Aerial photography is so fundamental an instrument of modern archaeology that we often take it for granted. But its methods are surprisingly specific and its most important experimental theatre was probably the territory of the Levant—and especially the rocky terrain of Jordan. The author, a prominent aerial archaeologist of our own day, takes time off to review the achievements of the pioneers, serving officers who established routes over the desert to deliver mail between Egypt and Iraq. The fabulous ancient landscape they discovered could only be appreciated through the low-level window provided by these slow-moving rickety machines and their intrepid pilots. In these days of jet travel, the precious basalt landscape is in danger of slipping off the agenda again—both for researchers and conservers.

Evidence from the Channel Islands supports the view that long-distance transport of megaliths in the European Neolithic cannot be substantiated. Analysis of the stones at La Hougue Bie, however, shows that megaliths were regularly moved over shorter distances, and suggests that the distribution of megalithic sites within a region cannot be explained simply as a function of the availability of building materials. This view modifies the purely materialistic conclusions of Thorpe & Williams-Thorpe in their recent demolition of the Stonehenge bluestones myth (ANTIQUITY 65: 64–73).

For the purpose of discussion the platform and the alignment must be regarded as two separate sites which might in the future prove to have been related. Taken together the metal objects from the two sites represent a remarkable collection, not only by their context and numbers but also by the range of metals represented. Whilst the majority of the objects are in copper alloy (almost certainly bronze) there are also objects in iron, a white metal (some definitely tin, others, lead) and a single gold object.

Once upon a time (so tradition says) a region of extreme fertility lay between the Scilly Islands and Cornwall. This land was called Lyonesse; and where now roll the waters of the Atlantic there once stood prosperous towns and no less than a hundred and forty churches. The rocks called the Seven Stones, seven miles west of Land's End, are said to mark the site of a large city. This country was overwhelmed by the sea, and the sole survivor, one Trevilian, escaped destruction only by mounting a swift horse and fleeing to the mainland.

Such, stripped to the bone, is the famous legend of Lyonesse. Had it any real basis in fact, or is it merely an invention of the “dreamy Celt”? There are good reasons for believing that the substance of the legend is true, that within prehistoric times there did actually exist land which is now covered by the sea, and that it has been gradually overwhelmed. In one respect only does the modern critic disagree with tradition. He believes that Lyonesse was the Scilly Islands themselves, not a completely vanished region between them and Cornwall; and that what is now an archipelago of islands was a single large island, surrounded perhaps by a few rocky islets.

Hallstatt and La Tène are the names given to the first and second phases of the pre-Roman Iron Age. They are derived from the sites where objects characteristic of the respective cultures were first identified, neither Hallstatt nor La Tène having any claim to be considered as the cradles of the cultures named after them. The former lies in Upper Austria. La Tène (‘the shallows’) is situated in Switzerland at the eastern end of the lake of Neuchatel.

The upper limit for the chronology of the Hallstatt Period is a vexed point. If by Hallstatt we mean a period when iron was in general use, it can hardly have said to have begun before the ninth century B.C. ; if we regard it as denoting the time when Villanovan and other contemporary influences first made themselves felt in Central Europe, it can hardly have begun later than c. 1000 B.C. Reinecke would even put it back as far as c. 1200 B.C. The lower limit is somewhat easier to define. Generally speaking it came to an end c. 550-500 B.C. ; but in some districts it persisted until c. 400, while in north-east Germany and other remote areas, the La Tène culture cannot be said to have succeeded it until c. 150 B.C., or even later.

A man and a woman were found in a double burial dating from the 1st century BC and located in a Xiongnu burial site in northern Mongolia. An offering box at the head of the man's coffin contained both remains of domestic animals and a human hyoid bone. The skeleton of the man was complete whereas the woman's hyoid bone was missing. The isolated hyoid bone could belong to the buried woman, which suggests the removal of her tongue and probably her sacrifice.

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?

EVER since, in 1893, Paolo Orsi published and described a group of these objects from the necropolis of Cava della Signora, Castelluccio, they have E been generally regarded as of the highest importance for the study of W. Mediterranean prehistory. Orsi himself immediately recognized the parallel with those which had then been recently unearthed by Schliemann at Troy, and since his time the validity of this parallel has been generally admitted by archaeologists. All who have since then treated of the chronological problems of Sicily and the Western Mediterranean lands have accepted them as imports from Troy and a basis for synchronisms between the cultures of the Eastern and Western basins. Despite this, however, no study has as yet been published of these objects in which the Trojan and Sicilian groups have been treated together and closely compared. In 1939 a useful critical analysis of the evidence relative to the three Trojan plaques was published by Bittel, but he did not go on to make a similar study of the Sicilian ones.

Two further points in Neeley & Barton's 1994 paper are explored.

In 1996 ‘Internet Archaeology’, the first peer-reviewed e-journal for Archaeology, published its first edition (Heyworth et al. 1997). Later the same year the Archaeology Data Service, the first digital archive for archaeology, was established (Richards 1997). Ten years on, this paper examines the rapid changes which have taken place in electronic publication and looks forward to the next ten years. It examines the pressures on traditional journal publication, and discusses the potential impact on Archaeology of the next Internet revolution, the Semantic Web.

One question fundamental to the interpretation of the elaborate sceptre found at Sutton Hoo is why whetstone should have been chosen as its material. Too heavy for convenience, yet neither rare nor intrinsically beautiful, why was this substance thought appropriate for such an important item of regalia? The interpretation so far has been that it symbolized the king as war-leader, ‘the forger, giver and master of the swords of his followers’. While this is undoubtedly an attractive and appropriate interpretation, it lacks literary confinnation; I would therefore like to put forward an alternative (or supplementary) hypothesis based on the evidence of certain passages in Old Icelandic writings where whetstones are mentioned in a mythical context, or are described as being used in non-realistic circumstances suggestive of ritual. Despite their late date, Icelandic sources have often cast valuable light on Germanic religion.