The Azmak settlement mound has T a very favourable position: it is situated in the midst of a fertile plain, surrounded on three sides by marsh land, from which it takes its name, Azmak being the Bulgarian for marsh. It is 7.94 m. high, with a diameter at its base of 80 m.; it covers an area of 5,500 sq. m.

The excavations between 1960 and 1963 yielded no less than 10,000 finds, mainly from the Neolithic and Eneolithic periods. The thickness of the accumulated cultural levels was 7-5 m., of which 3 m. belonged to the Neolithic period and 4-5 m. to the Eneolithic and Bronze Ages. The 3 m. belonging to the Neolithic period consisted of six building levels, five of which can be attributed to the culture known as Karanovo I, and the sixth, much destroyed, to the culture known as Karanovo 111, especially as known from the Jassa Tepe I level at Plovdiv.

All technical and scientific illustration is at once symbol and communication, a pictorial language addressing the author's audience side by side with his written text. It transmits information according to an agreed code of conventions which translates actuality into forms and outlines in one or more colours, usually black on white, in a manner which will convey to the observer the features of the original which the illustrator wishes to present. As Winston Churchill wrote of painting, ‘the canvas receives a message despatched a few seconds before from the natural object. But it has also come through a post office en route. It has been transmitted in code . . . it reaches the canvas a cryptogram’. Archaeological draughtsmanship involves the construction of technical cryptograms, and as in all ciphers these must be made according to rules carefully observed by both transmitter and recipient.

The Gallo-Roman sanctuary of Sequana is situated in the little wooded valley where the Seine rises, some 35 km. north-west of Dijon. It has been excavated at regular intervals from the middle of the 19th century onwards, and for over a century attention has been drawn to the many and varied finds made there [I]. After the excavations of 1953 it was decided, in conjunction with the Service des Monuments historiques, to undertake a complete and systematic study of the whole site with a view to its restoration. We planned to engage workmen to clear and restore the foundations of the two temples already known, to re-establish the line of the old terraces around the sanctuary, and to organize the river Seine itself, which, in the first few hundred yards of its existence, had become wayward in the extreme.

When prehistoric cultural developments in the Old and New World are compared, one difference is outstanding. The American Indian domesticated an inordinately large number of plants. This is even more remarkable when one considers that the prehistoric population of the Americas was very much less than that of the Old World and, also, that the development of American civilization began very much later.

During the last 25 years, archaeological investigations in the New World have revealed considerable information about prehistoric plant domestication and agriculture. Although this data is far from complete, it is now possible to establish some hypotheses, not only about the origin and spread of several American domesticates, but also about the effect of plant domestication, and later agriculture, upon cultural development and process in the New World.

Culture includes not only the material products of a human society, but also its non-productive acts and practices. Yet it is these of which we can know so little in regard to prehistoric peoples. However, there is one class of natural objects which, although as a general rule having no obvious practical value, have been noticed, picked up and evidently regarded with some interest since the earliest times: fossils. Certain types of fossil have attracted more attention than others, probably because they are both fairly common and of striking appearance. It occurred to me that it would be worth while attempting to gauge what kinds of ideas may have been associated with such fossils in the various stages of culture.

Old Burrow and Martinhoe are situated on the rocky North Devon coast, 1100 and 800 ft. high respectively above the seas of the Bristol Channel (PL. LIIa) , on either side of the small seaside town of Lynmouth. Both sites command an extensive view of the South Wales coast, 17 to 20 miles away (FIG. 4), but owing to an intervening hill, the Foreland, they are not intervisible. Inland the outlook is limited to the northern slopes of Exmoor, which rises to 1600 ft. some 6 to 7 miles away. The coastal tract in which they are situated was sparsely inhabited by friendly Iron Age peoples, the Dumnonii, living in small hillforts and isolated from the main body of the tribe in South Devon and Cornwall.

The Roman earthworks are practically identical (FIGS. I and 3); they consist of an inner rectilinear enclosure, 90 ft. square defended by a rampart and two ditches, set within a rounded outer enclosure, some 300 ft. in diameter and with a single rampart and ditch. At Martinhoe the outer enclosure ends on the cliffs, which form its northern side.

The entrance to the inner fartlet in both cases is on the seaward side; to the outer on the opposite landward side, so that all comers would be obliged to make a half-circuit between the two lines of defences under fire. In effect the device resembles that at the Claudian fort at Hod Hill in Dorset, where the defences were also designed to trap attackers within the range of missiles—spears or ballista bolts.

Fishbourne lieswithin the present-day boundaries of the City of Chichester, about one mile west of the City Cross. The village, situated at the head of the now-silted Chichester harbour, has long been recognized to lie above a Roman site, for finds of Roman material are plentiful. In 1805 a black-and-white mosaic, 13½ ft. wide, was discovered during road widening, by 1869 the remains of a bath and pavement had come to light nearby, and the local inhabitants say that in 1936 children digging in a garden uncovered a further black-and-white mosaic. These discoveries are now thought to belong to one large masonry building, but other finds scattered widely about the village suggest that Roman occupation covered an extensive area around the harbour end of the site.

Spectacular discoveries in Marnian in Marnian graves, an ambiguous reference by Caesar, and the attentions of modern scholars such as Fox and Piggott have led to a great deal of interest and speculation about the Celtic chariot. The discovery of a number of chariot fittings at Llyn Cerrig Bach prompted Sir Cyril Fox to attempt a reconstruction, and the result has been generally accepted as a fairly accurate representation [I]. The material used for the Llyn Cerrig model was drawn from all over Europe, and much of it came from socalled ‘chariot-burials’. But whether or not the vehicle buried in La Thne graves was identical with the war-chariot has never been seriously questioned and is worth considering.

In Champagne and Western Germany, where the two-wheeled vehicle is found in La Tène graves together with weapons, there are two possible interpretations of its purpose. On the one hand it could be associated with the weapons, and regarded as the dead warrior's chariot; on the other, it might be linked rather with death and the corpse, thus being either a hearse or a vehicle from a funeral procession. In Yorkshire this choice is less open. Weapons are never found in the same grave as the wheels and other fittings, and it would be more reasonable to identify the vehicle with a funerary cart.

In June 1964 some prehistoric rock-engravings of great interest and skilful execution were discovered in the Cyrenaican Gebel. They are the first works of rock-cut art of early prehistoric style found in this region after more than 30 years of research and survey carried out by Italian and English scholars in the field of prehistoric archaeology. In 1959 I had the opportunity of visiting several caves and shelters on the very steep rock walls of the widiàn notching the Gebel, and on the two big escarpments of this plateau facing north towards the Mediterranean. In none of the cavities thus explored have I found prehistoric art, except in a single case—of no absolute certainty—consisting of some line-engravings.

In the spring of 1964 I was informed of the existence of some rock-drawings of animals in a cave not far from Cyrene, and some weeks later I went to this site. No doubts about the authenticity of these engravings can be entertained, since, as we shall see, some of them are partially covered with stalactitic concretions.

Some years ago, in a short review of some of the major questions concerning agricultural efficiency in Roman times, I pointed out that we do not possess the materials on which to base an accurate computation. In attempting to make an assessment of agricultural efficiency we should require as a minimum basis a body of statistical information on the following points: first, the numbers of persons engaged; second, average yields per acre of certain crops for comparison with average yields in other producing countries; and third, statistics of output measured in man-hours according to recognized methods of determining the productivity of labour. The type of dficulty mentioned here is not confined to research in ancient agriculture; lack of records, and paucity of precise information, make investigation difficult in almost every department of ancient economic history. But lack of precise information has not deterred historians from making rough analyses and generalizations. The evidence on wheat-yields showed, inter alia, that it is not legitimate to use Columella’s general average return on Italian wheat of four-fold as evidence of a generally low standard of productivity in cereals (De Re Rust., III, iii, 4). So far as crop-yields are concerned, the common postulate of a low level of agricultural technique cannot be upheld.

In prehistoric times the Western Isles and the and the west coast of Scotland north of the Firth of Clyde seem to have formed a geographical and cultural unit quite distinct from the central and southern mainland but closely connected with the far north, with the counties of Sutherland and Caithness and the Orkney and Shetland Isles. Together all these territories form a highland and island zone which has recently been designated as one of the four main natural regions of Iron Age cultures in Scotland and called the Atlantic Province [I]. The distinctiveness of the cultures which occupied this maritime province not only in the Iron Age but at all periods emphasizes the effectiveness of the mountain barriers which hinder contact with the south and central mainland and also, by contrast, the relative ease with which it was colonized by sea. The spread of Neolithic chambered tombs in the 3rd millennium B.C. and the Norse settlements of the 9th century A.D. onwards show how seaborne migrants from distant regions could quickly occupy the province, and a similar series of immigrations seems to have taken place in the Iron Age.

Wales and its March is a land of fortifications, Celtic, Roman and medieval; and an analysis of any one of these classes in microcosm may also be of value for wider studies. Certainly the student of hillforts has just been presented with an invaluable corpus of material in the completed trilogy of Royal Commission Inventories for Caernarvonshire. As it happens, though the Caernarvonshire forts are deficient in significant finds, they are particularly valuable for settlement studies because house-foundations or emplacements are often still visible within the defences. The implications of this immediately accessible evidence have already been partly explored in a seminal article by the Secretary of the Welsh Commission (Hogg, 1960), but further discussion is both possible and desirable. Moreover, the archaeological evidence for Iron Age settlements makes it possible to discuss and correct the attempts of social historians to probe behind medieval documents to the social arrangements of earlier eras (e.g. Jones, 1964). There is at present a considerable ferment of ideas about the nature of hillforts as settlements and about their place in early Welsh society, which may also be of general interest to students of Celtic archaeology and institutions.