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Three years ago, ANTIQUITY reported a first archaeological insight into the origins of Venice. The city's historical records, famously good and full for its flourishing, say very little about the beginnings. This second report includes direct evidence from Piazza San Marco, the heart of the city.

Presentation des dates radiocarbone realisees par l'Universite d'Oxford depuis 1993. Elles couvrent le domaine europeen (Paleolithique, Neolithique et plus recent) et quelques sites oceaniens

Presentation de la 19e liste de datations par radiocarbone publiee par Archaeometry, contenant principalement le materiel date depuis le debut de l'annee 1993

Presentation de la 18° liste de datations par radiocarbone concernant la faune du Pleistocene, l'habitat, le mobilier et l'environnement du Paleolithique europeen, oriental et africain, du Mesolithique anglais, du Neolithique et de l'âge des metaux anglais, portugais, africain, et de la prehistoire sud-americaine.

Four separate finds of human skeletal remains from the Norfolk Fens have been 14C-dated to the Early Bronze Age. It is suggested that they are a facet of the far more extensive deposition of bodies and artefacts in wet places.

Andrews and Hammond (1990) recently presented a reevaluation of the Preclassic sequence at the early Maya site of Cuello in northern Belize and reported a substantial number of radiocarbon dates. These dates supported two mutually incompatible chronologies: (1) the "long" chronology advanced by Hammond et al. (1976, 1977, 1979), in which the Swasey phase spanned the second millennium B.C. in radiocarbon years and began as early as 2500 cal B.C. in calendar years; (2) a "short" chronology consistent with, or even more compressed than, the time scale based on ceramic comparisons and suggested by Coe (1980:34-35) and Marcus (1984), in which the Swasey phase would begin in the early first millennium cal B.C. (Figure 1). Andrews and Hammond noted that since both chronologies were supported by a number of dates from at least two laboratories, neither could be given preference on purely internal radiocarbon-dating criteria, nor could the discrepancy between the two suites be explained in terms of excavation, processing, or laboratory procedures; nor could arguments of residuality or intrusion be applied consistently, though some individual dates might be thus explained. Andrews and Hammond opted eventually for a version of the "short" chronology in which Swasey, and the Cuello sequence, began around the end of the second millennium cal B.C., largely on the basis of the much larger number of detailed ceramic sequences now available in southern Mesoamerica with which the Cuello typology could be compared. We report here a fresh dating of the Cuello sequence, for the first time using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) on the organic ("collagen") fraction of human bone from burials, which suggests a resolution of the dispute compatible with both stratigraphy and ceramic chronology and also indicates the potential utility of AMS dating of human burials as a way of constructing site chronologies.