We have not hitherto considered the East Angles as a showy and conspicuously prosperous folk. In the Settlement Period we find them, as Mr Myres says, 'a federation of several smaller peoples' living in groups that were geographically isolated and to a certain extent independent of each other. Their material wealth would be judged by such a cemetery as Caistor-by-Nonvich, and on the evidence available before the Sutton Hoo discovery we should not have credited them with any unusual skill in the crafts or with the possession of notable riches. But we now know that in the early seventh century the folk inhabiting the coastal area between the Orwell and the Alde were the subjects of a prince whose grave contained one of the most magnificent and costly furnitures that has ever been found in a Teutonic tomb. Hitherto, when we have wanted to show off the richness of Anglo-Saxon England, we have looked to Kent. Now we have learnt that in one limited area of Suffolk, where lies Rendlesham, a vicus regius of the East Anglian ruling dynasty, the maximum brilliance of Kentish archaeology was not only equalled, but surpassed in splendour ; and we realize that the house of Wuffa (the sixth century grandfather of Redwald) thus put to shame the rich royalties of Kent, at the time of, or only shortly after, the reign of Kent's greatest king, Ethelbert.

The study of Roman urban centres in Portugal (ancient Lusitania) is now well developed, but the rural landscape has remained little known. A new collaborative European project (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfud/Main, National University of Ireland Galway and University College Dublin) is investigating the rural landscape and its economy — with the support of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation Cologne and the Instituto Portugues do Patrimonio Arquitectonico — from the Romanization of coast and hinterland, its Christianization and subsequent Islamicization.

I have done some varied seafaring in different kinds of odd craft and so have some idea of the difficulties involved in earlier days. In the summer of 1925 I was at sea in a Fleetwood trawler, which was fishing the Ioo-fathom line from St Kilda to the Blaskets. On I July, we were off Galway Bay; it was a fairly calm day with a big Atlantic swell running. A three-man curragh from Inishmore (one of the Aran Islands) came alongside and the crew begged for fish.

The bone assemblages from the Flag Fen platform itself and from the contemporary post alignment revealed at the Fengate Power Station site are small (respectively c. 150 and c. 600 identified pieces), but may nonetheless shed some light on the nature of human activity at the two sites. For obvious reasons, this study is principally directed towards understanding the circumstances of bone deposition rather than towards a reconstruction of local animal husbandry.

I’m pleased with the news of the discovery of a runic record of a Norwegian expedition to Oklahoma in the 11th century. Why it should have gone round the Carolina coast and Florida and up to Oklahoma, not the most attractive of American states, I cannot imagine. But the Vikings were an odd people. The deciphering of the runes seems to have been extremely ingenious; and the fact that the runes are in code is also extremely interesting. Why the bishop put his record into cryptograms is even harder to understand than why Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, concealed his authorship of the plays attributed to Lord Oxford by Mr Looney. (I am no expert in Shakespearian cryptography, relying on the lucid description of it in Dr P. G. Wodehouse’s work, The Mulliner Omnibus, pp. 234 ff.)

Although French archaeologists such as Pbre Poidebard in Syria, and Colonel Baradez in North Africa, have been using air photography very successfully for a long time in sub-desert regions overseas, this has not been so in Metropolitan France. In fact it was a mere ten years ago-a considerable time after systematic air photography had been going on in England-that French research workers began to use air photography, and even then as individual efforts each in his own region. In almost all cases they used, like the author, the aircraft of local aero-clubs, and small non-professional cameras, usually the simple 24 x 36mm. models. That these individual efforts have been far from negligible became more widely apparent in Paris, in August 1963, at the conference on, and exhibition of, air photography organized by M. Raymond Chevallier (ANTIQUITY, 1963, 296), under the auspices of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne where he has recently inaugurated the first university course in photo-interpretation in France.