New excavation at Blombos Cave, in the southern Cape of South Africa, and new radiocarbon dates for its sequence further illuminate the chronology of pastoralism in southern Africa, and the relations between pottery-using and shepherding.

ANTIQUITY's recent report on direct radiocarbon dates for human bone from Welsh caves had them concentrated in two distinct Postglacial periods. The larger pattern for Britain as a whole is also striking.

The head of the Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art takes issue with comment on archaeometallurgical work at Oxford made in ANTIQUITY earlier in the year.

In ANTIQUITY for 1993 Barber & Crone reported their excavations at Buiston, one of the crannogs of southwestern Scotland, whose archaeology was in a remarkable good state despite the draining of its watery site. This further account, in reporting on botanical materials from the site, is able to develop a better knowledge of the plants around the crannog, and of their human uses.