The transition to states in mainland Southeast Asia began during the first centuries AD, and has commonly been ascribed to the adoption of Indian religious and political ideas which arrived on the maritime silk route. Recent research on the Khmer language inscriptions dating from 611 AD has revealed strong local traditions underlying the Indic veneer. In assessing these trends to increased social complexity, however, we have lacked insight into late prehistoric culture.

Although significant to societies at a local, regionaland national level for up to 6000 years, the prehistoriclandscape of Avebury, Wiltshire, was formallyattributed the accolade of being 'globally important'in November 1986. At this time the United NationsEducational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation(UNESCO) inscribed Avebury onto the growing listof World Heritage Sites (http://www.unesco.orglwhc), and along with England's most notorious prehistoricmonument, 'Stonehenge, Avebury, and associatedsites' ((373) was created.The joint nomination ofboth Avebury and Stonehengeby the UK government was rational. At a timewhen no UK sites were on the list, seven UK applicationswere being presented to UNESCO and it wasconsidered that there would be a better chance ofboth landscapes being accepted if they were consideredas one site. Indeed, in comparison with thevariety of cultural and temporal variation in nominations,Stonehenge and Avebury are similar. It istrue that upon closer inspection there are both comparableand contrasting patterns of monument type,construction, use and disuse, but when comparingthese differences to those between here and DnrhamCastle or Ironbridge Gorge, for example, Stonehengeand Avebury certainly have an affinity

Neolithic and Bronze Age lake villages have captured the public imagination since their recognition in the 19th century. Commonly thought of as 'Swiss' although similar types of sites are found throughout Europe and beyond, these villages are renowned for unusually well preserved organic finds and the romantic image of being raised above water. Today it is held that both raised and groundlevel dwellings existed, and that each site must be interpreted on an individual basis. Current research analyses sedimentary sequences from thrcc Neolithic lakeside villages on the northern rim of the European Alps using micromorphology, or the study of thin-sectioned in situ sediments from and around archaeologicals ites (FIGUR1E). This research is the first time sediment from lakeside villages was treated as material culture, with the specific purpose of detailing human use of the landscape through the identification of archaeological features (FIGURE2). Features on lakeside villages are often distorted by wave action, sediment loading and/or erosional episodes.

Subdivided strip fields were widespread over most of lowland England before enclosure. Where datable they seem to originate in the late Saxon period and their use survived into the 19th century in some places. In East Anglia and southeast England strips were usually ploughed flat, but in most of the Midlands they were cast up to form ‘ridge and furrow’. This ridging technique was once used in a central band stretching from County Durham in the north to Somerset in the southwest.

Rock-art, despite much ingenious effort (e.g., among many, Watchman et al. 1997), remains difficult to date by absolute methods, so relative dating has a central importance much as applied to dirt archaeology in the era before routine radiometric dating. It is sound relative dating which will show just what the entities are to which absolute dates may be connected. The first basis for relative dating is the determination of sequence: what motifs done by which techniques in which materials precede and follow each other; and the first basis for sequence is physical superposition, in which one figure plainly overlies another or - in the case of rock-engravings - one figure clearly cuts through another. But often figures do not cut or superpose each other so no relation of sequence exists: and sometimes figures are cut through each other without sequence being clear, or are so much overpainted that the older figures are impossible to discern.

The Romano-British settlement at Grandford lies northwest of the town of March, in the heart of the Fens of eastern England. It straddles the ‘Fen Causeway’, a Roman road that ran west—east across the Fens, and which probably originated at the legionary vexillation fortress at Longthorpe, near Peterborough, held between c. AD 48 and 61/62. Small-scale excavations between 1958 and 1968 demonstrated occupation for much of the Roman period, down to the later 4th century, beginning at least as early as c. AD 65 (Potter & Potter 1982). It was suggested on various grounds that the settlement niay have started life as a Roman fort, constructed in the aftermath of the great rebellion of AD 60-61, led by Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni (Potter 1981: 85-7).

'The Greatest Museum of Prehistoric Art in the whole World'. Such was the description Henri Lhote gave to the rock paintings of the Tassili-n- Ajjer , the massif (a designated World Heritage Site) that lies to the northeast of Ahaggar in the Algerian Central Sahara. His expedition spent 16 months in the Tassili in 1956-7 making 'discovery after discovery' and copying 'hundreds upon hundreds of painted walls'. Lhote's work is now recognized for its denigration of almost all and sundry. He likened the local people, the Tuareg, who made many of his 'discoveries', to wolves and living by the laws of the jungle. Significantly, he made no reference in his 'discovery claims' to Yolande Tschudi, the Swiss ethnologist, whose work preceded his own. Worse still, he undertook what might be regarded today as the systematic vandalism of the sites, not only by liberally washing the paintings to restore their colour, but by collecting and removing copious quantities of material artefacts from the area.

The study of Roman urban centres in Portugal (ancient Lusitania) is now well developed, but the rural landscape has remained little known. A new collaborative European project (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfud/Main, National University of Ireland Galway and University College Dublin) is investigating the rural landscape and its economy — with the support of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation Cologne and the Instituto Portugues do Patrimonio Arquitectonico — from the Romanization of coast and hinterland, its Christianization and subsequent Islamicization.

The Folsom site (New Mexico, USA) is justly famous as the place where in 1927 four decades of sometimes bitter controversy came to an end, when it was finally demonstrated humans had been in the New World since the Pleistocene (Meltzer 1993). Folsom became the type site for the Palaeoindian period and distinctive fluted projectile point that bears its name (see Hofman 1999). Yet, as the excavations done in the 1920s by the Colorado (now Denver) and American Museums of Natural History focused initially on the recovery of Bison antiquus skeletons suitable for museum display, and latterly on documenting the association of projectile points with those bison remains, many fundamental questions of interest about the site’s stratigraphic, environmental and archaeological context were left unanswered (and often not asked).

Roman Sicily has long been known from classical sources for its agricultural fertility, but little archaeological research has been conducted on the rural economy. The Campanaio project is uncovering a wealth of information about a small (3 ha) hellenistic and Roman rural settlement and its economy, 25 km west of Agrigento. Excavations (1994-95,1997-98) have revealed seven principal phases. Activity started c. 200 BC, and was intensive for two centuries in the central part of the site. A complex of buildings underwent two complete reconstructions between 200 BC and AD 25; in its last phase (c. 50 BC) it comprised an Lshaped building some 17 m long and 8.40 m wide, with dry-stone walls, earth floors and mud-brick superstructure (FIGUR1E