Ever since the revelation in 1953 that the finds at Piltdown were faked there has been very considerable speculation as to who was responsible for this astonishing fraud, and the matter has been ventilated many times in the last twenty years in our pages. Many people have thought that Charles Dawson was the forger and this seemed the answer by implication, though not specifically, in the late Professor Weiner's The Piltdown forgery. Other people, for various reasons, have tried to pin the blame, or part of the blame, on the late Father Teilhard de Chardin. Many other candidates have been put up and knocked down, and many of us have wondered whether we should ever know the truth. Now we think we do, owing to the most careful researches of Peter Costello, the biographer and literary historian based in Dublin. He has written an invaluable book setting out his complete investigations into this mystery, and coming to what we believe is the proper and final solution. In advance of the publication of his important book he has very kindly agreed to give us a short account, which we print here with great pleasure. All readers of Antiquity will look forward with avidity to reading the complete statement of his case in his published book.

In this, the eighth contribution to our archaeological retrospect series, Professor Carl Johan Becker describes the development of Danish archaeology in the last fifty years, how it affected him and how he affected it, since his first excavation in 1932. He retired this year as Professor of Nordic Archaeology in the University of Copenhagen: in this wide-ranging and most informative article he says that a ‘new survey of Danish prehistory… will not be forthcoming’ from him, but we have good reason to believe that he is mistaken.

The megalithic chambered mound of Gavrinis, in the Morbihan department of southern Brittany, with its world-famed engravings, was re-excavated from 1979 to 1984 by the author of this article who is Directeur des Antiquités de Bretagne. The results, here summarized, included the discovery that the capstone, hidden for four thousand years, bore engravings which show that it was originally part of a large menhir, another part being now the capstone of La Table des Marchands, four kilometres away.

When BBC2 proposed to run a series of six programmes in the Spring of this year, ‘In search of the Trojan War’, with Michael Wood in the leading role as both writer and presenter, we thought it would be a worthwhile novelty, for us, to review the TV series. Then there arrived Michael Wood's book with the same title (London: BBC, 1985. 272 pp., many unnumbered plates and figs. £10.95 hardback); so we asked Donald Easton, known to our readers mainly for his contributions on Troy and Schliemann, to look at the series over six weeks, read the book, and give us his considered judgement on Wood's claim for the historicity of the Trojan War. Mr Easton, whose interests lie mainly in the history, archaeology and languages of pre-classical Anatolia, at present holds a Research Fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

In this fascinating article, the Professor of Archaeology in the University of Exeter shows us that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was not only the author of Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and of beautiful lyrics, ballads and love-songs, but was keenly interested in prehistory and was well abreast of the subject as it was developing in Germany in the early nineteenth century.