Current Archaeology number 160 was published in December 1998

What is a Minster? Before parishes were invented, minsters were the centre of pastoral care, and thus they play a crucial role in Saxon society. After the conquest, many of them shrank in size: one such minster church is at Bampton, in Oxfordshire, where John Blair, of Queens College, Oxford has for the past 10 years been investigating the minster and it surrounding monuments. In a wide-ranging article, he describes his work, and the importance of minsters, and also his remarkable conclusion that the minster was originally placed over a row of Bronze Age barrows.

The Ice ages have for long been rather neglected in British archaeology, but recent advances in Radiocarbon dating mean that we can date them more precisely. During the coldest part of the Ice Age, from 20,000 to 16,000 years ago, Britain was uninhabited; before that however, Paviland cave was occupied by a small group of hunters, while by 12,000 Creswell Crags was occupied, not by rhino hunters, but by trappers of the arctic hare. Ruth Charles, of Newcastle University, sorts out some of the recent work.

Finally we have to report some very strange goings-on in the neolithic and Bronze Age monuments of south west Scotland. We start with Pict's Knowe, a henge monument first reported in CA 140. Unfortunately however the radiocarbon dates all turned out to be Roman, and we are faced with the dreadful problem that henges may have been used right down into the Roman period.

Two other sites at Holywell and Holm deal with cursus monuments and near-cursus monuments - rows of postholes leading in all directions. Many of them appear only to have been used one, and then burnt, and it looks as if instead of building solid monuments and then using them for centuries ever afterwards, many monuments were used only once, and then burnt, before being rebuilt next season.

We also look at a Late Bronze Age site at Welland Bank, near Peterborough, where a village was later covered by midden material.

And, of course, there is also the Books, Diary, John Musty's Science Dairy - and the Letters page!

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Created: 15th January 1999