The widespread remains of the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization—contemporaneous in part with the great civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt—present at first glance a picture of sterile isolationism. Yet none of the great civilizations of the world originated or thrived in a cultural and economic vacuum. There are, in fact, certain material indications of contact between the Harappans and their western contemporaries? Also, there is a strong Mesopotamian seafaring tradition attested to in cuneiform economic documents and mythological literature. The discovery of Indus type stamp seals in southern Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf area suggested that at least part of the Mesopotamian seafaring activities were directed toward the east. The identification, some thirty years ago, of the Makran Coast site of Sutkagen-dor as a Harappan settlement added further weight to the probability of sea contacts between the Indus and the West.

Jerusalem first enters written history as one of the towns of which the rulers were in correspondence with Egypt in the period covered by the Arnarna letters, in the first third of the 14th century B.C. It later appears in the Book of Joshua as a town of the Jebusites (a Canaanite tribe) who dwelt in the midst of the Israelites and were not conquered by them in the earlier stages of the entry into Palestine. It thus enters the historical stage as an important Canaanite town of the second half of the second millennium B.C. Its importance lies in its position. The physical configuration of Palestine with its north-south division of, from west to east, coastal plain—upland ridge—Jordan and Dead Sea Valley—plateau of Transjordan, means that a town dominating the backbone of the upland ridge is of major political importance, particularly when the coastal plain was under the control of alien powers, for the Jordan Valley route is not an important throughroute, owing to the spread of the Dead Sea from cliff to cliff of the valley. For most of the second millennium Egypt controlled the coastal plain, and from about 1200 B.C. onwards it was under Philistine domination. Jerusalem lies athwart the backbone of the upland ridge at a point where it is intersected by an important east-west route. The control of Jerusalem was therefore essential to the development of the political power of the Hebrews, who had infiltrated into Palestine in the second half of the second millennium B.C. Only when Jerusalem was captured by David about 995 B.C. could the Hebrew groups be combined into a nation.

In 1960 there appeared two important studies devoted to the Neolithic gallery graves of Ireland, hitherto considered to be part of the Clyde–Carlingford culture, as defined by Childe and Piggott. The first, by Professor de Valera, is of unique importance: it records and discusses a mass of new evidence for the Irish gallery graves, and advances an entirely fresh theory for their origin and evolution. Dr Corcoran defines and isolates the elements of the Carlingford culture, and argues for its acceptance in its own right, as distinct from the Clyde-Solway culture.

De Valera's paper contains an inventory of 269 sites. No fewer than 152 are planned, of which 97 are new surveys. All the plans are to a small but uniform scale of 3/1000, which greatly simplifies comparisons. Most of the hitherto unrecorded sites are in Connaught, Sligo and Mayo, where de Valera has worked as Archaeology Officer to the Ordnance Survey.

A POST-ROMAN inscription at Penmachno, Caernarvonshire, (Macalister's number 396) reads, in part:

The comment of Macalister is: ‘As Rhys, followed by Nash-Williams … has shown, this inscription dates the stone to A.D. 540, the year of the consulate of Justinus’. Whether this date is that of the ‘son of Avitorius’ commemorated at right angles to the words cited is uncertain, and for our present purpose unimportant. The point is that here we have evidence for the contemporary use of consular dates in Dark Age Britain.

A few years ago Professor Ole Klindt-Jensen, in publishing the results of his excavations of Migration Period sites on the island of Bornholm, described a remarkable find from the Sorte Muld settlement. Here, just outside the entrance to Building II, was a small pit containing the skull of a horse, its severed fore-legs, and a pelvic bone, accompanied by a few bones of sheep, pig and dog, and sherds which dated the pit to the main occupation phase of the site, in the 5th century A.D.(FIG. 2, 1).

Dr Napier and Dr Weiner quote from my preliminary reports and add, ‘All these opinions must be regarded as quite provisional for only detailed anatomical and statistical investigation will permit the assessment of the precise position of these new East African hominids within the evolutionary sequence’. Having said this, they then proceed to devote several pages to trying to assess the position of these new discoveries, when neither of them has made any detailed anatomical or statistical investigation of any of the skull and jaw material referred to, while the first author (at the time of writing) was only at an early stage of his study of the limb bones of the pre-Zinjanthropus juvenile.

The discovery of an Early Geometric (9th century B.c.) grave containing an array of iron objects at Athens has led to a quickening of interest in the beginnings of ironusing in South Eastern Europe. Two main theories about this have, for lack of conclusive evidence, been current for decades and while all admit iron was known earlier in the Near East than in Europe, the route by which that knowledge reached Central Europe has been hotly debated.

Dr Foltiny has recently restated the case for iron-using being brought to Hungary by horsemen from further east and has added to it the suggestion that not only did the knowledge then spread into Central Europe but also southwards into Greece. If he is correct and iron was known in Central and Eastern Europe before 900 B.C. then a major alteration to our ideas of the events of that period becomes necessary. Any theory must, at present, rely on the correlation of the Central European evidence with the better known and closer dated events of the east Mediterranean so that the interpretation of the objects in the Athenian grave mentioned above is vital to Dr Foltiny's theory. It is hoped to show elsewhere that their evidence is ambiguous and in this paper another body of material, from Jugoslavia, a region contiguous to Dr Foltiny's early iron-using centre in Hungary and athwart its communications with Greece, will be considered. The conclusions to be drawn from it are quite different from those which might be expected if Dr Foltiny is correct, for they are that much of Jugoslavia gained its knowledge of iron through trade connexions with Eastern Italy in the 8th–7th centuries B.C. and that Hungary and Greece played little part in the event.