Northern Belize lies in the northeastern quadrant of the central rainforest zone of the area formerly occupied by Classic Maya civilization, adjacent to the ecological frontier with the northern zone, the arid karstic plain of northern Yucatan. It is bounded on the east by the Caribbean, and is traversed by two of the major rivers of the Maya lowlands, the Rio Hondo and Rio Nuevo, the upper tributaries of which drain the Maya heartland of south Campeche and northeastern Peten.

It is well enough known that readers of English enjoy unimpeded access to 'the greatest book written about the Etruscans' in George Dennis's Cities and cemeteries of Etruria (Strong, 1968, 140). Well enough known: but not entirely true. Dennis's references to the Etruscans themselves have rather less evocative charm and lasting value than his guide to their country: 'he (and his contemporaries) got the history hopelessly wrong' (Finley, 1972, III; and see Dennis himself, 1893, on Phoenicians in America).

The winter of 1973-74 saw the extension of British archaeological activities to Qatar, an independent Arab state on the western shore of the Gulf to the east of Bahrain (FIG. 1). Surrounded on three sides by sea, Qatar’s inland borders lie with Saudi Arabia on the south-west and Abu Dhabi on the south-east. From the air Qatar appears to rise imperceptibly from the sea, its arid limestone plateaux stretching endlessly southward until they meet the high encroaching dunes from Saudi Arabia. Although generally flat the terrain is far from featureless and low cliffs, eroded mezas and dramatic gas flares add interest to the landscape in the west near Dukhan where the British Archaeological Expedition to Qatar was hospitably accommodated by the Qatar Petroleum Company.

For over thirty years, work has been in progress on the petrological examination and identification of stone implements. This work, initiated in South-Western England, has as its object the determination of ‘early trade routes and other factors of economic and social importance in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age times’ (Keiller, Piggott and Wallis, 1941). During this period, eight regional reports have been published, five dealing mainly with South- Western England (Keiller, Piggott and Wallis, 1941; Stone and Wallis, 1947; Stone and Wallis, 1951 ; Evens, Grinsell, Piggott and Wallis, 1962; Evens, Smith and Wallis, 1972), one with Yorkshire (Keen and Radley, 1971), one with East Anglia (Clough and Green, 1972) and one with Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire (Cummins and Moore, 1973). In these and other publications (e.g. Fox, 1964; Fell, 1964) distribution maps are given for the products of the various axe factories. Such maps show the extent of dispersal of the factory products, but fail, in themselves, to give much information about trade routes and other factors. Group I axes are found in Yorkshire, some 550 km. from their source in Cornwall; Group IX axes are found a similar distance from their factories in Northern Ireland; and Group VI axes are widespread up to 500 km. from their Lake District factory sites.

It is useful to know that Joanna Close-Brooks, at Edinburgh in the National Museum of Antiquities, has found its only bronze double axe to be not from Co. Antrim, Ireland, but a nineteenth-century acquisition from Attica, Greece. Her information rightly opens the review of the claims for such axes in the West, by Stephen Briggs in ANTIQUITY last December (Briggs, 1973). Those in our museums with no such Aegean provenance he makes now five, since Anthony Harding informed him that in the British Museum's Card-catalogue (formerly British Association's) another is drawn and recorded as kept–at least in the 1920s—in the Farnham, Dorset (Pitt Rivers) Museum, without a provenance at all.