Antiquity 50

The development of the 3-acre settlement is deduced from the archaeological evidence and nine carefully selected and treated 14C-dated samples. Interim plans show: Phase 1 pits and small 4-post structures, La Tène 1a brooch, and angular, shouldered and globular pottery; Phase 2, small round huts, pits, saucepan pottery and bronze-smith's refuse pit Phase 3, subsidiary inner enclosures, pits and Durotrigian pottery. The 14C dates corrected on the Clark curve, span the period 465-800 BC to AD 205-AD 20.

Describes the new Donald Baden-Powell Quaternary Research Centre for research, teaching, and the housing of important Palaeolithic-Mesolithic material.

SE 832559. Re-excavation of Mortimer's Barrow 275 in advance of destruction revealed post-pits at both ends of the stone burial platform, presumably for a mortuary structure. Façades to E and W were covered by a circular mound twice enlarged and ditched. The connections are both local (pottery and rite) and more distant (Wayland's Smithy).

Alcock's explanation (74/2791) is over-abstruse; window splays had the sheerly practical intention of admitting more light to the church interior, and Bede's metaphor is wholly explicable in terms of the task of holy men bringing enlightenment to people's hearts.

A lively interdisciplinary conference in 1975 evaluated recent work in archaeoastronomy and explored the possibility of reconciling it with more traditional archaeological evidence. The individual papers are briefly summarized (astronomical, mathematical, archaeological) with discussion of the 'Thomist paradox' (that the skills postulated by Thom et al are not reflected elsewhere in the archaeological record).

At the Empingham cemetery displacement of bones and artefacts was so frequent as to suggest that the burials (which were not coffined) had been roofed with planks, subsequent collapse of which had disturbed the body below. The funerary house may have been important here as it was earlier, in Neo times, or later, with the hogback tombs; and the need for extra-careful recording at all periods is clear.

Challenges Hawkins' theory that these stones indicate extreme positions of moonrise and moonset; instead, Lockyer was probably right to see them as pointing to sunrise/set at a date midway between equinox and solstice. If so, was the minor lunar standstill ever observed at Stonehenge?

[HY 4114]. Over twenty 14C dates are now available for bones from the chambered cairn at Quanterness and related sites at Maes Howe, Quoyness and on the island of Rousay. A tentative evolutionary sequence is drawn up from c 3600 BC to c 2900 BC; Maes Howe comes quite late and implies a more centralized organization than Quanterness and its contemporaries where small, egalitarian communities are to be inferred.

'How to get better drawings quicker and cheaper' is the problem posed here: the solution offered has been tested on at least three large excavations. First, trace the full original arc of the sherd or pot, using a 'circumference scriber' (figured). If necessary photograph the sherd, then section it vertically using a lapidary saw. Position the resulting clean surface against a 'stance block' (figured) and draw round it. The system is said to be 'reasonably fool-resistant' and in the field gives a drawing rate five or more times faster, with a more faithful result, than that of the conventional measured drawing.

A four-man delegation from Britain attended the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in May 1975, which among other things voted to set up a National Register of Professional Archaeologists to improve standards and enable the public to recognize the achievement of those standards. The second author visited Arizona where he found the situation of 'public' (rescue) archaeology very similar to that in Britain though the concept of 'cultural resource management' has been taken much further in the USA, where the stress is on preservation of the irreplaceable archaeological heritage rather than on its rescue-excavation.