In the last few years, widely ranging reconnaissance flights sponsored by the Committee for Aerial Photography in the University of Cambrike have been made over Wales for the purpose of archaeological and other research. Here Dr St. Joseph, the Curator in Aerial Photography at Cambridge, who planned these flights and undertook the photography, discusses some of the outstanding results of air photography in a region which has hitherto been neglected from this point of view.

We include here books which have been received for review, or books of importance not received for review, of which we have recently been informed. We welcome information about books, particularly in languages other than English and American, of interest to readers of ANTIQUITY. The listing of a book in this chronicle does not preclude its review in ANTIQUITY.

Since 1907 when Professor M. M. Vasić first posed the question of the south-eastem connexions of the Neolithic culture of Serbia, the investigation of this problem over a wider field and on a broader chronological footing has made material advances in the whole area from the Near East to the Lower Danube. It even proved possible to provide this problem with a more or less exact historical outline. These results have been produced by exceptionally fruitful but unco-ordinated, local research: uncertainties and apparent contradictions have still to be resolved.

In this article, Professor Bruce Dickins, Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge and sometime Director of the Survey, takes the opportunity of the publication of two general surveys of English Place-Names and of three volumes of the West Riding Survey, to discuss the development of English Place-Name Studies in the last sixty years. The books he here discusses are:–

THE ORIGIN OF ENGLISH PLACE-NAMES by P. H. Reaney. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960 (second impression 1961). pp. x + 278. 32s. net.

ENGLISH PLACE-NAMES. By Kenneth Cameron. London, Batsford. 1961. pp. 256 and 8 plates. 30$. net.

THE PLACE-NAMES OF THE WEST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE. By A. H. Smith. Parts I-III (English Place-Name Society, Vols. XXX-XXXII). Cambridge, University Press, 1961. pp. xii + 346 + map, pp. xii + 322 + map, pp. xiv + 278 + map. 35s. net per volume.

It is a commonplace of current archaeology that the publication of radiocarbon dates is revolutionizing our ideas of the past. Dr G. H. S. Bushnell, Curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in the University of Cambridge, England, has already published in ANTIQUITY and elsewhere some of his views on the impact of radiocarbon dating on New World chronology. Here he studies the whole problem in detail. He adopts the useful convention of referring to a date already fully published in the Radiocarbon Supplement to the American Journal of Science simply by its laboratory designation and number {thus K-554 is reading no. 554 of the Copenhagen Laboratory), but in some cases, where the date is not fully published, he gives fuller information.

At the request of the Cambridge Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science, Professor Atkinson, now Professor of Archaeology in University College, Cardiff, gave a public lecture on Neolithic Engineering, and subsequently agreed to allow its publication in ANTIQUITY. This article is a condensation of his lecture, given in 1958, with subsequent additions.

Professor Bernabò Brea, in his review of Professor J. D. Evans's Malta (ANTIQUITY, 1960, 132), did not dispute the sequence of cultures there described, but he questioned the interpretation of this sequence in three important particulars, namely, the continuity between the first (Għar Dalam) and later phases of Evans's sequence, the absolute chronology of the Neolithic period, and thirdly the role which Malta played in the prehistory of the Central and West Mediterranean. These three criticisms were met by Evans (ANTIQUITY, 1960, 218) and now Dr D. H. Trump, Curator of Archaeology in the Malta Museum, discusses all these problems in relation to his recent excavations at Skorba.

Mr Don Brothwell of the Sub-Department of Anthropology in the British Museum (Natural History) here discusses whether anthropophagy in prehistoric Britain is fact or fiction.