The Canary Islands, 1000 km southwest into the Atlantic from Iberia, are close to the African coast; at the latitude of southern Morocco, they are far southern outliers to Europe as presently defined by its nation-states. The archaeology of their indigenous people, the Guanches, is caught up now in the contemporary politics of the Islas Canarias.

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.

Recent years have seen the publication of some sumptuous reports of the large scale excavations conducted by American enterprise in the years before the war. The sites of Megiddo and Beth-Shan, which can confidently be referred to by their historical and biblical names, are of outstanding importance, dominating as they do the Plain of Esdraelon and the great road from Egypt to North Syria and Mesopotamia. The publications here considered are the latest (but not, it is hoped, the last) of a series dealing with different aspects of the excavations. Both sites have been partially sounded to bed-rock, and show continuous occupation from thc chalcolithic period to the end of the first millennium B.C., and Beth-Shan beyond it. Tell en-Nasbeh is in a different category. It is possibly to be identified with the Biblical Mizpah, but this is not universally accepted. Like many Palestinian hill-country sites, it was occupied in the Early Bronze Age (the ascription of some groups to the chalcolithic period is unsatisfactory). Its main occupation is, however, confined to the Early Iron Age, from the time of the undivided Israelite Kingdom down to the post-exilic, Hellenistic and Roman periods.

‘Time’, wrote Sir Thomas Browne, ‘which antiquates antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments’. The Nile Valley is full of major monuments—pyramids, tombs and temples; each expedition which goes into the Libyan Desert learns that it is well-filled with minor ones and remarkable among these are paintings and gravings on rocks.

If the description of the 6th century Massalian Periplus, preserved in the Ora Maritima of Rufus Festus Avienus,l does not refer to Tarragona, as almost all scholars agree with Professor Bosch Gimpera2 in believing, then one can only say that to no other city of the Spanish coast can that account of its walls be applied with greater appropriateness.

Seldom does it happen, as at Tarragona, that the ancient walls retain intact throughout the ages the embodiment of history amid the modern life of the city, and nowhere else with such charm and grandeur as that of Cesse with its true Iberian atmosphere. Usually the huge blocks of the primitive cyclopean wall are overlaid with reconstructions and refacings of the Roman, Visigothic and Medieval periods and of the modern Spanish fortifications.

Chartres is made of stone and glass. But it is not just stone and glass; it is a cathedral, and not only a cathedral, but a particular cathedral built at a particular time by certain members of a particular society. To understand what it means, to perceive it for what it is, you need to know rather more than the generic properties of stone and glass and rather more than what is common to all cathedrals. You need to understand also – and, in my opinion, most critically – the specific concepts of the relations among God, man and architecture that, since they have governed its creation, it consequently embodies. (Geertz 1973: 50.)