‘Im’Adiya lies about eight thousand feet above sea level, on the plateau known as the dhahir, near the precipice, four thousand feet in height, which separates it from the plain on the southern or seaward side. It lies within the territory of the ’Audhala tribe, near the Yemen border. It is ninety miles from Aden as the crow flies, or four days by camel. The nearest inhabited centre is Mukeiras, from which it is about three hours distant on foot, to the east. At Mukeiras the Royal Air Force maintains a landing ground and a rest-house, and the Government has a wireless telegraph station there.

The primary purpose of this paper is to publish for the first time a complete set of plans and descriptions of the Dorset stone circles, and of certain allied monuments in which timber uprights may have played a part but whose visible remains today consist only of encircling banks and ditches. The existence of most of the sites described has been recorded, with full references, in the Ordnance Survey’s Map of Neolithic Wessex, but we have been able to add several new circles to those listed there. The field-work was undertaken and the surveys made in 1936 and 1937, while in certain instances use has been made of air-photographs to which Mr O. G. S. Crawford has drawn our attention.

I. La Civilisation d’Assur et de Babylone. By Dr G. Contenau, Conservateur des Antiquités Orientales au Musée du Louvre. Paris: Payot, 1937. 30 francs.

Fouilles de Telloh: sous la direction de H. de Genouillac. Vol. II, Époques d’Ur IIIe Dynastie et de Larsa. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1937. Vols. I and II. 400 francs.

The Music of the Sumerians. By F. W. Galpin. Cambridge University Press, 1937. 18s.

These three works, all published in the same year, form a trilogy with the Tigris and Euphrates as a background. The Land of the Two Rivers, as historians have aptly called it, was from the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C. a focus on which man converged from the cardinal points of western Asia. The earliest settlements were composed of farmers and hunters: in the south their pottery and the art of painting suggest that they were predominant with the Syrian hinterland and eastern Anatolia. Sometime before 3000 B.C. the invention of the wheel, of metal-working and writing produced an industrial revolution, which brought the young civilization of these early farmers to maturity. The beautiful painted pottery of A1 ‘Ubaid and Tall Halaf died out, partly because, as de Genouillac says, the invention of cuneiform writing made the pictorial writing of clay vases obsolete, and no doubt caused the skilful artisans of painted ceramic to apply themselves to the more paying craft of metallurgy, much as in western Europe in the first quarter of this century a horde of stable hands left the paddock for the garage and forsook the horse for the motor car.

1. The Stone Age of Mount Carmel; Excavations at the Wady-el-Mughara. Vol. I. By D. A. E. Garrod and D. M. A. Bate. Clarendon Press, 1937. pp. 240, 55 plates, 8 text figures. 42s.

2. Lachish I: The Lachish Letters. By Harry Torczyner, Lankester Harding, Alkin Lewis and J. L. Starkey. Published for the Trustees of the late Sir Henry Wellcome by the Oxford University Press, 1938. pp. 221 (including plates, not numbered separately). 25s.

3. The Quarterly of the Department of Antiquities in Palestine vol. vii, Sela-Petra the Rock, of Edom and Nabatene. By G. and A. Horsfield. Published for the Government of Palestine by the Oxford University Press, 1938. pp. 42,74 plates, 10 text-figures. 5s.

4. The Annual of the American schools of Oriental Research vol. xv, Excavations in Eastern Palestine II. By Nelson Glueck. pp. 161, 38 plates, 45 text-figures.

5. Preliminary report of the University of Michigan Excavations at Sepphoris Palestine in 1931. By Leroy Waterman. University of Michigan Press, 1937. 2 dollars.

The group of books here under review is so varied in subject, that connected discussion is difficult. Apart from the importance of the subjects, however, there is a general interest and connexion in the illustrations they give of the comparatively new approach now being made to Palestinian Archaeology. The inevitably preponderant importance to most people of the association of Palestine with Biblical history has had two effects on the study of its archaeology. In the first place, periods outside that of the Bible have not received much attention, and in the second, it has rather often been the case that distinguished Biblical scholars have undertaken excavations without the supplementary training in field-work which modern archaeological technique now requires. Among the books under review are examples of how this tendency has in recent years been corrected. We see Palestine taking its place as an important connecting link between the great lands of the Near East, and we see how modern methods are now applied to all aspects of field archaeology. There is also unfortunately one example of how modern excavations should not be done.

In his Editorial Notes for September 1930, the Editor of ANTIQUITY described an exploratory flight over England and Scotland taken by him and Mr H. J. Andrews in June of that year, in the course of which a most remarkable discovery was made. A main objective of the flight was the Roman town of Durobrivae, where the Ermine Street from London to Lincoln and the North crosses the river Nene, now the boundary here between the counties of Huntingdon and Northampton. Extensive, and for their period careful excavations were carried out in this vicinity by E. T. Artis in the twenties of the 19th century, and illustrated in a sumptuous quarto volume of plates; but despite exhaustive summaries of these and all recordable discoveries contributed to the Victoria County History, by Haverfield for the Northamptonshire side in 1902, and by Miss M. V. Taylor for the Huntingdonshire side in 1926, no systematic modern work has been attempted on any part of the site, and an air reconnaissance seemed an ideal way of re-introducing it in 1930 to the attention of archaeologists.

It has often appeared to the writer to be a really remarkable circumstance, during the long and sometimes acrimonious controversies of the nineteenth century concerning the various physical, social, and ‘technical’ phenomena (methods, etc.) characterizing the Saxon settlement of Britain and its more immediate antecedents, that among the various protagonists of the first rank, none seems to have thought it worth while to visit those lands where an essentially similar environment still prevailed, and to see for himself what they might yield. To make such a statement concerning archaeological students of today would certainly be to invite questions in return, which are not easily answered. What was the (physical) environment of early Saxon England; and where shall we find its ‘essentially similar’ counterpart? But at the time of which I speak, such doubts may almost be said to have been non-existent. Whatever opinions were held concerning Roman centuriation, or Teutonic three-field systems, the old ‘traditional’ view of England as ‘a land of forests’, ‘one great wood’, etc., seems hardly to have been questioned. Under such conditions, virtually any forest country occupied by settlers of European birth or descent would serve the required purpose.

Recent articles in Antiquity have drawn attention to the rich sources of material for study in ethnology and archaeology which lie almost untapped in the dwellings of peasant Britain. For Ireland three papers by Åke Campbell1 break new ground in a virgin field and increase the heavy debt which Irish scientific studies owe to Scandinavia; and the interest roused has been fostered by a short statement on the need for enquiry into house-types issued by Colonel R. G. Berry. The Irish Folklore Commission has gathered much information on this and related topics, while a regional survey of the housetypes of north Kerry, clearly inspired by Campbell's work, has lately appeared. The participation of continental workers in this field is further illustrated in the ‘Contributions to the study of the tangible material culture of the Gaoltacht’ published by L. Mühlhausen.

The reasons for selecting the northwest sector for the beginning of the excavations within the circles of Avebury, scheduled to last for at least a decade, by the Morven Institute of Archaeological Research (with the permission and cordial co-operation of H.M. Office of Works) was twofold. First, the conditions of indescribable squalor and neglect prevailing over most of the area of this section surpassed, if comparison is possible, those existing in any other part of the circle; indeed the tangle of rusty pig-wire, the accumulations, to a depth of nearly three feet, of old tins and broken bottles, around two of the standing stones, to say nothing of the refuse-heaps which filled part of the ditch almost flush with its edges, contributed ungenerously towards rendering the once majestic site of Avebury what it has been for centuries, the outstanding archaeological disgrace of Britain. Secondly, the presence of a veritable jungle of trees and undergrowth not only perpetually menaced the safety of this part of the monument, but had already done dama e to the preservation of the all-important features below ground-level.