Peu-Richard is the name of a low hill in rollingchalkland overlooking the marshland which hasformed where the River Seugne meets the RiverCharente, a little way to the south of Saintes. It washere in 1882 that a farm labourer came across tracesof a fortified enclosure rich in prehistoric material.The landowner, Baron Eschasseriaux, was anamateur archaeologist and when told of the discoveryimmediately arranged an excavation. A totalof 106 trenches was opened in the course of thiswork, and a good idea of the complexity of the sitelayout, with its multiple ditches, was obtained (FIG.I). A recent aerial photograph has contributedsome further details (PL. va). Eschasseriaux describedthe discovery of rock-cut ditches, remains ofstone ramparts and traces of gateways. Potsherds,animal bones and flints were collected in abundanceand some examples were illustrated in the report,though few details were given (Eschasseriaux,1882). This material included quantities of decoratedsherds of the type which came to be known as'Peu-Richardien'.

‘ . . . the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.’ (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin, p. 31).

Nick Humphrey, of King’s College, Cambridge, in a recent broadcast on Human Evolution, made the following comments (slightly paraphrased from my notes of the radio broadcast): ‘Man, in comparison to the chimp is a forgetful ape. Chimps in experiments have a remarkable visual memory, recalling for example 25 complex patterns. Some humans can do the same, but rarely, and often where there is a brain malfunction as with epilepsy or damage to the parietal lobes. In effect it is characteristically pathological. Why was this facility suppressed? In order to replace this means of storing knowledge with a new way of thought. Not one of counting objects or observations as particular, but instead ordering such data into general models of things and situations, as with the Platonic Ideal forms. This was the birth of symbolic thought.’

Attention has recently been drawn to the existence of ‘vaccary’ walling at Wycoller, Lancashire (Antiquity, LVI, 1982, 163, Pl. xviib). Upright stones, or orthostats, occur in both field boundaries and the construction of buildings in Brittany where they are to be found in three widely-separated parts of the Province. Known areas of orthostat walling have recently been mapped in southern Finistère, between Concarneau and Pont-Aven; in southern Côtes-du-Nord between Rostrenen, Saint-Nicolas-du-Pélem and Mur-de-Bretagne; and in a large area stretching across northern Loire-Atlantique into eastern hlorbihan as far as Rochefort-en-Terre, and also into south-western llle-et-Vilaine (FIG. I).