Antiquity 75 (288)

Reports on an EH funded survey aimed at establishing the number of LBA to LIA pottery collections in England. Work from January 1996 to October 1998 by a team of twenty-one people using a single-page proforma discovered 7,138 collections of which only 2,032 were already published. The proforma data from all c.7,000 sites has now been entered into an Access database which is currently maintained at the University of Southampton and known as The Later Prehistoric Pottery Collections Register and Bibliography for England: a Gazetteer. The internet address is given as: http://www.arch.soton.ac.uk/Research/PotteryGazetteer/ and readers are invited to access the data for themselves.

Reports experiments in megalithic construction using axe-based technology. Proposes methods whereby relatively small groups of skilled workers could effectively transport and erect standing stones and dolmens.

A set of gunflints and other artefacts produced by Fred Snare at Brandon (Suffolk) is an example of ways in which craftspeople in a declining trade attempted to create new markets by introducing new techniques and forms, and finding new ways to sell traditional skills. Sample sets and artefacts made for collectors reflect how some gunflint knappers, drawing on romantic conceptions of their craft as `heritage', assigned new meanings to the flint industry as part of a survival strategy for an obsolescent trade.

Raises concerns about a previous article (see 2001/272). The four main areas at issue are: the precision of the statistical methods employed; the problems of using chronological data in inferring human palaeodemographics; refinements needed in the original data; general problems of radiocarbon accuracy in the period concerned. The original authors reply with