Nine superposed cities were uncovered at the mound of Hisarlik on the northwest coast of Asia Minor, where Heinrich Schliemann’s visionary search for the Homeric Troy had led him. Soon the interest of Homeric scholars concentrated upon the two cities labelled Troy VI and Troy VIIa as the most likely candidates for the Troy of Homer. Both cities yielded Mycenaean pottery, showing connexions with mainland Greece in the centuries from 1400-1200 B.C., when Mycenaean power was at its height. Both cities had been violently destroyed. However, the brilliant excavations by the University of Cincinnati under the distinguished leadership of Professor Carl W. Blegen have been able to prove that Troy VI was undoubtedly destroyed by a violent earthquake about 1300 or somewhat later.

The chambered cairn at Dyffryn Ardudwy is one of the principal tombs in a group of six surviving monuments that stand at medium altitudes above the sea coast in this vicinity which lies midway between Harlech and Barmouth. The cairn stands close to the village school in Dyffryn Ardudwy, and the questionable safety of the capstone of the larger chamber was the principal reason for undertaking excavation and consolidation. The work was carried out by the Department of Prehistoric Archaeology of the University of Liverpool on behalf and with the close assistance of the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments for Wales. The monument has been well-known since Crawford's plan of 1920, and has been described by Grimes and Daniel in so far as surface inspection would allow.

The interpretations of the Dead Sea Scrolls propagated by the overwhelming majority of Scrolls scholars start with the assumption that the Scrolls are not later than the second half of the first Christian century—more precisely, not later than June, A.D. 68—the only exceptions being those of one or two scholars who prefer a slightly later date. The exact terminus ad quem is not, however, based on any evidence contained in the Scrolls themselves, but was propounded by Père de Vaux as a conclusion derived from his excavations of the Qumran building and was taken over from him by the Scrolls scholars.

It was Dr Margaret Murray, my predecessor in charge of the Flinders Petrie Collection of Ancient Egyptian Antiquities, whose 100th birthday we look forward to celebrating this year, who encouraged me to re-study as many as possible of the antiquities found at Hierakonpolis; for she holds that the original publication was, as is not surprising, inadequate by modern standards.

We have in the Petrie Collection two pieces of large yellow limestone macehead (UCI4898 and 14898A). They have hitherto been considered to belong to the same macehead, being published by Quibell and Green as the first of three great maceheads, of which no. 2 is in Cairo and no. 3 in the Ashmolean at Oxford. It is not surprising that our two fragments should have been thought to have come from the same mace, for the subject of the relief decoration on each is the conquest of the Pigtail people, and both are of yellow limestone. But I am indebted to my artist, Mr W. Masiewicz, who drew FIGS. 1 and 2, for drawing my attention to points indicating that they are not from the same macehead.

In 1931 Dr O. G. S. Crawford published his survey of the Chiltern Grim’s Ditch in ANTIQUITY, and in the following issue Mr M. W. Hughes related it to Cuthwulf’s expedition to the Chilterns in A.D. 571. It is my intention in this paper to show that Mr Hughes had no evidence for so dating the earthwork and to demonstrate that it most probably belongs to the Iron Age. Closer study on the ground has shown that it is cut by two Roman roads, and is more extensive than Crawford realized, although he had credited it with a Berkhampstead section that cannot belong to it. The only question which really remains to be considered is whether the Ditch belongs to the Belgic Iron Age, since the Belgae are known to have dug cross-country dykes, or to the pre-Belgic Iron Age, since I have recently assigned this date to a number of cross-ridge dykes not far away in the eastern Chilterns.

Professor Hawkes’s important article on ‘The British Museum and British Archaeology’ in the December number of ANTIQUITY is based on an intimate knowledge of the Museum and a sympathetic understanding of the disabilities which have beset it since the war. It may be that he is not fully aware of the changes in work and tempo that have markedly developed since he himself left the staff in 1946, but we know well that his article reflects a widespread impatience to see an end of the disabilities and the problems which have developed as the direct result of the war; and above all to see created in the National Museum an organization for dealing with British archaeology and antiquities which will be equal to the great advance of the subject that has taken place in this century, and with dramatic acceleration in the post-war years. No one is keener to see this development than the staff of the Department of British Antiquities who are entirely alive to what is required. We fully recognize, therefore, the importance of what Professor Hawkes has to say, but he does seem to be in some danger of falling into the mistake that many other less well-informed and less well-intentioned critics have made—of assuming that the honourable scars which still disfigure the British Museum and the overcrowding which was the inevitable concomitant of an informed and successful collecting policy in the Museum’s many departments, are being complacently lived with and that nothing has been done to bring about the speedy disappearance of these obstacles to our service.