This letter had its origin in an after-dinner discussion with fellow-scientists, in which the trials of working with archaeologists were ruefully compared in full and horrendous detail. Being the only one present with formal training in archaeology as well as in science, I found myself to some extent playing the role of devil’s advocate, but it still seemed to me regrettable that while the scientists were making genuine efforts to understand and illuminate archaeological problems, many archaeologists make little effort to understand the limitations and difficulties of scientific techniques.

The story of the discovery of Mapungubwe, which led to its systematic excavation, makes reading as vivid and exciting as any adventure-fiction of our youth.

The site is one of many precipitous sandstone kopjes which rear their almost perpendicular sides some 200 ft. above a valley-floor tributary to the Limpopo, which lies only a mile distant, at the point where the Shashi river, flowing from Rhodesia, joins forces with it. Messina—archaeologically famous for its pre-European copper mines—lies about 50 miles west, and it overlooks the meeting point of Transvaal, Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesian territory. Fortunately for science, British administration being parsimonious in these matters, the hill lay within the Transvaal border.

Professor Hoyle's use of my Stonehenge findings is as intriguing as it is ingenious. As I said on the BBC-TV programme Chronicle last August, his support of my theory is most welcome, and his speculations deserve and will receive the most careful consideration.

A fragment of Cassis rufa shell, in modern times a species of the Indian Ocean, was reliably reported from the deep Mousterian deposits excavated at the beginning of the century from the Grotte du Prince, Monaco. Because its known habitat is so distant and exotic, there has always been question about the specimen's authenticity. A radiocarbon determination shows it to be recent, and no evidence for long-distance movement of shell in the European Middle Palaeolithic.

Professor Stuart Piggott ends his admirable study of William Stukeley with these words: ‘It was a Druidic dream-world which has left an oddly tangible relic today in the Welsh Eisteddfod with its Gorsedd Circle, invented by Iolo Morganwg in response to romantic Welsh patriotism a century or so ago, but in the end to be derived from Stukeley …’. When I pointed out to Professor Piggott that, in this form, his statement was not strictly accurate, he suggested that a brief note on the Welsh Eisteddfod and Gorsedd would prove of value.