The early nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable reversal of judgment on the American pre-Columbian cultures. Prescott's romantic histories and Lord Kingsborough's monumental Mexican Antiquities are inspirations of earlier and less sceptical eras. Such pleasing imaginings as that the Spaniards ‘overthrew in Mexico a greater civilization than their own’ received scant support from the archaeologist who had displaced the antiquary, or from the critical historian who interpreted him. Dr Robertson1 summed up the verdict of the new investigators;:—‘The inhabitants of the New World were in a state of society so extremely rude as to be unacquainted with those arts which are the first essays of human ingenuity in its advance towards improvement’. He characterized Cortes's ‘emperors’ as ‘headmen’, the gorgeous palaces of the Conquest as ‘huts or mounds of rubble’, the Aztec Empire as a ‘league of primitive tribes’. Research, both among the ruins of the Mexican Valley and in the histories of the more prosaic conquistadores, established a singular lack of anything on the pre-Columbian continents which could be described as other than a tawdry barbarism.

Most of the opposition directed at the new AcropolisMuseum (herafter NAM), both beforeand since its opening in June 2009, has turned out to be politically motivated, mainly from the Left in Greece, mainly from the Right in Britain (the Daily Telegraph called it 'a hideous visitor centre in modern Athens'before it was even built [Wilson 2006]). Dimitris Plantzos comes at the museum from a different angle, but he too is determinedly on the attack. A first sign of this is his total silence about the protection and exhibition of the archaeological site underlying the museum, one of its major positive (and innovatory) features.

Many scholars emphasize the Soviet Union's invasion of Lithuania in 1940 as the first traumatic event in Marija Gimbutas'life, but she was exposed to conflict from the time of her birth. She was born in Vilnius, a city that was at the root of conflict between Lithuanians and Poles during the 1920s and 1930s. It is unclear why she created an image of a peaceful ‘Goddess-oriented Old Europe’, as her life was inseparable from various ethnic and ideological conflicts of 20th-century Europe.

Professor Stuart Piggott, who opened the conference, began by tracing the history of Iron Age studies in Scotland. He referred to the idea that there was something essentially peculiar about the Scottish Iron Age, and attributed its growth to an over-emphasis on the distinction between Highland and Lowland Zones. It was not inevitable (though it frequently happened) that Scotland should receive its cultural stimuli at second hand from lowland England, and certainly not that every development in the north should be retarded in time. On the other hand, there were differences, above all the shortage of pottery, and this gave especial value to the recent field studies of monuments, notably those made by the Royal Commission.

A Series of Egyptian objects found in foreign lands has been used to date archaeological groups in those lands, especially for periods the dating of which was unknown. In connexion with a study of Egyptian stone vessels I have taken occasion to examine the material reported from other lands, and it appears to me that some of the material used by scholars can be more accurately dated.

Until modern cultivation invaded even the permanent pasture-land, the ubiquitous trace of medieval farming in the lowland English landscape was ridge-and-furrow. A record in themselves, the undulating slopes are now seen to act as a device to preserve older features underneath.