In recent years much emphasis has been placed upon the effects of literacy in the transformation of the Mediterranean World between 800 and 400 BC. Alphabetic scripts have been seen by many, archaeologists and classicists alike, as one of the key factors that made many of the achievements of Mediterranean, particularly Greek, thought and culture possible. Alphabetic scripts encouraged widespread literacy, and widespread literacy was the necessary condition for what remains distinctive in Ancient Greek culture, namely the development of History, Philosophy and speculative Natural Science. Murray (1980: 96) is typical in his view that ‘Archaic Greece was a literate society in the modern sense.’ The work of Goody & Watt (1963) has done much to advance the view that many of the achievements of Mediterranean Society can be ascribed to, if not entirely explained by, this ‘technology of the intellect’. Their ‘autonomous model’ however, as Cartledge (1978: 37) has observed, comes dangerously close to technological determinism.

The Etruscan city states flourished in westcentral Italy from the late 8th century BC until their conquest and absorption by the emergent state ofRome in the 4th century BC. In 1985 Italy celebrated the century or so of work on its oldest civilization with a series of major exhibitions under the slogan, ‘Buongiorno Etruschi’ (‘Good morning, Etruscansi!’). There were eight major exhibitions in Tuscany displaying over 5000 objects from all the major collections in the region, designed to cover most aspects of Etruscan culture – settlement systems, domestic and religious architecture, religion, everyday life, crafts, and artistic achievement. As the sponsors FIAT wrote in their preface to the splendid catalogues produced for the project (e.g. Camporeale 1985; Carandini 1985; Cristofani 1985; Stopponi 1985), the intention of this massive undertaking was to convey to the Italian public that the Etruscans were not just a dead civilization known above all for the way of death of its élite, but ‘a lively culture of ordinary people, merchants, and craftsmen’.

Several recent reconstructions of the social and economic development of non-Mediterranean Gaul after c. 200 BC have argued for the development of complex societies, characterized by the appearance of centralized political entities with urban – or at least urbanizing – communities. The emergence of such ‘Archaic States’ is often considered as having been restricted to a broad zone running eastward from the Atlantic façade through the northern Massif Central to the Swiss plateau. Five certain such states are usually claimed: Bituriges cubi, Aedui, Arverni, Sequani, Helvetii; and three probable: Pictones, Lemovices and Lingones. The constitutents of this zone were originally recognized by Dr Daphne Nash (1976; 1978a; 1978b; 1981), and her view has since been adopted in Britain by Champion and his collaborators (1984), Bintliff (1984) and, most recently, Cunliffe (1988: figure 38). Essential to the formulation of this hypothesis was a wide-ranging consideration of three domains of protohistoric evidence on Gaul: literary, most conspicuously Julius Caesar’s de Bello Gallico; numismatics; and the settlement record of the late La Tène and its more shadowy antecedents. Among more recent commentators, a primary interest in the ‘core–periphery’ relationship (Cunliffe 1988; Rowlands et al. 1987) which existed between the Mediterranean world and Central Gaul is manifest. In a minimal view, this interaction may be envisaged in terms of the consequences of long-distance trade and subsequent military conquest spurring socio-political change. The unspoken by-product of this perspective is that differential development within non-Mediterranean Gaul is simplistically presented in terms of distance-decay from the Mediterranean littoral, with little attention being paid to the effects of physiographic diversity across this landmass.

‘Archaeology is breaking up … the very identity of “Archaeology” is beginning to fragment’: thus the alarm call in early 1988 from Cambridge, made by and to non-classical archaeologists, to gather in June and consider remedies. A month after the Cambridge symposium nearly 1500 scholars gathered in Berlin for the Eleventh International Congress in Classical Archaeology, devoted to the Hellenistic period. Many of the papers treated subjects in the traditional way, trying to make sense of new discoveries, and making better sense ofthe long familiar, including some radical revisions. Several were of a style and approach unthinkable even 20 years ago, notably those dealing with the problems of acculturation on the eastern edges of Alexander’s empire. There were no signs of anxiety. Should there have been?