<p>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.</p>