upon ground water. Such bogs receive very little mineral supply and become very acidic and poor in plant nutrients, so that their vegetation is highly specialized and most characteristic, consisting very largely of species of the moss genus Sphagnum, various flowering plants of the order Ericales, cotton-grass, deer-grass (Trichophorum caespitosum) and a restricted number of other species of equally restricted range. It is the various assemblages of the remains of these plants that allow us to identify given peat samples as having formed in raised bog, and often permit us to relate them to given communities characteristic of different aspects of the vegetation of still-active raised bogs.

This is a very helpful circumstance, since the raised bogs are entities in such close dependence upon annual precipitation that they respond quickly to phases of increased or decreased wetness by altered surface vegetation. Thus in periods of dryness they become covered with ling (Calluna vulgaris), cotton-grass (Eriophorum vaginatum) and sometimes trees, chiefly birch (Betula verrucosa), and the peat then formed is very colloidal, dark and fully humified. By contrast, when it is continuously wet the bog surface is covered with actively-growing Sphagna (which form a matrix for the associated higher plants), and the peat formed in these conditions is pale, fibrous, and undecayed. An abrupt transition from the one peat type to the other, if consistent across a bog, is referred to as a recurrence-surface (RY is the familiar contraction from the Swedish word).

Mesopotamia is an elongated basin running from Syria south-eastwards to the Persian Gulf. It is bordered on the south-west by the Arabian massif, on the north by the mountains of Anatolia, and on the east by the Zagros range. Agriculture in this basin is controlled by climate to an extent unknown in Europe, particularly by water supply, which may come from rainfall or from rivers that flow out of the mountains. The modern boundary of rainfall sufficient for agriculture, which for practical purposes may be taken as 200 mm or 8 in reliable annual aggregate, runs across northern Mesopotamia from west to east and then turns south-east, following the foothills of the Zagros (fig. 1). We have at present no reason to think that this approximate boundary has shifted appreciably during the period with which we are concerned, although there were almost certainly marginal fluctuations. The limited palynological evidence, which comes from the mountainous regions north and east of Mesopotamia, suggests that after about 12000 bc both temperature and precipitation gradually increased and that by about 9000 bc oak and pistachio trees were beginning to reinvade the Zagros foothills, an area from which they had been eradicated during the cooler temperatures of the last glacial period (van Zeist and Wright 1963; Wright 1968; van Zeist 1969).

This paper presents a selection of compositional analyses of Iron Age copper alloy artefacts from northern Britain. The results were obtained as part of a larger project which examined Iron Age and Roman copper alloys in northern Britain (the region from the Trent-Mersey to the Forth-Clyde). The quantitative analyses were carried out using EDXRF on drilled or polished samples. Comparisons are made with results from the late Bronze Age and early Roman period in northern Britain. The results are also compared with those already published from a range of Iron Age sites in southern England. The large total number of copper alloy analyses from the British Iron Age has made possible a synthesis of the data which has largely been assembled piecemeal. It is now clear that a tin bronze was the principal copper alloy for much of the Iron Age. The composition of this alloy is distinct from the alloys used in the Late Bronze Age and during the Roman period although there is considerable ‘blurring’ at the transitions. A brief outline of the analytical method employed and the analytical results are included.

This paper explores the interpretation of the deposition of artefacts in Ireland from c. 2500 to c. 800 bc, combining a contextual analysis with post-processual ideas about materiality, artefacts, and their biographies. Hoards, single and burial finds are shown to be complementary strands of the depositional record and the result of deliberate deposition. It is argued that both the symbolic value of these items as well as economic and practical rationales determine the depositional mode. The paper attempts to infer social practices and rules that determined the differential treatment of materials and object types. The main structuring factor in the depositional record is the type-specific meanings of individual artefacts, which embody social identities beyond the utilitarian function of the object. The act of deposition facilitates and legitimates the literal and symbolic transformation of artefacts and the concepts they embody. The need for a separation between ritual and profane interpretation is removed, as deposition is understood as the reflection of prehistoric concepts rather than labelled according to modern notions of functionality. It is also argued that both dry and wet places are meaningful contexts and that different forms of wet landscapes were conceptualised differently

A survey and new perspectives of Celtic or La Tène art from Britain is presented. Following Spratling, Celtic art is defined as ‘ornament or pattern and animal/human/supernatural images in metal and other media’. Regional and temporal variations in the type and usage of decorated artefacts are summarised. Three case studies, made of different media, are presented: metal scabbards, bone and antler weaving combs, and pottery. By asking the question ‘why decorate?’ it is argued that the decision to decorate an artefact can affect its life history, marking it out from undecorated artefacts of the same type. Rather than serving a single function, decoration was employed to serve multiple social goals throughout the Iron Age. Different forms of social expression, such as feasting, elaborate display, or weaving, are significant at any one time or place. It is argued that decorated artefacts often played a significant role in these different social arenas. Contrary to many past discussions, decorated artefacts in media other than metal are demonstrated to have been important in negotiations of social power and cosmology.

This paper is an attempt to bring together the rather scanty evidence for prehistoric textiles in the British Isles, whether in the form of surviving fragments, impressions on bronze corrosion, or implements associated with spinning and weaving. While the material cannot compare with the rich series from Scandinavia or Switzerland, it has, nevertheless, considerable points of interest in its own right.

Surviving woven textiles are first discussed, with such evidence of spinning and weaving techniques as can be deduced from the fragments. The archaeological material representing weaving appliances (e.g. spindle whorls, loom-weights, weaving combs, etc.) is then reviewed, with a special note on the curious technique of tablet-weaving, and finally there is a consideration of the evidence for basketry and allied fabrics. The material discussed is listed with references in a series of tabular appendices at the end of the paper.

The deposits with which I propose to deal in my address are those laid down by the Thames in that part of its course that lies between Maidenhead and the sea.

These deposits rest at three principal levels above mean tide, while a fourth series infills the buried channel of the ancient river.

Perhaps the most completely explored series is that of the so-called 100-ft. terrace at Swanscombe, in Kent. Specimens from the great gravel pit at Milton Street have enriched the collections of amateurs for upwards of fifty years, but they lacked scientific value because their exact provenance was unknown, the collectors being merely desirous of possessing fine specimens. When the value of Palæolithic implements as ‘geological time indicators’ became recognized in France, the demand for more precise information about the English Palæoliths spread among observers on this side of the Channel, and among others, influenced Worthington Smith. His accurate work has not received the acknowledgment it deserves from either geologists or archæologists, but it may be said that in the light of present knowledge it is of outstanding importance. He dealt more with the deposits of the Lea than with those of the main river, but his observations show how fully alive he was to the importance of truly recording the locality and site of each find, and the characteristics of the deposit in which it occurred. In the writer's opinion, Smith's book on “Man, the Primeval Savage” is destined to be recognized as one of the great books on prehistory in the English language.