This fine, and deservedly famous, ragstone head from Czechoslovakia makes an appealing piece with its delightful curling moustaches – ‘perhaps the closest that we have to Celtic self-portraiture’. This new study looks at the head in its context, and notes the pieces that may parallel it.

There are few frontiers from later periods whose archaeology is more beguiling than the east African coast. To the east are the sea-routes of the Indian Ocean, to the Islamic world, to India, to Indonesia, to China. To the west are the distinctive cultures of medieval Africa. And on the coast are the settlements where the east and the west touch. This paper works towards the wider issue of circum-maritime cultures from a single find from the new excavations at Shanga which have revealed mosques of a remarkably early date.

The written sources are overwhelming for that great historical event, the conquest of the world by Europeans between the 15th and the 19th centuries. Historical archaeology, especially in north America, now provides an important source of evidence of a different character. But what was it like to receive Europeans on your shore, what was it like to be dispossesed? Here is a report specifically concerned with relations between native and newcomer at the Cape, one of those African regions which first felt the European impact.

Tintagel Castle (at NGR SS 0589) has been strangely absent from the pages of ANTIQUITY. O.G.S. Crawford missed seeing it during his Cornish trips in the 1920s. Glyn Daniel was there only in October 1986, his last visit to Cornwall, when the place was also inspected by HRH Prince Charles – apparently the first Duke or Earl of Cornwall to set foot on the Island since Richard (1209–72; the younger brother of Henry III), who built the Castle and was crowned King of the Romans at Aachen in 1257. If Tintagel shares with Maiden Castle the fate of being among the most frequently excavated of all the Duchy of Cornwall's monuments, it stands alone in being at once the most picturesque and the most enigmatic.

A knowledge of pyrotechnology - the skills of creating and working with high temperatures - attested for later prehistoric Europe first by refined ceramics in the Neolithic, then by copper and bronze metallurgy. But what about the third aspect of pyrotechnology – faience, glass and other vitreous materials? New work reported in this survey shows a place for glass in the European Bronze Age.

It is uncommon for the prehistorian to engage in the writing of culture history in the wider sense of the term – that is, to comment on major works of literature and art in the light of contemporary experience, learning and values. As archaeology has become a more professional field of study, discourse in recent years has come increasingly to have a discipline-centred focus. There is a price to pay for the habit of looking inward: the loss of contact with cultural and intellectual developments in the world at large. What is attempted in revisiting Old Calabria, a classic that Norman Douglas wrote in the early part of this century, is an experiment at writing archaeological discourse that is less self-centred and instead tries to look outward.

Twenty years' debate in English and Americanist circles about the fundamental aims of archaeology, and the methods that are to achieve them, has mostly been conducted in a framework of named schools – ‘new’, ‘processual’, and now also ‘postprocessual’ and ‘contextual’ – and in terms of their philosophical good standing (or lack of it).

This paper addresses the fundamentals as they declare themselves in a different region, the Pacific, and sees that the heart of the matter lies more in the nature of history, the history of the Pacific itself, and the history of its study.

The group of gold objects excavated in 1808 from Bush Barrow, a little to the south of Stonehenge, are among the best-known and best-regarded artefacts from British prehistory. Here they are fully published, with an account of the recent restoration of the larger lozenge from the group.

Classification is fundamental to all artefactual archaeology, and no one who works with artefacts can be unaware of the doubts that surround many classifications. How similar are the similar things that belong together? How different are the different things that belong apart? What do the classes of similar things actually amount to? This paper looks at some fundamental questions of classification, believing that classification is too important a practical matter to be left to the theoreticians.

Recognition of distinctive ceramics by visual inspection is the norm in surface survey - especially when ceramic types are as varied and colourful as those of Islamic medieval pottery. Here petrographic analysis is used successfully to define the ceramic categories and the contributions of local and imported wares.

The fascicules of the final report on Franchthi Cave in the Argolid, the key Aegean sequence for the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition, are starting to appear, along with the publications of the Stanford survey of the region. Here, those reports prompt a wider review of existing explanations for the emergence of Greek social complexity, and the identifying of a new and major impetus as the basis for a revised model.

Experimental study with replica bows and projectiles of a variety of types indicates the superiority of archery over the throwing of spears, and makes it possible to indicate a hierarchy of increasing efficiency in the main classes of bows.