The treasures from Troy, removed from Berlin to be kept quietly in Moscow and–it now proves–in St Petersburg these last 50 years, are now being seen. Here is a first first-hand report on just what they amount to.

We asked Sarah Colley, who teaches Aboriginal archaeology and heritage management at the University of Sydney, Australia, to give an account of the 3rd World Archaeological Congress, held at New Delhi, India, 4–11 December 1994, as she experienced it.

Thirty years ago, the finding of a single hand-axe in Greece was remarkable enough to have its own note in ANTIQUITY. A recent conference is occasion to review the regional picture, now broad as well as deep enough for patterns to emerge which look more like early prehistoric realities than the chance consequence of where the pioneers have been looking.

St Kilda, the little group of islands far offshore from northwest Scotland, was known for its seabird subsistence in the period before its evacuation in 1930. Recent discoveries suggest that the importance of agriculture in the prehistoric period (before the 16th century AD) may have been underestimated.

A new field is opening up in biological archaeology, as it is found that ancient DNA and other bio-molecules may–under the right conditions–survive over the long term. Is the same true of blood residues on stone tools?

Contemporary diaries and the water-colours of artists such as the Port Jackson Painter vividly tell of Aboriginal life when the First Fleet in 1788 settled its cargo of convicts in Australia. Fishing was important around the waters of Port Jackson, whose Aboriginal inhabitants are recorded to have used the techniques of spear-fishing and angling. Were other methods also used? Fish remains from a shell midden provide an opportunity to investigate.

The American Northwest Coast, famously rich as an environment for hunter-gatherers, is not an easy landscape to inhabit. Field survey of the Tebenkof Bay region, Kuiu Island, southeast Alaska, identifies the pattern of site positions. Mathematical modelling explores which considerations directed the placing of settlements in that landscape.

For a century a notion of a prehistoric Mother Goddess has infused some perceptions of ancient Europe, whatever the realities of developing archaeological knowledge. With the reverent respect now being given to Marija Gimbutas, and her special vision of a perfect matriarchy in Old Europe, a daughter-goddess is now being made, bearer of a holy spirit in our own time, to be set alongside the wise mother of old.

The study of gender in ancient societies seems inseparable from the place of gender in our own society–and therefore inseparable from the particular attitudes and expectations those contemporary manners create. This BIG problem is explored, and some approaches to its resolution are developed.

Previous articles in ANTIQUITY have taken different views of the dating pattern for the human settlement of Australia. Is the apparent limit in the region of 35–40,000 years ago visible in the radiocarbon determinations a real date for the human presence? Or is it an artificial result of the dating method? A comparative study of the dating pattern in archaeological as against non-archaeological contexts may inform.

First generation modelling of cultural systems, as applied in archaeology, frequently invoked linear, deterministic relationships as well as privileging concepts such as stability and an assumed cumulative evolution towards increasing complexity. But can the world of human affairs with its numerous reversals and unintended consequences really be captured by such models? Recent advances in the natural sciences have demonstrated the central role of non-linear phenomena, discontinuities and unpredictable breaks from established patterns and events. It is argued that such findings can form the basis for a new theoretical framework, human ecodynamics.

Zhukaigou, a late prehistoric site in Inner Mongolia, stands in an important zone, the region where the steppe cultures meet the settled farming civilization of China. As elsewhere across the Asian steppes, that zone where each tradition meets its other is observed both from its archaeology and from such clues as we have to ancient perceptions of significant others.

The subsistence basis for Japanese civilization has always been intensive rice cultivation. What was grown there before the introduction of paddy technology? A glimpse of the plant cultigens in the later Jomon begins to tell.

New finds from the Upper Palaeolithic of Anatolia, and the mineralogical analysis of their colours, extends evidence of a precocious interest in pigments from the western European heartland of Palaeolithic painting into the Near East.

The designer of the reconstructed Greek trireme, Olympias, first proposed by John Morrison and now built and tested at sea, takes issue with Alec Tilley's divergent ideas and proposals about these ships, together with their practicality. The author is a naval architect.

Bradley & Gordon, writing in ANTIQUITY in 1988, reported a distinct pattern in the distribution and dates of the many human crania that have been found in the River Thames. Issue is taken with that view, and the insight it promised in relating human remains to the prehistoric British interest in watery places