Professor Paolo Graziosi is Professor of Anthropology in the University of Florence, and also Director of the Istituto di Paletnologia in that University. He here describes new discoveries of rock paintings which he saw in Ethiopia in 1961, and relates these discoveries and earlier ones from that country to prehistoric European and African art in general. In order to allow space to illustrate this article as fully as possible, it is being published in two parts. The rock art of the Adi Caieh and Karora regions will be described in the September number of ANTIQUITY, together with Professor Graxiosi’s discussion of Ethiopian rock art as a whole.

A book slender in size but rich in content. Certainly it should be read by Europeans and Africans who are interested in the historic problems of Zimbabwe ruins with or without a mystery attached, yet have neither time or training to tackle the detailed publication of the 1958 excavations by Summers and his two colleagues, which appeared in December 1961 as an Occasional Paper (vol. 3) of the National Museum of Southern Rhodesia, and is, in the main, a concentrated and masterly exercise in stratigraphy.

Verulamium was the third largest city in Roman Britain (200 acres within the walls). Its place in the Roman province was thus commensurate with the part it has played in modern assessments of the history and culture of Roman Britain. The excavations undertaken between 1930 and 19-34 by Dr and Mrs R. E. M. Wheeler were amongst the first scientific excavations of Roman towns in this country, and their report was certainly the first to interpret the results gained in the wider context of the history of the Roman Empire. Those deductions were thereupon utilized by Collingwood as a framework for the history of urbanization in Britain as a whole and have coloured interpretation ever since. Yet of the 200 acres of Verulamium only 11 had been investigated and those in an area thought to be peripheral. Today, therefore, at the conclusion of a second campaign (1955-61) when another, more central, area has been excavated and when the acreage investigated has increased to 20, it is justifiable to reassess the history of the town.

Although French archaeologists such as Pbre Poidebard in Syria, and Colonel Baradez in North Africa, have been using air photography very successfully for a long time in sub-desert regions overseas, this has not been so in Metropolitan France. In fact it was a mere ten years ago-a considerable time after systematic air photography had been going on in England-that French research workers began to use air photography, and even then as individual efforts each in his own region. In almost all cases they used, like the author, the aircraft of local aero-clubs, and small non-professional cameras, usually the simple 24 x 36mm. models. That these individual efforts have been far from negligible became more widely apparent in Paris, in August 1963, at the conference on, and exhibition of, air photography organized by M. Raymond Chevallier (ANTIQUITY, 1963, 296), under the auspices of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne where he has recently inaugurated the first university course in photo-interpretation in France.