From its early stages, on 16 March 1967, the Department of State Affairs and the Central Army decreed the protection of cultural objects and books, and during the summer, 1971, a large exhibition in Peking featured an immense range of archaeological materials, all uncovered in the past few years (Kung, 1972). Archaeology may be studied as one of the best-documented humanities in contemporary China.

During the decade before last the majority of archaeologists stepped aboard the good ship Radiocarbon on a voyage of discovery, some hesitatingly, some with enthusiasm. Once under way the engine room staff were usually too busy to be questioned, for it was a new device having complex technical problems that had to be solved as the ship went along. For the most part the voyagers were content to accept the daily information bulletins; but there were some that questioned whether the peripheral islands could have been reached by the route the navigators claimed and there were some that said the islands seemed to be much further away than they could possibly be. Eventually the engine room staff got its problems sorted out and there was time to talk to the passengers; after lengthy discussions it came to be agreed (by nearly all) that the motion of the ship was more affected by ocean currents than had been assumed, and a way of correcting for this was worked out.

The province (or regione) of Molise is roughly the size of Lincolnshire or Devon, and stretches from the Apennine mountains to the Adriatic coast (FIG. I). In the Roman period Molise was occupied by the Samnite peoples and by related tribes such as the Frentani (Salmon, 1967, 25, map I). The historical tradition describes the Samnites as a rustic and warlike people, whom the Romans subdued only after the long series of savage wars in the last three centuries BC. Despite this historical evidence, however, the lack of previous archaeological research in Molise until the recent past meant that the archaeological record for this period in the province prior to 1974 was essentially confined to two major town sites of the Roman period (Boiano and Sepino), and two Samnite and Roman religious sanctuaries. For the same reason practically nothing was known about earlier prehistoric settlement. In the rest of Italy the evidence for early man built up by survey and excavation usually goes back at least as far as the Middle Palaeolithic, up to some 100,000 years ago. For Molise, however, there were in 1974 only chance finds of prehistoric flint and stone artifacts in local and national museum collections, most with little or no exact information about provenance. Molise was therefore virtually a blank area on the archaeological map of Italy.

During the early post-Pleistocene there flourished right across the middle belt of the African continent a highly distinctive way of life intimately associated with the great rivers, lakes and marshes. This belt–or arc, to be more precise, corresponding roughly with the drought zone of the early 1970s–comprises the southern Sahara and the Sahel from the Atlantic to the Nile and there bends up-river to the East African rift valleys and the equator. Traceable as early as the eighth millennium BC, the zenith of this ‘aquatic civilization’ was achieved in the seventh millennium, being a time when higher rainfall made rivers longer and more permanent and caused lakes to swell and burst their basins (Butzer et al., 1972; Zinderen Bakker, 1972). Around 7000 BC, for instance, fish populations as well as hippos and crocodiles reached the central Saharan highlands, while, to their south, Lake Chad expanded enormously till it overflowed via the Benue and Lower Niger into the Atlantic. In East Africa at the same time the small lakes in the Kenya rift valley rose to combine or to create riverain links over the normal watersheds, while to their north Lake Rudolf reached a height sufficient to help feed the White Nile system.

The Matupi cave is one of the 40 caves within the Mount Hoyo limestone massif, a touristic site in Ituri, Zaïre. The author recognized its archaeological possibilities in February 1973 during a prospection tour in the northern part of the country. This expedition had been organized by the Institut des Musées nationaux du ZaYre in collaboration with the Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale at Tervuren, Belgium. Upon the visit to the cave a I sq m trial trench was excavated. More extended excavations (10 sq m) took place during January-March 1974. The excavations were carried out in spits of 5 cm on a I m grid system. Matupi is a large cave with an ideal living room at its entrance (c. 7 m high, c. 8 m deep and c. 5 m wide).

In my article in 1954 I suggested that the role of the Finns in the folklore of the northern Scottish Islands might have assisted in the attribution to these visitors of the designation “Finn-men” which is found in the earliest accounts. The aim of the article was to dispose of suggestions by earlier students of the problem (e.g. MacRitchie, 1912a, 130-1) that they might be visitors from Northern Europe, and to identify them clearly as Eskimos arriving directly from Greenland. The problem that the kayak becomes waterlogged after being immersed in water for 48 hours presents difficulties to this solution which could only be overcome if one postulated Olympic standards on the part of the travellers. At the time of this study I presumed that the Scottish specimens and traditions were unique, and therefore sought an explanation which was particular to that country.