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A number of infant burials in Britain, both cremations and inhumations, contained a consistent deposit of a small jet bear, black mineral jewellery, a coin, and a pottery beaker. Some of the graves held several examples of these items, and some a wider variety of objects. Comparison with more obviously amuletic grave deposits from Butt Road, Colchester, and Lankhills, Winchester, suggests that the coins were selected for their reverse image, and that both they and the bears are representations of guardians placed in the burials to ensure that the child did not enter the underworld alone and unprotected. These bears are set in the wider context of the animal's iconography and mythology, with particular reference to the Greek cult of Artemis, who oversaw childbirth and child-rearing. The choice and importance of materials and the positions of objects within graves are also briefl y explored and the social identity of the dead infants is examined. In an appendix of other burials containing jet animals, the Chelmsford hoard of jet jewellery is reinterpreted as grave goods from the inhumation of a young woman.Colchester

B ONE pins are often regarded as undatable. Though several classifications of head-types have been produced, notably that from the Jewry Wall site at Leicester (Kenyon 1948: 264), no attempt has been made to relate any type to a particular date-range and to test such dating against comparable published material. Three large sites in the centre of Colchester 1 have produced over 280 bone pins with heads intact, for 202 of which provisional broadly-dated contexts have been established. These pins can be divided into seven types as follows:

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This paper describes the development of a prehistoric landscape by the river Nene at Grendon Lakes, partly revealed in the 1970s and partly during excavations in 1998 and 2001, which are reported in full. Two major phases of archaeological activity are evident, one interpreted as Neolithic–Early Bronze Age, the other as Iron Age. The gap between these is bridged by an environmental sequence reconstructed with the aid of a pollen core from an adjacent palaeochannel, which shows that human activity continued in the intervening period. The landscape is comparable in form, though not in scale, with that investigated 13 km downstream at Raunds, and helps shed light on the distinctive features of Midlands river valleys like the Nene in prehistory. In conclusion it is suggested that the different characters of the Neolithic and Iron Age features at Grendon mask some underlying similarities in the way they structured people's movements and encounters.