Much archaeology is publicly funded, but rarely as a venture that is the personal initiative of a head of government. In this invited contribution, John Waddell (National University of Ireland, Galway) reports on the vigorous initiative of the Irish Discovery Programme since its 1991 launch. (And ANTIQUITY's editor notes the speedy rhythm of publication, in which John Waddell has had a role!)

Most archaeology and anthropology departments are grouped as Humanities or as Social Sciences in university organizations. Where does that place the archaeometrists who approach the materials with the methods of physical and biological sciences? And where does it place the archaeologists themselves — especially when archaeometric studies have a large place in contract archaeology?

Like the cultures of Neolithic Europe — ‘Glockenbecherkultur’, ‘Trichterbecherkultur’, ‘Linienbandkeramik’ — the ‘Lapita culture’ of the western Pacific is defined by its distinctive ceramics. What that ‘ceramic culture’ amounts to in human terms has been a key question in the region's archaeology — complete with a quest for a Lapita homeland. This fresh review focuses on the pottery, the defining stuff itself of the affair.

The Lapita ceramics that define the ‘Lapita’ cultural complex of the southwestern Pacific are named for the type-site of Lapita, on the south Melanesian island of Nouvelle-Calédonie (New Caledonia). The island archipelago's early sites are central to shaping what Lapita is, and — if Lapita is not alone — to how it meshes with the other precocious ceramics made by voyagers of the western Pacific. Varied radiocarbon determinations need to be collated, and some stratigraphic complications resolved.

Ambrose (this issue, above) and Sand (this issue, above) reported on Lapita in the specific, without being parochial in their concerns. This paper looks at the largest Lapita picture, but is itself in turn based on new reports in the specific, here from the coast of Papua New Guinea which is key for the relations in space, in time and in cultural affinity of whatever human it is that Lapita is.

The Smithsonian Institution Press (with a patience one no longer expects of a scholarly publisher) early this year issued the second volume of Tom Dillehay's monograph on Monte Verde, in far southern Chile — 8 years after the first volume (Dillehay 1989; 1997). What is the standing of the site? Is it the long-sought-after proof of a ‘pre-Clovis’ human presence in the Americas? And if it is, why is it by the southern tip of the Western Hemisphere, rather than close to its northern portal from Siberia?

A first rule of statistics is that the existence of a correlation does not itself prove a causal connection. This is the heart of the recurrent question in later European prehistory — whether in the Mediterranean or in the Atlantic northwest — about volcanic eruptions, their impact on climate, and then of the climatic impact on human populations. The burial under tephra of the Late Bronze Age settlement of Santorini is proof of a particular catastrophe: but is there the evidence to prove wider European calamity?

Where there are wet sites and organic artefacts are preserved, one can study artefacts of perishable materials which may by their nature offer more information than do lithic assemblages. On the US/Canadian Northwest Coast, with its series of celebrated wet sites, basketry and wooden fish-hooks survive so often that a decisive issue in the region's regional pattern can be explored this way — with archaeo-experimental help from unlucky inhabitants of the local aquarium!

The trade of dried fish played an important role in the transformation from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages in Scandinavian polities such as Arctic Norway. This paper develops zooarchaeological methods to investigate whether similar processes occurred in the less well documented Norse colonies of northern Scotland — the joint earldoms of Orkney and Caithness.

What do we know about the effects of the transition to agriculture on human biology? A literature has grown up that gives us the impression that we know a great deal about what happened to bones and teeth when people became sedentary farmers. A review of the sources of these ideas and the evidence supporting them, especially based on work in Portugal, reveals that a reconsideration of the biological consequences of farming in Europe is overdue.

As many an excavator — and many an older person — knows, it is in the nature of human teeth to fall out, before death if they can, after and into the ground if they may not. So any consideration of tooth loss as we see it in prehistoric remains — if it is to be the cultural evidence for the deliberate removal of teeth — needs properly to identify a sufficiently distinctive pattern.

The Moche tombs at Sipán, on the north Peruvian coast, are a major addition to our knowledge of high-status élite burial rituals. Its Tomb 1 contains the remains of nine individuals — three adult males, one adult female, three adolescent females and one child — besides the principal burial. Who are these people, as their biological remains instruct us?

Evidence of early occupations by hunter-gatherers in diverse tropical forests is increasing the world over (e.g. Gorman 1971; Pavlides & Gosden 1994), even in America (Roosevelt et al. 1996). This paper reports them in northern South America. Several lines of evidence suggest that many kinds of forests, some or all without modern analogues, existed in the American tropics during glacial times and remained there, with changing composition, until the present. According to evidence presented here, human beings adapted to those forests in northern South America since, at least, the end of the Pleistocene.

Çatalhöyük, on the Konya Plain in south central Anatolia, in the 1960s became the most celebrated Neolithic site of western Asia: huge (21 hectares), with early dates, tightpacked rooms with roof access, exuberant mural paintings, cattle heads fixed to walls, dead buried beneath floors in collective graves.

This site, as difficult to excavcate as it is strange, is the object of a pioneering application of the ‘post-processual’ approach, hitherto largely a matter of re-working and criticism outside the trench. The Çatalhöyük project director explains his approach, in which the conclusions as well as the work in early progress will be ‘always momentary, fluid and flexible’.

Recent excavations at the site of Saar, Bahrain, further advance our knowledge of Dilmun, that magical place on the Gulf which was a cross-roads of southwest Asian land and northwest Indian Ocean. Saar is a proto-urban agglomeration with the characteristics of a planned settlement — planned it appears from some other and controlling place.

What were the ‘black stones’ about which Charlemagne wrote to King Offa of Mercia just before AD 800? How do these special blocks fit into the broader pattern in re-using Roman columns in early medieval buildings?

The visual manifestation of the recent Hale-Bopp comet reminds us how telling are those rare objects which suddenly flare in the sky. One can suppose ancient people living by natural light were more compellingly struck by the sight of comets and supernovae, and understandably researchers seek images of them in the shapes of rock-art motifs. An absolute dating contradicts that supposition in respect of a presumed image of the visible supernova of AD 1054.

More on whether the prehistoric pottery vessels from Eridu, in Mesopotamia, are models of precocious boats, or as was argued in a recent ANTIQUITY, spinning bowls.

Introducing our articles by Richard Hobbs and Paul Ashbee (ANTIQUITY 71: 63–76) on the Mildenhall Treasure, the mass of Roman silverware which came to light in east England in 1946, I remarked that the principals are deceased. One principal did leave a first-hand account which has not been known before — Tom Lethbridge, Hon. Keeper of Anglo-Saxon antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. This extract from his unpublished autobiography is printed with the kind permission of Mrs Tom Lethbridge.