The original impetus for this volume came from a small and informal conference held at the British Museum in 1997. The conference, in itself, was an inaugural meeting of the Worked Bone Research Group, an organisation set up shortly before to allow specialists in the study of worked bone, antler, ivory and horn to meet together and discuss assemblages, themes and work in progress. In collating these papers, it became clear that a general theme of materials and their use could be established. Equally, a specific, if fairly broad, time frame of the first millennium AD could also be defined. With these parameters determined, it was possible to enlarge the volume by commissioning extra texts and updating several others, and to bring all of these together into a small monograph. Northern and central Europe witnessed enormous changes in the transition from the Roman to the medieval world across the first millennium AD. This volume pursues some of the common elements, as well as noting change over time. The featured papers ar Kordula Gostennik: Elk Antler as a Material of Manufacture.Finds from Late Republican/Early Imperial 'Old Virunum' on the Magdalensberg in Carinthia, southern Austria; Robin Bendrey: The Identification of Fallow Deer Remains from Roman Monkton, the Isle of Thanet, Kent; Maria T. Biro: Recycling Worked Bone in Pannonia; Annick Thuet: Un atelier de peignes en bois de cerf de la fin de l'Antiquite a Saint-Clair-sur-Epte (Eure); Ian Riddler: A Lesser Material: the Working of Roe Deer Antler in Anglo-Saxon England; Jennifer Bourdillon: Bias from Boneworking at Middle Saxon Hamwic, Southampton, England; Ian Riddler and Nicola Trzaska-Nartowski: Late Saxon Worked Antler Waste from Holy Rood, Southampton.