Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology (683 page)

Type of middle Neolithic chambered tomb found only on Orkney in the far north of Scotland. Some seventeen or eighteen examples are known, all part of Audrey Henshall's family of Orkney–Cromarty–Hebridean passage graves. Each tomb has an elongated mound with a central stone-slab-built chamber subdivided into compartments with projecting side slabs. The largest is the Knowe of Ramsey where the chamber is 27m long with fourteen compartments and an original roof height of over 3m.

 
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One of the earliest forms of glazed ceramics manufactured in Britain. Dating to the 9th to 13th centuries, Stamford ware was made in a number of small centres concentrated around Stamford in Lincolnshire. The main products were spouted pitchers and jugs that were much in demand in England and sometimes traded abroad.

 
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Squat two-handled vase used for the storage of wine during classical times in Greece and in Etruria during the 4th century
bc
.

 
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A measure of the distribution around the mean of a group of defined values. Normally, the values of 68 per cent of cases fall within one standard deviation of the mean, 95 per cent between two, and 99 per cent within three standard deviations either side of the mean. Standard deviation is usually expressed as a plus-or-negative (±).

 
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Representative organization formed in 1976 to promote the interests of archaeological contracting units working in the British Isles to government, government agencies, and the public.

 
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A block or slab of stone perhaps selected for its shape or mass that was set upright as a marker of some kind. In the British Isles and neighbouring areas of northwest Europe the majority of standing stones date to the Neolithic and Bronze Age period, part of a long-lived tradition of using stones in this way. As free-standing structures they seem to mark sacred places, alignments, and sometimes burial grounds. Many are connected with broadly contemporary monuments such as
STONE CIRCLES
, and a high proportion have evocative names. A few examples, such as Long Meg in Cumbria, have been adorned with
ROCK ART
, while in Brittany, where they are also known as
menhirs
, large examples were broken up in Neolithic times and used in the construction of
SIMPLE PASSAGE GRAVES
.

 
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