Since taking his PhD at the University of Sheffield Dr Stephen Pierpoint has been working as ‘Archaeologist’ for the North Derbyshire Archaeological Committee. During his research he obtained three radiocarbon determinations (financed by Shffield University) for the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Yorkshire of considerable interest.

Italy has been and still is the scene of unprecedented archaeological activity ; and it was not unnatural that this fact should lead to the holding of a succession of congresses during the Spring. Rome, as was only fitting, opened the ball on the 2628th anniversary of her birthday, the 21st of April, with the first national congress of Roman Studies.

Very wisely the organizing committee decided, as also did the Etruscan committee two years before, to regard this as a sort of preliminary canter to an international congress to be held, I believe, in 1930, the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Vergil ; and therefore to confine it in the main to Italians—though various foreign scholars resident in Rome were invited to take part, and several of them read papers.

The first year's work was to be primarily field survey to locate and test sites. Any sites found in construction areas of the dams were to be excavated at once. Plans for the second year would see two parties in the field for a part of the season, one continuing with detailed survey and the second with excavation of sites. The third year would operate with one field party.

Headquarters, laboratory, and storage facilities are located at Pimai (see Map, FIG. I), the site of an extensive Khmer site, the central ruins of which are in the process of reconstruction by the Fine Arts Department. The field season, determined by the end and the beginning of the rainy season, runs from about the middle of October to the middle of May. It is hoped that during the rainy season all laboratory work and research will be completed on the materials collected during the field season and the final report for that season in the press before starting the next season in the field.

These brief remarks of Al Makdisi, from his account of the first colonization of Khwarizm, contain much of interest. For evidently in early medieval times there still survived in Khwarizm a vague traditional memory of an ancient culture, when the sandy islands of the great Oxus delta and the lowlands round the Sea of Aral were inhabited by sedentary fisher-folk, the ancestors of the creators of the brilliant but little known civilization of ancient Khwarizm.