Students of human origins agree that man was not separately created, but evolved in the remote past from an apelike ancestor. To such as reject the evidence of man’s emergence from a lower animal form, the place of his original home is not a subject for discussion but rather a tenet of faith, or a simple geographical identification of the Garden of Eden.

Even if one is uninfluenced by ecclesiastical tradition it is difficult to avoid prejudice in the search for the cradle of humanity. The ex oriente Zux hypothesis, which Reinach once so vigorously contested in the field of archaeology, numbers among its submissive acceptants a majority perhaps of anthropologists and students of primate evolution. Much of human culture and many peoples have come out of Asia. Because of the antiquity of its civilizations, the multifariousness of its inhabitants and its vast extent and physical diversity, that continent has become a natural residuary legatee for all unknown origins. The paucity of knowledge concerning the archaeology and palaeontology of Asia has determined its selection as the mute scapegoat of all our original sins.

Three years ago, when the Survey of English Place-names was initiated, the present editor of ANTIQUITY wrote an article for the opening volume of the Survey publications with the above title. In it he attempted to show how fruitful might be the mutual relations of place-names and archaeological studies. The Survey is now well under way. It has completed its work in four counties—Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Worcestershire (shortly to be published) and the time seems not inappropriate to take stock of some of the results achieved in this particular field of studies.

It is surprising how little classical authors of the time of Augustus choose to tell us about the Etruscans. For Livy, Vergil and their contemporaries it might almost seem as if the Etruscans had already become a dim legendary background to history, hardly less unreal than King Arthur is to us. If they ever knew the facts they have taken great pains to conceal how much of their state religion and political organization was due to Etruscan rulers, and how completely the city of Rome itself was based upon Etruscan foundations. This is to some extent the result of a deliberate conspiracy. It was the set policy of the Augustan writers to suppress everything that did not obviously tend to the enhancement of Roman prestige; it was their policy to distort facts, to invent legends and to carry into their literature the same single-minded fanaticism that had made the success of their nation in politics and war. We must not look therefore to the Latin writers for any scientific account of the extraordinary people that preceded the Romans almost everywhere in North and Central Italy, and, but for some strange inherent weakness, would have ruled the whole peninsula in their stead. Merely as a prelude to his story of the rise of Rome, Livy tells us that Etruria had ‘filled with the renown of her name the whole length of Italy from the Alps to the Sicilian strait.’

Most writers, ancient and modern, represent all Vikings as enemies of Christianity. It seems to be still believed that wherever they went, and at all periods, they sacked churches, massacred monks and nuns, and played havoc with civilization. That was certainly the view of politicians and chroniclers from Alfred to William the Conqueror. Even recent historians repeat the charge, sometimes with quite unnecessary emphasis.

In this article it is not proposed to whitewash the race in all respects—that would be impossible—but to bring forward certain scraps of evidence, not generally recollected, to set off against the too universal chorus of reprobation. In a word, there were such people as Christian Vikings; that is to say the immigrant Danes and Norse of that turbulent age, though always pirates on occasion, softened their manners as time went on, long before their general conversion to organized Christianity. Strange to say, some of the churches that are still with us owe their foundation to the Viking settlement in Britain.

On 27 September 1926 the learned world was startled by a letter from Monsieur Salomon Reinach, published in The Times. The writer expressed the opinion that the Palaeolithic period (the last phase of which is represented in France by La Madelaine) might have lasted up to 5000 B.C. M. Reinach is Director of the National Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris; his reputation as a savant stands very high, and he is listened to with respect. The discoveries which prompted him to express this unorthodox opinion were, he says “ascertained last summer at Glozel near Vichy. In the same stratum, no doubt a deposit of a religious character, have been found—(1) objects akin to the Neolithic culture of the Aegean, one of them being an idol in the shape of a violin; (2) inscriptions closely related to those found in 1894 in an early Portuguese dolmen; (3) numerous engravings of animals on pebbles, the style of which is degenerate Magdalenian. As the objects classified under (1) and (2) date from about 4000–3500, degenerate Magdalenian outlines (3) cannot possibly be earlier, and we thus have a proof, which I think is conclusive, that the Magdalenian should be dated about 5000 B.C.” Thus from the outset the discussion of the issues has been confused by questionable fact and faulty inference.

There is a tendency, in these days of steadily increasing enthusiasm for excavation, to overlook the very considerable body of Greek and Roman literature extant which deals with the geography and history of the British Isles during the Roman occupation (43–410 A.D.) Few people have studied all the evidence; few history books pause to discuss the authorities for such familiar stories as those of Caratacus and Boudicca, or even to spell their names correctly. The reason is that many of these documents have never been edited in England, and no attempt has been made to collect them in handy form, and discuss the date, purpose, and value of each. The purpose of this article is to review the most important authors and estimate briefly the value of the contribution of each. There are no fewer than 49 writers in Greek and 79 in Latin who make direct mention of the British Isles; and though it is true that many of these do little more than mention them, or repeat the statements of previous authorities, we are still left with a number of independent sources of information.

The walls and hut circles which are known to the Bedouins as “the works of the old men” lie about 120 miles to the east of the Dead Sea, in a southern extension of the Jebel Druze range through which the Cairo-Baghdad air mail passes, in the neighbourhood of landing grounds F, G, and H.

The Jebel Druze is a desolate range of mountains rising to from 2000 to 3000 feet above sea level. It consists of steep-sided flat-topped mountains of black basalt, the wadis and flat country between being covered with sand thickly besprinkled with huge black basalt boulders. Here and there the winter rains have formed lakes of sand which during the winter are morasses and during the summer hard flat glaring expanses of white sand, many as much as three miles long.

In archaeology as in other branches of science we are only at the beginning of discoveries. New vistas are opening up to us and we are beginning to realize how little we know about the origin and early history of civilized man. Theories and presumptions, chronologies and criticisms, all are being revolutionized. In Egypt, in Babylonia, in India and in Asia Minor discoveries are being made which teach us that we are still only upon the threshold of knowledge about what is called “the remote past” and how insecure are the foundations upon which most of our assumptions in regard to the earlier history of culture really rest. Many of our assumptions, in fact, have nothing behind them except want of evidence, and excavation in Egypt alone has proved, time after time, how archaeologically valueless negative evidence must be. All that it shows is that scientifically conducted excavation and archaeological exploration are still in their infancy. Negative evidence has been a favourite weapon of argument, especially among German scholars, and we need not be surprised that theory after theory based or partially based upon it has broken down. It is merely a survival of the early Victorian belief that science had mastered all the secrets of the material universe.