In a recent number of ANTIQUITY (1) Prof. V. Gordon Childe discussed Mr Donald I McCown's study of the Iranian prehistoric sequence published last year by the Oriental Institute of Chicago (2), and in his article raised the question of the dating of the Hissar settlements, for which McCown argues a higher antiquity than that hitherto assigned. The dating of such a site must necessarily depend ultimately on correlations made with the centres of civilization to the southwest, but I hope to show that synchronisms and parallels may usefully be made from the opposite direction, and from that viewpoint in which the Middle East has to be studied as geographically the Middle West.

Apart from the Harappa Culture of the Indus Valley and the Punjab, with its famous brick-built cities, its undeciphered script and its individual glyptic art, the prehistory of western India and the Iranian borderlands has been an uncomfortable enigma to the majority of archaeologists owing to the combined causes of insufficient excavation, inadequate publication, and the inaccessibility of the actual finds to the western world, concentrated as they are in local site-museums or in the Central Asian Museum in New Delhi (3). The accident of war has enabled me to study most of this material at first hand, and in the notes which follow certain points bearing on McCown's thesis and Childe's commentary are given, with the arguments, especially those concerned with stylistic considerations, necessarily in an abbreviated form. Full publication of the evidence for the Indian sequence, and a detailed examination of the relations between prehistoric India and the lands to the west must await the end of the war.

Les étonnantesm trouvailles retirées par la mission russe de Tsalka (direction B. A. Kuftin) des grands tertres funéraires ou kourganes de la vallée supérieure de la Khram dans la province de Trialeti, Géorgie centrale, à l'Ouest de Tiflis (1), ont causé une sensation dans le monde des archéologues (2). Comme, à l'occasion d'une étude d'ensemble sur la chronologie du Bronze au Caucase (3), nous venons d'étudier ces nouvelles trouvailles, il nous paraît utile de publier ici nos conclusions relatives à la date qu‘;il convient d'attribuer au kourganes de Trialeti. La question, en effet, intéresse au plus haut point l'archéologie du Caucase.

Disons tout de suite que Mr. Kuftin considère l'époque de la quatrième tombe à fosse de Mycènes et celle de Troie vi comme le terminus post quem des plus récentes des kourganes qu'il classe à la fin du Bronze Moyen. Il ne croit pas devoir envisager pour eux une date postérieure aux xvue siècle avant notre ère, tandis que nous serions en faveur d'une attribution de l'ensemble de ces kourganes aux xvie-xve s., c'est-à-dire au début du Bronze Récent.

The immediate environs of Silchester consist of fields, which are either now under plough or else have been arable for many years in the recent past. Consequently there are few, if any, traces there of the Roman roads which led from the various gates to Dorchester, Speen and Cirencester, Sarum, Winchester, and London. A mile or more to the north and northwest of the Roman town, however, there is a belt of land, which is largely heathland except where trees have been planted. Here there are clear indications of the line of two Roman roads, one from the west gate, west-northwest to Speen and Cirencester, the other from the north gate to Dorchester (Oxon.)

The road to Speen (FIG. I) was formerly thought to follow closely the modern road along the northern side of Silchester Common and thence to run along the straight county boundary between Berkshire and Hampshire. In recent years, however, Mr O. G. S. Crawford has shown that the road, instead of following this traditional line, ran west-northwestward to cross the river Kennet near Brimpton Mill. It is traceable as a raised camber or a deep hollow way from Catthaw Lands Copse, about half-a-mile from the west gate of Silchester, to the western side of Hungry Hill. Further west, in Decoy Plantation, and again beyond the road from Padworth Common, i.e. in Keyser's Plantation, it is clearly seen as a broad cambered way (o.s. 641-1. Berkshire XLIV, SE, Hampshire IV, SE). Beyond this point the present writer has not followed it, but Mr Crawford has noted its continuation.