History has been studied and histories written for more than two millennia. From time to time attempts have been made to discern some pattern or design running through it. But they have usually failed because the data have been inadequate. You cannot see the pattern of a carpet when only a minute portion is uncovered, and you cannot discern the pattern of history until large portions of it are available for examination. It was not until the 19th century that really long vistas were opened up by archaeological exploration in the East. Here, in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Crete, there were found the remains of forgotten civilizations; and Sir Flinders Petrie, one of the pioneers in that work of epoch-making in the literal sense, has himself sketched an outline of the pattern he believes he can see emerging. The present essay is an attempt to interpret and explain that pattern.

At the time when Darwin published his Descent of Man comparatively little was known of the fossil remains either of men or apes, so that the discussion of the evidence of palaeontology played an altogether insignificant part in his argument. Apart from the discoveries that had been made in the Neanderthal cave and at Gibraltar, nothing was known of fossil man, and what little was known was puzzling rather than helpful. Little more had then been recovered of the fossil remains of apes than a few fragments of Pliopithecus and Dryopithecus.

The White Horses cut in the turf of the Wessex Downs are familiar to most people who have wandered over the hills of western England, and many have no doubt paused to look at one or another of them and perhaps to ‘hazard a wide solution’ as to its antiquity or origin. But of the fifteen White Horses in Wiltshire and the adjoining counties, only one can be attributed to a date before the eighteenth century. This, the sire of them all, is cut on the north slope of the Berkshire Downs, above the village of Uffington, and gives its name to the fertile plain of mid-Berkshire-the Vale of the White Horse. Camden in writing of the Vale was wholly contemptuous of the Horse, saying that the inhabitants named the district ‘I wotte not from what shape of a white horse, imagined to appeare in a whitish chalky hill’. But despite Camden's scepticism, the Uffington White Horse very definitely exists, and has been cited as a landmark since the eleventh century, when the cartulary of Abingdon abbey records that one Godfric was possessed of Sparsholt juxta locum qui vulgo mons Albi Equi nuncupatur. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Horse is several times mentioned in connexion with the tenure of lands near it. Mr T. H. Ravenhill has recently drawn attention to an early fourteenth century manuscript in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, entitled Tractatus de mirabizibus Britanniae, in which the White Horse is given second place among the Marvels, Stonehenge being first.

Perhaps the greatest handicap in trying to visualize life in prehistoric Britain is the exiguity of domestic remains, especially on the architectural side. The dwellings themselves were normally of perishable materials so that only their outlines survive, and of their furniture not even that can be said. An exceptional conjunction of circumstances has, however, preserved in Orkney a whole village belonging to a belated Stone Age, with its huts and their fixtures reasonably complete. The huts were built of stone; they had been packed in refuse and were eventually buried by sand, and so the walls still stand to a height of from 8 to 9 feet. The timber shortage prevailing on the wind-swept isle necessitated the translation into stone, and therewith the immortalization of articles such as beds, usually manufactured of ephemeral wood. The village is indeed a highly specialized adaptation to a particular environment so that deductions from it can only be generalized with reservations. Again, though the villagers used only stone and bone tools, they probably lived at a time when bronze, and perhaps even iron, were current in less isolated localities. Still we get here so vivid a picture of Stone Age life in our islands that a summary of the results of four seasons' work may be of interest even to the general reader.

The British hill-fort in these days needs no introduction. Everybody, certainly every reader of ANTIQUITY, is familiar with the ancient earthworks that crown the blunt spurs and whale-backed ridges of the chalk downs, and the grimmer ramparts of stone that take their place as one penetrates the lands of sharper contours and more obstinate rock that lie to the west and north.