Antiquity

A key place in the 19th-century view of the British prehistoric landscape was taken by an ancient wonder which was was not a human or artificial device at all. An account of this anomaly is called for.

Granito del foro is a distinctive igneous rock, in fact a granodiorite rather than a granite, long known and named for its use in buildings of the Roman Forum. Exactly what is it? Where does it come from? Where else was it used and not used? What does the granito del foro say about ownership and empire?

The commensal rats — notably the black rat Rattus rattus and the brown R. norvegicus — are among mankind's most destructive and dangerous enemies, and have spread relentlessly with humans across the globe. A decade after an important ratty meeting at the Natural History Museum, London, in 1981, this noxious rodent pest is again reviewed.

Northern Australia is one of the very few regions of the world where an established tradition of rock-art has continued and extends into present-day knowledge. Excavation of deposits under the painted surfaces allows the age of the paintings to be estimated, by linking across to these deposits and their dateable contexts. One can begin to assess the antiquity of those systems of knowledge and of ‘signifying’.

The revised radiocarbon calibration curve, published last year, extends back into the Pleistocene the radiocarbon determinations that can be converted to real calendar years. For determinations of any age, the right judgements and statistical considerations must be followed if the real information held in the determinations is to be found. Here is advice with some worked examples.

Recent excavations at the Archbishop's Palace in the city of Trondheim, Norway, have brought to light mint workshops of the period 1458/1483–1537. Surviving internal arrangements, analogous with features portrayed in contemporary illustrations, are uniquely illuminative of late medieval minting.

Archaeologists have long assumed that morphological variability in microliths primarily reflects cultural differences among the makers. This forms the basis for differentiating major cultural/temporal traditions in the late Epipalaeolithic of southwest Asia. An alternative explanation for morphological variability is proposed which emphasizes the dynamic aspects of lithic technology in hunter-gatherer societies and questions current explanations of culture change.

What is the nature of the cities and chiefdoms, the states or proto-states or would-be states that fringe the Roman Empire? Modern Spain, like other regions that were first outside and then inside Empire, shows social transformations that were as important as they are now hard to judge from enigmatic evidence.

The postmodern, or ‘postprocessual’, tendency in contemporary archaeology pays much attention in its rhetoric to that wider public, that wider constituency whose views of the past may not match much or at all with the academics. What happens when the realities of archaeology in the real world meet with those of postmodern theory?

Not every first footstep on a virgin shore leaves enduring trace, nor every first human settlement an enduring deposit that chances to survive, and then chances to be observed archaeologically. Good environmental evidence from Mangaia Island, central East Polynesia, gives — it is contended — a fairer picture of the human invasion of remote Oceania than the short and sceptical chronology recently published in ANTIQUITY.

A new find at Knowth, the site in eastern Ireland famous for its complex of Neolithic passage-tombs, of a wooden structure associated with that enigmatic later Neolithic material, Grooved Ware.

A first notice of the mushy element in the subsistence base of the Maya realms.

Albania, isolated from Europe for nearly half a century, was closed to absolute archaeological dating during that time. New dates from an unusual large cave-site in southern Albania go beyond the single first radiocarbon date published for the country in ANTIQUITY in 1991, and permit the establishment of a radiocarbon and archaeomagnetic sequence.

The September 1993 editorial (ANTIQUITY 65: 44–5) made comment on recent Australian dates, by luminescence techniques, significantly older than radiocarbon determinations from elsewhere in Australia and New Guinea, which formed a single continent in the late Pleistocene. (There are hints also from the Americas of a discrepancy between dates by the two methods.) The period involved, c. 30-60,000 years ago, is crucial also in the Old World mainland, where the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic is usually set at c. 35,000 years ago by radiocarbon determinations.

A modest experiment explores what is is seen and what is not seen in field survey, and what can be done about it.

X-ray study of bronze plates from a fortress of the 1st millennium BC reveals cuneiform inscriptions on metal surfaces that are now wholly hidden by corrosion.

To those of us who wish there was no commercial trade in antiquities, colleagues — and those themselves active in the market — say there always has been one and always will be. Since concern largely arises from destruction of context and loss of information, may there be a way forward that both permits the trade and preserves the context?

More on the vexed question of collectors, looting, and on the right relationship between museums, researchers and the antiquities market.