The archer's bow is a machine whose purpose is to impart stored energy effectively and accurately to propel the arrow. A mathematical modelling of different bow types shows how their engineering characteristics define their performances.

Minute biological traces, with their prospect of recovering even ancient DNA, are the most attractive of archaeological materials to work with. This supplementary report on field studies of rock-art first published in ANTIQUITY further explores how these studies may in truth be carried out.

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.

The Mesolithic — as the ‘time in between’ — raises issues of definition, the more so as chronology is refined and the abruptness of environmental change at the end of the glaciation becomes clearer. This clarification of an unusual regional sequence is an instance.

Trevisker pottery is a common Bronze Age type in Cornwall and the southwest of England. It is often well-made and with a distinct petrology. It was, however, traded in prehistory with some petrologically similar vessels being found in Brittany and northern France. Recently, a Cornish-style vessel made from Cornish clays has been located in eastern Kent, almost 500 km from its source.

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?

Grapes appear rather early in temperate Europe: even in the cool north of Sweden, their pips occur in the Neolithic. With grapes go wine, and with wine go the artefacts of wine, amongst them the cauldron on wheels — a grand and an odd artefact type of Bronze Age Europe.

We live, most of us, in agricultural societies; our food comes from the farm. We make gardens, many of us, and we eat some of the plants that we grow there. That farming is not the same as gardening we see in the responses of western observers when they made contact with societies whose food came more from the garden than the farm. A gardener's view of food makes its own story.

‘Animals were wild, and then some of them were tamed and so became domestic.’ The archaeological definition of ‘domestic’ is a fundamental, alongside the means by which the domestic is to be recognized in the archaeological record. Setting that relationship with human beings which we call ‘domestication’ alongside other relations between species clarifies the issues.

Mediterranean obsidian-provenance studies are changing in direction and focus of modern research, with characterization of the Sardinian sources, application of minimally destructive and inexpensive analytical techniques, analysis of complete or large parts of assemblages, and the integration of provenance data with reduction technology and use-wear traces.

The history of field manuring is poorly known. Domestic waste may have been used for this purpose from the Early Neolithic onwards. It is possible that the practice of collecting animal dung began with the introduction of the ard.

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.

As Rosenfeld & Smith report in this number of ANTIQUITY, the reconciliation of conventional chronologies for rock-art with the emergent radiocarbon-based dates is not proving an easy affair. Here are the first steps for the classic area of San hunter-gatherer art, on the South Africa/Lesotho border.

Ground-penetrating radar and other geophysical techniques are known to produce useful data when deposits are crisply structured, as in the case of sub-surface masonry walls or large ditches. New studies of Californian coastal sites find the methods are effective in tracing the less sharp distinctions that define clay and sand house floors within these large and dense hunter-gatherer middens.

Three aurochs horn cores, unearthed during the construction of the city baths in Vác (Hungary), were purchased from a private collector in 1951. One of these stray finds deserves attention in light of new archaeozoological research, and the relation between mundane horn manufacturing and high-status medieval craft industries.

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.

A ‘heritage manager’ who wishes a quiet and an orderly life may hope their heritage place is culturally dead; whatever meaning it once had, now it is an archaeological site, an ancient monument, a tourist attraction. But many sites are not dead. Chaco Canyon, the celebrated complex in the desert of the US Southwest, is of continuing value to Native Americans of its region; and the place has become a focus for New Age ceremony — itself in part inspired by Native American knowledge.

A rock-shelter near the north Argentinian coast offers an archaeological sequence of hunter-gatherer occupation running intermittently from Palaeo-Indian times to the era of European contact.

As has often been the case before, the actual manufacture of a distinctive class of ancient artefact offers valuable insight about the realities of an ancient craft knowledge.

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.