More than a decade has passed since the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo was excavated, but owing to the war serious study of the finds has been of much shorter duration. Even so, in spite of much intensive research in laboratory and study, all of first-rate quality, certain vital problems still remain unsolved. We still do not know in whose honour the cenotaph was made; though we can say ‘with complete certainty that no body, either cremated or inhumed, ever occupied the “body-space” at the west end of the burial-chamber, where everyone is agreed the primary burial should have been’. Before the king can be identified the date must be determined, and that in turn may depend to some extent upon the coins. Since I first discussed this matter, further pronouncements have been made by coin experts, but there has still been no full and frank statement of the evidence upon which the date (A.D. 650-70) has been arrived at, and it is now long overdue. As a layman who has already somewhat rashly broken a lance with the coin experts, I feel that unless we are soon given something more substantial to discuss, the case for the date 650-70 may be said to have been lost by default. Dr Gordon Ward seems to think that that has already happened. The critical article of his which is printed below assumes a knowledge of Mr Bruce-Mitford's in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology; for this reason, and because of its intrinsic importance, I have summarised it and printed it here. The summary has been submitted to Mr Bruce-Mitford and is approved by him as representing his own views correctly. Some of his arguments assume that the date of 650-70, handed out by the coin experts, must be provisionally accepted. But most of them would be just as cogent, and his main conclusion equally valid, if the date should eventually be put back about a quarter of a century and the cenotaph assigned to Redwald.

There were found in the great ship burial two silver spoons, ten inches long, of a type well-known about the 6th century A.D. They have inscribed on them in Greek the names SAUL and PAUL (FIG. I). Although several spoons of this character are known to students, their precise use remains obscure. Since they mostly bear the names of saints it is possible that they served some special liturgical purpose, but it is equally possible that they were strictly comparable to the christening mug of later ages (see discussion by Ernst Kitzinger in ANTIQUITY for March 1940). At Sutton Hoo the spoons were closely associated with a set of silver bowls bearing a cruciform decoration and were placed close to the right side of the position which should have been occupied by the head of the deceased. R. L. S. Bruce Mitford of the British Museum (Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, Vol. XXV, 1949), writes as follows:— ‘We may accept the spoons without hesitation as a present for a convert—not a Christening gift for an infant, but as a gift intended to mark the baptism of an adult convert relinquishing his pagan state, and no doubt a royal convert’.

In April, 1938, I had a short holiday in Schleswig, chiefly in order to see and walk along the Danewerk. During my stay there, Professor Jankuhn took me to see the province of Angeln; and on a little hill above the small town of Süderbrarup we inspected the much disturbed remains of a circular stone-setting, perhaps once covered by an earthen burial-mound (barrow). The spot is marked B on the plan (FIG. 7), and is to be seen also on PLATE I. It was for centuries the meeting-place of the district, at which discussions were held, just as at our early Hundred Courts, to which it may have corresponded. Here, said Dr Jankuhn, the Angles of Angeln must surely have met to discuss their forthcoming expeditions to England. It is seldom possible to nail down decisive historical events to a particular spot; and this revelation seemed to me most dramatic and would, I said, make an admirable article for ANTIQUITY. But other events supervened, and this earlier invasion receded into the background. Now at last the article has come into being, not quite perhaps in the form originally planned, but none the less welcome. O.G.S.C.

Nearly forty years ago Sir Charles Peers read a paper of outstanding importance on Caernarvon Castle. The description he then gave of the various buildings of which the castle is composed is printed in the Transactions of the Cymmrodorion Society. It will never be bettered, combining as it does a mastery of detail with a simple and lucid presentation of a most complicated structure. It is prefaced by an analysis of contemporary documents bearing on the original work of construction, on the gradual progress of building and on the castle's subsequent history. On the strength of these records a concise building sequence is established, and this has in its turn been adopted as the basis of all subsequent writings on the castle. A dated ground-plan, setting out this sequence in graphic form, accompanied the printed account, and has since been widely reproduced.

The latest complete list of radiocarbon readings received from America brings the total number of dated sites and objects to upwards of 160. Of these 120 are from localities in the New World, and their archaeological implications have been reviewed by G. H. S, Bushneil in the last number of ANTIQUITY; the object of the present article is to do the same for the 40 odd results available from the Old World.