No one, so far as I know, has as yet made any particular study of the many local learned societies that were founded up and down France in the years after the French Revolution, and of their effect upon contemporary thought. These Sociétés d’Émulation differed from the local archaeological and historical societies of England in being more all-embracing ; they included in their scope pure literature, philosophy and science as well as the history and antiquities of the district, and often developed a philanthropic side as well. At the time of their foundation they were often of a free-thinking colour ; but as the balance of French life came to be restored after the Revolution this element was forgotten, and the more learned priests of the neighbourhood were often included among their members.

These societies fostered a peculiar polymathic quality among those who regularly attended their frequent meetings. They were to a great extent self-supporting in the provision of papers and communications, and it would have been pure selfishness for any member with any claim to versatility to specialize too deeply. Their standards, too, were not those of the Metropolis, where a new professionalism was bringing higher and more exact criteria into every branch of knowledge and speculation. Rather, we can see in the Sociétés d’Émulation of the nineteenth century the continuance of the amateur spirit that in the eighteenth century had flourished in the aristocratic circles of Court and château : a spirit surviving in a less polished form among the lesser gentry of the provincial towns.

For more than half a century Sir Arthur Keith has been one of the world’s leading authorities on the physical evolution of man. As a young man, Sir Arthur spent some years of medical practice in Borneo and became interested in the comparative anatomy of the anthropoid apes and the relation of these higher primates to man. By dissections and other anatomical studies he accumulated the largest body of accurate scientific information on this subject available to students before Professor Adolph H. Schultz began his researches in this same field in the nineteen twenties. In 1901 Sir Arthur published his Human Embryology and Morphology, which is one of the few technical treatises on man’s embryology that is anthropological and primatological in its orientation. From 1908 onward Keith concerned himself with the problem of the transformation of the body and brain of the ape precursor into that of a human being. This subject led him into intensive studies of the skeletal remains of fossil men and apes, culminating in his great works, The Antiquity of Man (1925) and New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man (1931).

During the long years in which he was thus engaged, Sir Arthur was also considering the evolution and differentiation of the modern races of man, not only from the biological and anatomical viewpoints, but also on the bases of history, social anthropology, and psychology. Recently, as he approaches the end of his fruitful scientific career, this great anthropologist has produced two volumes dealing with human evolution in its entirety—a preliminary book Essays on Human Evolution (1946), and the present work.

Till 1948 the coherent record of farming in Northern Europe began with the neolithic culture represented in the Danish dysser (‘dolmens’) and most readily defined by the funnel-necked beakers, collared flasks and ‘amphorae’ found therein. As early as 1910 Gustav Kossinna had remarked that these distinctive ceramic types, and accordingly the culture they defined, were not confined to the West Baltic coastlands, but recurred in the valleys of the Upper Vistula and Oder to the east, to the south as far as the Upper Elbe and in northwest Germany and Holland too. He saw in this distribution evidence for the first expansion of Urindogermanen from their cradle in the Cimbrian peninsula. In the sequel Åberg filled in the documentation of this expansion with fresh spots on the distribution map and Kossinna himself distinguished typologically four main provinces or geographical groups—the Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western. Finally Jazdrzewski gave a standard account of the whole content of what had come to be called Kultura puharów lejkowatych, Trichterbecherkultur, or Tragtbaegerkulturen. As ‘Funnel-necked-beaker culture’ is a clumsy expression and English terminology is already overloaded with ‘beakers’, I shall use the term ‘First Northern’.

The orgin of this vigorous and expansive group of cultivators and herdsmen has always been an enigma. Not even Kossinna imagined that the savages of the Ertebølle shell-mounds spontaneously began cultivating cereals and breeding sheep in Denmark. As dysser were regarded as megalithic tombs and as megaliths are Atlantic phenomena, he supposed that the bases of the neolithic economy were introduced from the West together with the ‘megalithic idea’. But the First Northern Farmers of the South and East groups did not build megalithic tombs. Moreover, in the last ten years an extension of the North group across southern Sweden as far as Södermannland has come to light, and these farmers too, though they used collared flasks and funnel-necked beakers, built no dolmens either. In any case there was nothing Western about the pottery from the Danish dysser, and Western types of arrow-head are conspicuously rare in Denmark.

Two notable events in Peruvian archaeology, which are of wide general interest, have recently taken place. One was the discovery of pre-ceramic horizons on the Peruvian coast, and the other was a conference held in New York in July 1947, at which several acknowledged experts felt that the time had come to explain the known facts in terms of a general scheme of development, and attempted to do so independently with strikingly similar results. The papers read at the conference on this and other matters have recently been published, and they include the fullest summary so far available of the preceramic discoveries.

Mr Junius Bird has long been known for his work on the prehistory of unpromising and difficult regions in South America. He has studied successions in Tierra del Fuego and on the southern end of the Chilean mainland, which contain stone and bone artifacts but no pottery, from which he estimates, by such methods as the rate of rise of land and of accumulation of deposits, that human occupation began about 5000 years ago, i.e. at the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C.. His methods of course involve some very large assumptions, but the results are reasonable when considered in relation to the usual estimate of about 10,000 years for Folsom man. He has also discovered non-pottery and non-agricultural horizons in the middens of the north part of the coast of Chile, but these may not be of any great age and their poverty may be due to the inhospitable nature of the region.

The Isle of Portland reaches out into the waters of the English Channel. Almost a solid block of stone, it is the most southerly point on the Dorset coast. Its greatest length from north to south is four miles and its maximum width one and a half miles, while its entire circumference is less than nine miles. The north of the island is low-lying, but half a mile inland the ground rises steeply to a maximum height of 496 feet above sea-level at the Verne. From here it slopes away gradually to the southern tip or Bill, 20 feet above sea-level. There has never been a town of Portland and the chief centres of population were originally eight hamlets. Today, three of these, Castletown, Fortuneswell and Chesil have merged to form the main settlement in the north or Underhill, as the district is called, On Tophill three more of the hamlets, Reforne, Easton and Wakeham have similarly run together. Weston and Southwell remain hamlets, while another settlement has grown up around the prison at ‘The Grove’.

The ‘Island’ is, in fact, joined to the mainland by the Chesil Beach. But since this pebble bank extends westwards for ten miles before it meets the Dorset coast at Abbotsbury and could be used as a thoroughfare only with the greatest difficulty, the term ‘island’ is no real misnomer. Between Portland and the immediate mainland to the north runs the Fleet, a narrow arm of the sea, wide enough to make the approach across Smallmouth by ferry, before the building of the modern bridge, awkward and, at times, dangerous.

On 1 June 1942, occurred the German air-raid which destroyed about one-fifth of the old part of the City of Canterbury. It was soon realized that a unique opportunity existed of discovering something of the archaeological past of the city before rebuilding again concealed the wide areas now exposed.

It was not only an opportunity but a duty ; for modern rebuilding, with its deep foundations, would be bound to destroy a very large part of whatever evidence had survived until the present. The Canterbury Excavations Committee was accordingly formed by the initiative of the local Archaeological Society, and excavations under a supervisor lent by the Ministry of Works began in August 1944, and have continued three times a year up to the present.

Canterbury is one of the few Romano-British towns where there are good grounds for supposing a continuity of occupation through the Dark Ages. Thus though there was little to hint at any pre-Roman occupation, from the Roman, Saxon, and Medieval periods much was to be expected. Yet such a prediction has not turned out wholly true. On the one hand evidence for a pre-Roman Belgic settlement is accumulating ; but little of Saxon date has been found, and the circumstances of the excavations have limited the extent of the medieval discoveries.

The town could not be investigated purely as an archaeological problem, digging on sites which seemed promising and following out the plan as on an open site like Silchester or Verulam. There was a double call. Rebuilding was ever imminent, and the first sites to be rebuilt were likely to be along the main street-frontages. Attention was necessarily devoted first to them.

The State Antiquary of Iceland, Kristján Eldjárn, M.A., published in January this year a fine volume containing a report of his recent excavations of pagan graves, and other contributions to early Icelandic history, under the title of Gengidh á Reika, Akureyri, 1948. It is very important that we have got here reliable accounts of systematically explored Viking burials, with diagrams and photographs, all very well done, as Iceland had produced, till now, very little of similar publications. But really exciting is undeniably the news of the discovery of three Roman coins in Iceland.

The place of discovery was at the farm Bragdhavellir, at the head of Hamarsfjord, in the district of Sudhur Mulasyssel, on the southeast coast of Iceland. In a small valley called Djupibotn the gales had partially denuded the ground leaving only the hard stony gravel subsoil. In this place the remains of two primitive houses came to light, certainly representing an ancient farm which had been deserted for long ages. A peasant of the vicinity Jón Sigfusson started searching the site for antiquities and collected a lot of such poor objects as are generally left in country dwellings of the early Middle-Ages, nails and fragments of iron, broken pots of soapstone, stone whorls, some teeth of horse and cow, bits of charcoal, etc. The only object of a more distinct character was a bead of variegated glass, reddish-brown with black and white, possibly dating from the Viking Period. Subsequently a number of the antiquities were sent to the National Museum in Reykjavik, including two Roman coins said to have been found on the same site and under same conditions as the other articles.