It is not growing like a tree.… The poet wrote of Man, and Man as the ultimate standard of all size need not, outside a company of Footguards, regard I the trivial vacillation of his inches. In other manifestations, Size is a matter of moment. Look at a Little Pyramid; a Big Pyramid has to fight hard enough for intelligent recognition, but those little pyramids that the Pharaonic builders did not hesitate to scatter round and about are surely silly toys beyond belief. And imagine a little Empire State Building, bereft of the size and vista that give some sort of status, I suppose, to the actual pile; the thought horrifies. Imagine a little St. Peter’s, such as can in fact be seen somewhere in Canada, lacking altogether that superhuman, super-personal, immensity that in Rome at once conditions the mind to all measure of other-worldly emotion. Size.

By common consent the spread of Neolithic culture has been one of the first objectives of radiocarbon dating in north-western Europe. This is due primarily to the intrinsic historical importance of this process, but the fact that the inception of husbandry has left clear indicators in the palaeobotanical record means that decisive samples are readily available. In the present paper an account will first be given of the reinvestigation of the site on Peacock’s Farm, Shippea Hill, Cambridgeshire, a locality where in 1934 Neolithic pottery had been found stratified in a vertical sequence between Mesolithic and Early Bronze Age remains, each in deposits with fossil pollen. In view of the stratigraphical importance of the site it may be appropriate in this same context to review the radiocarbon dates for the inception of Neolithic culture in the British Isles as a whole. The excavations were undertaken during June, 1960, by the Cambridge University Department of Archaeology and Anthropology with the support of the Crowther-Beynon Fund. Samples were collected for pollen analysis and radiocarbon age determination and the laboratory work was carried out in the University Sub-department of Quaternary Research at Cambridge.

Professor Stuart Piggott, who opened the conference, began by tracing the history of Iron Age studies in Scotland. He referred to the idea that there was something essentially peculiar about the Scottish Iron Age, and attributed its growth to an over-emphasis on the distinction between Highland and Lowland Zones. It was not inevitable (though it frequently happened) that Scotland should receive its cultural stimuli at second hand from lowland England, and certainly not that every development in the north should be retarded in time. On the other hand, there were differences, above all the shortage of pottery, and this gave especial value to the recent field studies of monuments, notably those made by the Royal Commission.

Skin boats have an assured but unsatisfactory place in history. Assured, because the literary references to them are many and interesting. Unsatisfactory, S because archaeologically it is unlikely that any remains, by their nature, will ever be found to give an idea of what they were 1ike. James Hornell has summarized many of the literary references to the part they played in Northern Europe during the Classical and Dark Ages in his well-known work on British coracles and Irish curraghs. In the Roman period they are mentioned by Caesar, Lucan, Pliny, Strabo, Solinus, Sidonius Apollinaris and Avienus. Pliny specifically mentions their part in the cross-channel tin trade. The references in Caesar and Lucan are also particularly significant, as will become clear below.

Later in the Dark Ages, according to the old Irish stories, Bran and Maelduin used curraghs, or hide-covered boats, for their voyages and Teigue, son of Cian, raided nearly to Spain. In the other direction, St Brendan reached the Shetlands and possibly Iceland as well. St Columba, of course, travelled from Ireland to Iona in a curragh. Niall of the Nine Hostages raided Wales in a fleet of curraghs and his grandson, Breccan, lost 50 in Breccan’s Cauldron, the Corryvreckan which fishermen still avoid today. In the medieval period, Froissart and Holinshed show that Caesar’s use of leather-covered coracles to get armies across rivers survived amongst the troops of Edward III and Henry V, though one imagines they were stouter craft than those described by Giraldus Cambrensis in his Description of Wales, which, Giraldus claimed, could be overturned by a blow from the tail of the salmon which the coracle fishermen were trying to catch.

I do not see that Professor Palmer has any adequate grounds for his refusal to accept the definitive opinion of Evans and Mackenzie that the Linear B tablets found at Knossos were all of them—or the great bulk of them—from the ruins of the Palace and other buildings destroyed at the end of the Late Minoan II period about 1400 B.C.

This opinion was based, not upon a few isolated ‘facts’ of the kind which Professor Palmer has, with commendable diligence, mustered against it, but upon their observation of the ruins of the ‘Last Palace’ (as they called it) as a whole. In these ruins they found, on the one hand Linear B tablets, on the other remains of vases decorated in the ‘Palace Style’ of Late Minoan II, which falls in time between what Evans called Late Minoan I (c, 1550–1450 B.C.) and Late Minoan III (c. 1400 B.C. and later). It is to the end of the Late Minoan III period, about 1200 B.C. or later, that Professor Palmer wishes to transfer the tablets.

Nearly two years have passed since Dr L.S.B. Leakey announced the first of a series of remarkable discoveries at Olduvai Gorge, Tanganyika. The great importance of this region as a palaeontological hunting ground has been appreciated since 1911 when, by chance, a German entomologist picked up a number of fossil bones which had been eroded on to the surface of the slopes of this East African Pleistocene canyon. Since 1931 Dr Leakey has made repeated visits to the Gorge where steadily he has been building up the evidence of an early stone-age cultural sequence.

In July, 1959, Dr and Mrs Leakey discovered a hominid skull which was lying partly exposed on the slopes, 22 ft. below the upper limit of Bed I, the lowest stratum of the Pleistocene sequence at Olduvai. Excavation of the site revealed that the skull was fragmented but almost complete and was lying on a living floor containing tools of a recognized culture (Oldowan) as well as waste flakes and unworked stones, all foreign to the site; in addition there were a number of broken and splintered bones of small animals which had apparently constituted part of the diet of the incumbents. Subsequently, a tibia and fibula were recovered from the same living floor. Dr Leakey named the skull Zinjanthropus boisei (PLATE x (a)). During 1960, excavations were started at a slightly lower level of Bed I and in December, 1960, Dr Leakey reported the discovery of a number of adult and juvenile bones of the hand and foot, two clavicles and some skull (parietal) fragments. This was rapidly followed by the important discovery of a juvenile mandible from the same level (PLATE XI). A number of stone artifacts of an Oldowan culture have also come to light from the juvenile site.