In a number of publications W. G. Collingwood has described the north country hogbacks and he has suggested that they were replicas in stone of the dwellings prevailing at the time among the people responsible for their erection. He was primarily concerned, however, with their development and dating, based upon the ornament employed. In this paper I have concentrated rather on the hogback as a representation of an Anglo-Danish house and its bearing on the origin of cruck construction.

The hogback is a recumbent tombstone in the form of a long, low house with a roofridge slightly arched lengthwise. Its ground plan (FIG. I, D) is bomb6 in shape, affording a plan which has only rarely been revealed by excavation. From Glendarragh, The Braaid, Isle of Man, Fleure and Dunlop have described two alignments which they consider represented the side walls of a boat-shaped house (FIG. I, A). These, they contend, were built of more durable materials to provide a stronger construction whilst the gable walls, which contained the entrances, were probably built of wattle. This is supported by the evidence of the hogbacks which show low stone ground-walls at the sides only and the walls at The Braaid are probably survivals of similar ground-walls. Fleure and Dunlop compare it to the ‘banqueting hall’ of Hofstaoir, Mývatn, in northern Iceland, which is 118 feet long and has incurved stone side walls varying from 19½ feet, at the ends, to 26 feet, in the middle, apart (FIG. I, B).

The main routes of commerce into Asia beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire are now well charted, thanks to many vindications of the reliability of Ptolemy, and to the archaeological work of Sir Aurel Stein in the deserts of Central Asia and North Arabia. However, little is still known about the administration of this commerce. The classical geographers give very few hints on such questions as who organized and who travelled with the caravans; where were the stages on the route, and how the goods were handed over at each stage; whether currency or barter was used; and what arrangements were made for the security of the traffic.

What follows is an attempt to collect the scanty information on these questions in classical sources, and to compare it with what is known about the organization of caravan trade in Asia in medieval and later times. Commerce along three main routes will be considered, the overland trade route from the Aegean to India, outlined by Strabo (after Arternidorus) and Isidore of Charax, the Arabian spice road, and the silk road to China.

I have been repeatedly asked to record a few of the more picturesque pitfalls or potential pitfalls I have encountered in my fieldwork. In attempting to do so, I have selected examples which, although they deal with entirely recent events, reflect the kind of thing that has undoubtedly gone on in one form or another from time immemorial. Where they have no direct bearing on prehistory, they have a bearing on the general background of all archaeological fieldwork. Their picturesqueness neither hides, nor does it dull, the lessons they contain; rather the opposite, for the warnings within them need to be taken into account by all who work in the field. In some, the value is psychological as much as archaeological.

There is little in prehistory that provides a greater problem than that which the Abbé Breuil calls a ‘travelling piece’—that is a piece collected on one site and deliberately transported to another. We have repeatedly found that men who lived on or near the bank of a river during the Later Stone Age gathered material for their tools in the river-bed where, as likely as not, the stones they collected were derived from an implement-bearing deposit of the Middle or even the Earlier Stone Age. In this way, Stone Age man could, and indeed often did, transport a millennia- or million-year-old artifact up from one geological horizon to another often very appreciably higher and therefore later. I have frequently found Old Palaeolithic bifaced tools, such as hand-axes, used as cores or fabricators on Upper Palaeolithic ‘living floors’; and I have traced the ‘floor’ of the handaxes to a deep-buried aggradation in the vicinity.

The barren hill-tops of Malta are scored in many places by ancient ruts cut deeply into the rock. They can be seen also on the slopes and on the lower plains, but less frequently because these areas are normally under agricultural soil. They always occur in pairs from 52 to 58 inches apart and were quite clearly used by vehicles. They have been discussed in print for 300 years but no agreement has been reached on how, when or why they were made or what vehicles used them. In fact, there are as many theories as there are authors. Of these writers only Captain E. G. Fenton and Professor Sir T. Zammit appear to have done any serious field work, and none has published a map. The present writer, therefore, decided to attempt the laborious task of plotting them, making such other observations and measurements as he could. Zammit, in the paper cited, reproduced some excellent photographs from both the ground and the air, to which the reader is referred.

Time did not permit an examination of the whole island and few observations were made in the low-lying south-eastern part. A fairly intensive survey was made of the high ground as far north as the Baida Ridge, which joins the northern shores of Ghain Tuffieha Bay and St. Paul’s Bay. Two portions of the map are reproduced here. Where there are a number of parallel tracks in close proximity they are shown on the map as one on account of the necessarily small scale used. The gaps in the routes are mainly due to cultivated patches, and no attempt has been made to bridge them by conjecture.

Among the more obscure aspects of polar research the problem of the appearance off Scotland of kayaks of Eskimo type is one of the most formidable. A These craft, one of which has certainly survived, normally become waterlogged after about forty-eight hours in the water. How then were they brought to the British Isles, and by whom?

Apparently the earliest reference to their appearance off the Scottish coast is that of the Rev. James Wallace, Minister of Kirkwall, Orkney, who wrote about 1688 in his Description of the Isles of Orkney:

‘Sometime about this Country are seen these Men which are called Finnmen; In the year 1682 one was seen sometime sailing, sometime Rowing up and down in his little Boat at the south end of the Isle of Eda, most of the people of the Isle flocked to see him, and when they adventured to put out a Boat with men to see if they could apprehend him, he presently fled away most swiftly: And in the year 1684, another was seen from Westra, and for a while after they got few or no Fishes; for they have this Remark here, that these Finnmen drive away the fishes from the place to which they come.

‘These Finnmen seem to be some of these people that dwell about the Fretum Davis [Davis Straits].… One of their Boats sent from Orkney to Edinburgh is to be seen in the Physitians hall, with the Oar and the Dart he makes use of for killing Fish’.

We receive a constant stream of publications of archaeological societies, issued by national and provincial bodies in various countries, with requests to notice them in ANTIQUITY. Much as we should like to do so, it is not possible as a regular practice for all sorts of reasons, chiefly lack of space. Itre also receive many requests to exchange them for ANTIQUITY, and these too we are obliged to refuse; this is an obvious mutual convenience for societies which have libraries, but ANTIQUITY is not a society and we cannot pay the printer’s bill with anything but money. Nevertheless we try occasionally to make up by an omnibus notice, and this is one them. We can only hope that in this way some small assistance may be given to those whose ultimate objectives are, like ours, the advancement and diffusion of knowledge.

IRAQ, Vol. XV, part I, Spring 1953, is the organ of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (founded in memory of Gertrude Bell) and issued from 20 Wilton St., London. The first work is devoted to Professor Mallowan’s usual prompt and workmanlike account of his excavations, this time at Nimrud (Kalhou) in 1952. One of the ivories had a cruciform symbol which looks remarkably like a late survival of the (Cretan) ‘horns of consecration’ and double-axe. R. W. Hamilton publishes some fine Umayyad carved plaster of the 8th century from Khirbat a1 Mafjar in the Jordan valley, and deals generally with the origins, history and extent of this art, in which several different traditions converged to create a new and easily recognizable style. M. V. Seton Williams describes painted pottery made in parts of Turkey and North Syria between c. 1900 and c. 1550 B.C., some of which has Persian cognates. R. Maxwell-Hyslop writes about bronze lugged axe- or adze-blades, also called Trunnion Celts, for which an Anatolian origin early in the 2nd millennium is suggested. Later the type may have spread westwards and northwestwards through Mycenaean trade.