Papers presented at a symposium Metals in Antiquity held in 1997 at Harvard University, which sought to explore the distribution of metals in the natural environment, and extractive metallurgy and fabrication processes, as well as the social context, use and deposition of artefacts. Subjects include the earliest use of iron in China (D Wagner), smelting and sacrifice in Greece and the Near East from the Bronze Age to the Classical period (S B Westover), Roman iron production in England (I Schruefer-Kolb), early 1600s silver exploitation in Scotland (E Photos-Jones, A J Hall, T Pollard, T K Meikle and A Newlands), the lead isotope method for tracing the sources of metal in the Western Hemisphere (A Macfarlane) .