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Abstract Background Impaired ability to make inferences about what another person might think or feel (i.e., social cognition impairment) is recognised as a core feature of schizophrenia and a key determinant of the poor social functioning that characterizes this illness. The development of treatments to target social cognitive impairments as a causal factor of impaired functioning in schizophrenia is of high priority. In this study, we investigated the acceptability, feasibility, and limited efficacy of 2 programs targeted at specific domains of social cognition in schizophrenia: “SoCog” Mental-State Reasoning Training (SoCog-MSRT) and “SoCog” Emotion Recognition Training (SoCog-ERT). Method Thirty-one participants with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder were allocated to either SoCog-MSRT (n = 19) or SoCog-ERT (n = 12). Treatment comprised 12 twice-weekly sessions for 6 weeks. Participants underwent assessments of social cognition, neurocognition and symptoms at baseline, post-training and 3-months after completing training. Results Attendance at training sessions was high with an average of 89.29 % attendance in the SoCog-MSRT groups and 85.42 % in the SoCog-ERT groups. Participants also reported the 2 programs as enjoyable and beneficial. Both SoCog-MSRT and SoCog-ERT groups showed increased scores on a false belief reasoning task and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. The SoCog-MSRT group also showed reduced personalising attributional biases in a small number of participants, while the SoCog-ERT group showed improved emotion recognition. Conclusions The results are promising and support the feasibility and acceptability of the 2 SoCog programs as well as limited efficacy to improve social cognitive abilities in schizophrenia. There is also some evidence that skills for the recognition of basic facial expressions need specific training. Trial registration Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12613000978763 . Retrospectively registered 3/09/2013.

Recently, I had the privilege of hosting a session in honour of Dr. Warwick Bray at the 71st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The following is a forward to Pamela J. Smith’s interview which introduces the reader to this wonderfully modest and endearingly understated man. His modest nature is exemplified in the title for my introduction which comes from a letter Warwick sent me in response to my request for his curriculum vitae – a document he humourously paralleled to children’s book ‘The Life and Times of Uncle Wiggley’.

If honours and titles give measure of a man, then Professor Sir Grahame Clark was indeed important. Faculty Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University from 1935-46, University Lecturer 1946-52, Disney Professor of Archaeology 1952-74, Head of the Department of Archaeol­ogy and Anthropology 1956-61 and 1968-71, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge 1950-73, Master of Peterhouse 1973-80, he was a visiting lecturer at diverse universities; appointed CBE in 1971, he received many awards includ­ing the prestigious Erasmus Prize for 1990, presented by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, for his "long and inspiring devotion to prehistory" (Scarre 1991:10); and in June 1992, he was knighted. Yet well before fame and position were rewards, Clark made major contributions to the establishment of prehis­tory as an academic subject at Cambridge University. Cambridge was the first and, for many years, only British university granting an undergraduate degree which offered prehistory as a specialization. "The development of postgraduate research in prehistoric archaeology at Cambridge had to wait on the provision of undergraduate teaching;' Clark (1989b: 6) recently observed. The "faculty was the only one in Britain producing a flow of graduates in prehistoric archaeology" (Clark 1989a: 53).

Acclaimed archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, remembers the exciting and momentous academic changes which dominated archaeology in Britain and the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Describing his experiences as a student and young academic at the University of Cambridge, Renfrew argues that basic philosophical questions (What is the nature of explanation? What are we doing as archaeologists?) underlay the emergence of a ‘New Archaeology’ in the 1960s and that young ‘New Archaeologists’ successfully used scientific and computer research methods to answer innovative environmental and economic questions about prehistory. He feels that this new academic development went seriously wrong in the United States when archaeologists relied too heavily on Carl Hempel’s analysis of scientific explanation. Consequently, Renfrew suggests, the New Archaeology was already in decline by the early 1970s.

In 1939, Dorothy Garrod became the first woman Professor in either Cambridge or Oxford. Garrod at the time was Director of Studies at Newnham College, Cambridge University and had been in charge of excava­tions in Gibraltar, Western Judaea, Southern Kurdistan and Mount Carmel for which she is now renowned. Trained by Marett at Oxford and Abbe Henri Breuil in France, she was one of our finest archaeologists. By 1939, Garrod had unearthed the well-preserved skull of 'Abel', a Neanderthal child, in Gibraltar, discovered and named the Natufian culture while excavating Shukba near Jerusalem, directed the long term, large scale excavations at Mount Carmel and traveled with Bruce Howe as her assistant to explore Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria. Once elected Professor, she became instrumental in establishing Archaeology and Anthropology as a full degree course and influential in Cambridge's decision to admit women to full membership in 1948. After retirement, she continued excavating in Lebanon and France. Here, with her close friend Suzanen Cassou de Saint Mathurin, she discovered the superb Magdalenian sculptured frieze at Angles-sur-l'Anglin.