Notes on four miscellaneous shell and organic objects from Sharm

Four miscellaneous artefacts, which do not correspond to the other major small finds groups, are also included in the Sharm assemblage. Whilst the gastropod shell is positively identified as Tonna luteostoma, the materials and function of the remaining objects are conjectural.     

Quality Quartz: working stone at a bronze age kerbed Cairn at Olcote,near Calanais,Isle of Lewis

This paper discusses an assemblage of worked and smashed quartz associated with a Bronze Age kerbed cairn at Olcote. Most analytical treatments of quartz in Scottish prehistory have been structured around a pervasive dualism: quartz working is either the mundane use of a low quality raw material or the ritual use of a symbolically laden referent. The assemblage from Olcote highlights the dangers of such dichotomous analytical positions.     

Soviet dilemmas

Archie Brown and Michael Kaser (eds), Soviet Policy for the 1980s, London, Macmillan, 1982, pp.282. £7.95 (paper)

David Childs, The GDR: Moscow's Ally, London, Allen & Unwin, 1983, pp.346. $19.95 (paper)

Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller, Hungary 1956 Revisited. The Message of a Revolution — a Quarter of a Century After, London, Allen & Unwin, 1983, pp.174. $29.95 (cloth)

Paul G. Lewis (ed.) Eastern Europe: Political Crisis and Legitimation, London & Sydney, Croom Helm, 1984, pp.202. $33.95 (cloth)

Borys Lewytzhyj, Politics and Society in Soviet Ukraine 1953–1980, Edmonton, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1984, pp.219. Can. $6.95 (paper)

Roy Medvedev, Khrushchev, Oxford, Blackwell, 1982, pp.292. $15.95 (paper)

Zhores Medvedev, Andropov: His Life and Death, Oxford, Blackwell, 1984, pp.255. $12.95 (paper)