Exploring the archaeological correlates of Islam in Bahrain, the author finds that ‘Islamic identity’ is no singular condition: communities are diverse, exhibiting a culture that is rich, multicultural and complex.

In his response, Colin Renfrew retreats to a formalistic argument – Indo-European can only mean a language family. It has nothing to do whatsoever with institutions or religion. This statement simply writes off a whole academic discourse of Indo-European studies. Consequently Renfrew does not accept an argument that links the spread of an institution to a concomitant spread of its language or its terminology. In opposition to this I consider Indo-European languages to have a history linked to social and economic processes of change that we still know too little about. However, it implies a relationship between them, as Colin Renfrew cogently argues in his book (Renfrew 1987: chapter 6). Institutions which appear to have their origin in the Proto-Indo-European period, and which are still preserved – like language diversified – in later Indo-European religious mythology or sagas, are consequently termed Indo-European in this specific research context, as they share a common history. Often they also share a common terminology that can be demonstrated to have a Proto-Indo-European origin. In that they are interlinked in one way or another with language. It is therefore a worthy research task to consider if processes of language spread and the spread of institutions are interlinked, given that their terminology share a common origin.

From this follows that we must either abolish the term Indo-European completely, or accept that it embodies a number of social and religious traditions and institutions whose history cannot be totally separated from that of language, as their meaning is expressed in a specific Indo-European terminology. The danger of political misuse does not originate from research into this relationship; it originates from simplistic theoretical and methodological conflations of such categories with racist and chauvinistic historical constructions. The relationship between language and DNA, which Colin Renfrew has propagated, is no less subject to such manipulation. The only weapon against this is a developed theoretical and methodological strategy.

Recent research investigating the origins of Bahama archipelago habitation conducted archaeological surveys on the remote Bahamian Guinchos Cay and Cay Lobos. A complete lack of prehistoric evidence, however, suggests that they played no significant role in the colonisation of The Bahamas.

Crannogs, the artificial island habitations of the Scottish lochs and lakes, are once more a lively field of research. Following our 1993 report on the crannogs of southwest Scotland and their dates, here is news of crannogs on the Isle of Mull, again with striking dates.

Unlike many regional archaeologies the study of Egypt has always had widespread appeal, from archaeologists to Afrocentrists, orientalists to occultists. According to one web-site, ‘Egypt dominates the history of the world.’ This ever-popular fascination has spilled over into the electronic media since the inception of the Internet. Thus, Egypt proves to be a telling casestudyin net politics and potentialities. Simply typing the word ‘Egypt’ into a Web searcher elicits over 1 million sites, and the content of that material runs the gamut from scholarly resources closely matching those known in print to fringe sites and sci-fi web pages. This makes electronic Egypt an intellectual and ethical minefield for the uninitiated, especially as there proves often little to differentiate between this panoply of sites in terms of presentation and professionality. It palpably illustrates the homogenization of knowledge on the net and prompts us to consider the construction of archaeology and archaeological knowledges.

As has often been the case before, the actual manufacture of a distinctive class of ancient artefact offers valuable insight about the realities of an ancient craft knowledge.

Some five months have elapsed since I was invited to write this paper and, as seems always to be the case, the continued rapid change in applied computing and available technology has transformed my view of the potentials offered by CD-ROM (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory) as a publishing medium. The paper I now offer is substantially different in content; the conclusions, however, are the same.

Does a unique eroded prehistoric carving on one of the sarsen uprights at Stonehenge link the most famous of English megalithic monuments to Brittany?

Tangas are small convex triangular pottery covers found in large numbers in the Amazon delta. Their suggestive shape has long been attributed to use as a cover or shield for the female Mound of Venus, for protection, modesty (‘cache-sexe’ is the French term) or embellishment. Here the author offers a typology and searches for correlations between the shapes, sizes and patterns of the tangas and the date, location, purpose and status of the women who wore them. He emphasises that in spite of this advance, better understanding requires new information from properly designed excavations; 85 per cent of known tangas have been acquired by looting, purchase or low-precision digging.

A two-day conference, Fields of Conflict: progress and prospect in battlefield archaeology, held at the University of Glasgow, 15–16 April 2000, began by considering techniques of research and the interpretation of events and moved to consideration of site management and preservation