The first year's work was to be primarily field survey to locate and test sites. Any sites found in construction areas of the dams were to be excavated at once. Plans for the second year would see two parties in the field for a part of the season, one continuing with detailed survey and the second with excavation of sites. The third year would operate with one field party.

Headquarters, laboratory, and storage facilities are located at Pimai (see Map, FIG. I), the site of an extensive Khmer site, the central ruins of which are in the process of reconstruction by the Fine Arts Department. The field season, determined by the end and the beginning of the rainy season, runs from about the middle of October to the middle of May. It is hoped that during the rainy season all laboratory work and research will be completed on the materials collected during the field season and the final report for that season in the press before starting the next season in the field.

On the periphery of the cuneiform using area there was in use in the 3rd and 2nd millennia B.C. a number of non-cuneiform scripts of apparently independent character and purely regional use (see map, FIG. I). My purpose in this article is to speculate on the possibility of their common origin. I shall not apologize for this as I believe hypothesis-making to be a useful occupation, but I must in fairness warn the reader that not only am I myself an outsider since my special interest concerns only one of the writing systems I shall be discussing (the Aegean), but so is the horse I am going to back. Diffusionism is out of favour, and despite a recent series of articles by Brice [I] pointing out the similarities between the Cretan and proto-Elamite accounting tablets, the odds currently offered are decidedly against my choice.* But I think the bookmakers are wrong, and my purpose in this article is to say why.

First I must explain that my fancy has not been taken by external markings. These are unreliable. The number of simple linear designs is limited, and it is nowadays generally agreed that a small proportion of apparent identities between the signs of different scripts can tell us nothing. The descent of our alphabet from Phoenician is not proved by the close resemblance of our capital i to their zed, nor is the common form of the Russian cursive d to our cursive g any argument for the common ancestry of our two scripts. Conversely the different appearances of, say Armenian printing, Pompeian graffiti, and Gothic handwriting are no disproof of cousinhood. The only observations from the outward look of scripts that can usefully be made are those that have reference to the structure of the writing system as a whole.

The present dispute over the date of the of the Linear B tablets found at Knossos has been, for the most part, concerned with the question whether they belong to an LM II/IIIA I destruction of the Palace, which Evans dated about 1400 B.c., or to the end of the LM IIIB period, some 150 or more years later, when Evans believed that the Palace ruins were only partly reoccupied [I]. To many archaeologists, however, the problem is a different one. For them the evidence of the pottery and of the sealings associated with the burning of the Palace and with the baking of its clay archives makes the later dating of the tablets impossible. Their concern is rather to determine more exactly when in the 14th century the destruction took place.

The greatest help towards answering this question will come from a closer definition of the style of pottery in use at the time of the catastrophe. The author has been working on this problem over the last three years by studying the considerable amount of unpublished sherd material in the Stratigraphical Museum established by Evans at Knossos. A comprehensive publication of this material will of necessity take some time to complete. Meanwhile it is hoped that it would be generally helpful to illustrate some eight of the pots which the author has been able to have reconstructed from these sherds; at the same time it is proposed briefly to outline the circumstances in which they were originally found according to the excavation reports.

This magnificently produced volume is in itself a tribute to the devoted and rewarding work which Claude Schaeffer, aided by many skilful collaborators, began at Ras Shamra-Ugarit 36 years ago. The frontispiece illustrates a 5000-pound Syrian banknote, engraved with designs of Ugaritic ivories, a mark of honour in addition to that which was bestowed when the author was made a ‘Freeman’ of the city of Latakia. His many friends and admirers in this country will rejoice that he is held in esteem and affection in the East no less than in the West.

The account here presented describes the discoveries made in the 18th and 19th campaigns of 1954-5, and includes a full-scale map of the ‘Grand Palais’ and the ‘Petit Palais’ which, besides being buildings of great architectural interest, have yielded historical and archaeological treasures in abundance. Associated with the former building we have the remains of a royal garden, a parterre which, with its surrounding paths, is an ancient forerunner of Louis XIV's achievement at Versailles, but 31 centuries older, and in another court we find an ornamental pond bordered with a low stone parapet. Not far away was a furnace for the baking of cuneiform texts; some of them had never been removed from the ashes.

Very little work has so far been done on the Bronze Age in South-East Bulgaria. This is an area which is of the greatest importance in the prehistory of South-Eastern Europe, a fact which has been often stressed by archaeologists working in the Eastern Mediterranean [I]. Geographically linked closely to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean lands, and especially to the Troad, South-East Bulgaria should provide important data for the establishment of relations between these lands in the Bronze Age. With these aims in mind the village settlement of Ezero, a site which even before excavation was obviously one of many periods, presented itself clearly as a place for excavation. Ezero, also known as Dipsis, is 3 km. south-east of Nova Zagora: it is not far from the well-known settlement site of Karanovo and 24 km. from the Azmak mound described in a recent number of this journal [2]. Preliminary excavations carried out from 1952-8 at Ezero showed that the settlement had a great thickness of occupation levels dating from the Early Bronze Age. Systematic excavation was restarted in 1961 and continued in 1963 and 1964.

The site is bordered by swampy ground and large open water-meadows. The damp, easily worked soil was well suited to primitive agriculture, and the meadows to stock-rearing.

One of the best known and most quoted finds in western Europe must be that of the ‘princess's burial’ of Vix discovered early in 1953 not far from Châtillon-sur-Seine below the Celtic stronghold of Mont Lassois (Latisco). The contents of the grave are such that classical no less than prehistoric archaeologists have had cause to add to the still increasing literature on the site [I].

Recently, discussion has ranged over two of the foremost problems concerning the Vix burial: first, the question of date and provenance for the great Krater or mixing bowl, at more than 5 feet tall the largest extant bronze vessel of the Greek Archaic period. Second is the matter of the route taken by Greek and Italic imports into Western Europe from their place of manufacture—whether via the Alps or through the entrepôt of Marseilles, founded as Massalia by Phocaian settlers in about 600 B.c.—a debate which has continued since first opened in these pages more than 35 years ago [2]. Ancillary to these two points is the question as to the reason why costly objects made their way into the heart of Celtdom, to what end, with what exchange in mind—what in fact was the status of those native nobles whose graves and settlements have produced the basic clues for such tantalizing investigations?