In June 1926 my father, a master at the school in Hampshire in which I was an idle and unedifying pupil, received a letter from the Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey in Southampton, asking for details of a new Romano-British site at West Harting, on the downs just across the county boundary in Sussex. Crawford was collecting material for the second edition of the OS Roman Britain map: my proud discovery of sherds in moleheaps and rabbit-scrapes had found its way into the parish magazine and thence to the Portsmouth Evening News where it had been spotted by OGSC, and so the letter was really for me. Correspondence followed; the next year, in Southampton with my parents en route for a holiday in France, I was able to meet him for the first time. The Generation Gap had not then been invented, and we liked one another from the start, and from then on OGS (as we were all later to call him) took upon himself to be my archaeological godfather.

The Inventaire des mégalithes de la France—Région Parisienne is the fourth in the French series which began with Cordier's inventory of Indre-et-Loire (1963) and continued with Gruet's inventory of Maine-et-Loire (1967) and Despride and Leymarios's inventory of Loir-et-Cher (1974). All these have been published as supplements to Gallia Préhistoire and we are now promised a fifth volume by Jean Clottes on the megaliths of the Lot. The present volume is by far the biggest and most important in the series so far and it deals with the monuments in the present six departments of Paris, Yvelines, Essonne, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de- Marne, and Val d'Oise, which used to be the departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise.

The author of this inventory is an English civil servant, now in high international office in Brussels, who formerly was in Paris and there spent his week-ends picnicking in megaliths, and what better employment could there be for our international civil servants? As he says, with characteristic modesty, of his Paris days, ‘Au commencement vers 1955 ou 1956, la prtparation de cet inventaire servait uniquement de distraction pour mes moments perdus et n'avait aucune prétention. Ce ne fut que beaucoup plus tard qu'il m'a été suggéré de le proposer à la présente série. La distraction transformée en devoir, c'est alors que le travail a commencé pour de bon.’

Gertrude Bell first visited the East in 1886 when, after graduating with a First in Modern History—the first woman to do so, she went to stay with diplomatic relatives in Bucharest ‘to get rid of her Oxfordy manner’. From Bucharest she visited Constantinople. In 1892 she went to stay in Tehran: before the trip she devoted herself to learning Persian. From her observations of Persia and Turkey she wrote her first book of travel, Safar Nameh—Persian pictures, which was published ‘reluctantly and anonymously’ in 1894. She also worked on a translation, Poems from the Divan of Hafiz, which was published in 1897.

The chambered cairns of Orkney are among the most sophisticated architectural products of prehistoric Europe. Maes Howe, since the chamber was re-entered a century ago (Petrie, 1861) has excited the admiration of all who have visited it. In Stuart Piggott’s words (1954, 244): ‘The assured competence and mastery over the building material shown at Maes Howe mark it out as a monument comparable in prehistoric Britain only to Stonehenge in its individual handling of an architectural problem. In both a contemporary existing conception—that of a chambered tomb or that of a stone circle—has been used to produce a superlative monument that by its originality of execution is lifted out of its class into a unique position.’

Quanterness has proved to be one of the best preserved of the Orcadian monuments, with four of the six side chambers still standing, very much as they were built some five thousand years ago. Much of the importance of the excavation comes from the detailed examination of the deposits within the chamber which have offered an unusual insight into neolithic burial practice, and these are fully discussed in the forthcoming final publication (Renfrew et al., in press).

How do ideas, or ideologies, articulate with other cultural systems? This is a complex question, and archaeologists, in their study of the rise and growth of civilizations, have been hesitant to address it. There are obvious reasons for this hesitancy. Even in those instances where the archaeological record is text-aided it is difficult, and it is still more so where contemporaneous documentary materials are lacking or equivocal, as in Precolumbian America. Then, too, it is my impression that while many archaeologists are willing to grant ideology a role in cultural development they tend to look upon it as causally ‘secondary’. Subsistence, demography, technology, and ecology—perhaps because they are more directly susceptible to archaeological methods and inferences than are idea systems—are more apt to be seen as the seats of ‘prime cause’.

Ras a1 Khaimah is the most northerly of the seven states comprising the United Arab Emirates and its Ruler, H. H. Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad al-Qasimi, is keenly interested in the history of the state and its people. Survey carried out there jointly with Dr D. B. Doe in 1968 had focused attention on the site of JuIfar which lies just north of the present town of Ras a1 Khaimah (de Cardi, 1971, 230-2). Julfar was in existence in Abbasid times and its importance as an entrep6t during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the Portuguese Period-is reflected by the quantity and variety of imported wares to be found among the ruins of the city. Most of the sites discovered during the survey dated from that period but a group of cairns near Ghalilah and some long gabled graves in the Shimal area to the north-east of the date-groves behind Ras a1 Khaimah (map, FIG. I) clearly represented a more distant past.