Since the great International Conference held at Florence in 1928, when so many of the wider problems of Etruscan archaeology were discussed, there has been a general tendency, especially marked among the younger writers, to concentrate upon intensive studies of detail. The seven volumes of the admirable Studi Etruschi and, in a less degree, the annual publications of the foreign Schools and the Italian Academy are full of excellent monographs upon such matters as the sculpture, painting or pottery of a given period or place, or upon any other minor department of the whole far-reaching subject. These are of real value as contributing to build up the entire fabric, but they are naturally too specialized to have any appeal for the general archaeologist.

In a stimulating lecture recently published in ANTIQUITY (1933, VII, 410–18) Gordon Childe raises the question : is Prehistory practical ? He suggests that the disastrous social consequences of applying ethnological hypotheses based on flimsy foundations of fact are sufficient justification for insisting on the scientific study of prehistory and archaeology as an essential part of the intellectual equipment of a civilized person in our generation. Current events certainly sustain the justice of his plea. Still it may be argued that there is an even stronger reason, and one which is perhaps more durable, for asserting the claims of such studies to occupy a pivotal position in twentieth - century culture. The publication of Neugebauer‘s Vorlesungen ueber Geschichte der antiken mathematischen Wissenschaften is a timely reminder of the contribution which students of prehistory and archaeology working together can make to the solution of one of the great intellectual issues of our own time.

Archaeology in the Arctic has a charm of its own. The surroundings are unusual : the scenery is magnificent, with high, snow-clad mountains and deep fiords ; the sea is filled with icebergs or drift ice—the sun shines day and night ; seals, whales caribou, bears, sea fowl and fish are abundant; and the peo le are the small dark-haired, brown-skinned, broad-faced Eskimos, the kindest and most helpful people in the whole world.

It does not seem to have been contested, and therefore one may assume that it is generally agreed, that the discovery of the remains of a sickle in an ancient deposit is evidence that its owner knew how to grow corn. The forms that sickles took prior to the use of metal have been ably classified by M. Vayson de Pradenne in an article which was reviewed and summarized in ANTIQUITY in June 1930, and as a result of his work the characteristics of the flint flakes and of their method of hafting as sickles has come to be widely known and easily recognized.

There is little room for doubt that the remains of ancient roads or causeways still to be seen in Yucatan are, so far as the history of the peninsula is concerned, of considerable antiquity. Two of the earliest and most important historians of Yucatan, namely, Diego de Landa and Bernardo de Lizana, mention them, and brief notices of their existence have been made by explorers in the nineteenth century. It seems highly probable that as early as a thousand years ago a broad highway extended a considerable distance across the northern part of the peninsula of Yucatan, if indeed it did not reach from the eastern to the western shores of the country.

There was certainly room for a well illustrated work, providing at once a conspectus and a review of early Maltese archaeology. Only an unusual library can supply simultaneously to the reader the Papers of the British School at Rome, three or four volumes of Archaeologia, the official reports on the excavations, Ebert’s Reallexikon, and Zammit’s Prehistoric Malta, to mention only the indispensable minimum. Even with all these the student has not enough pictorial material to enable him to visualize the whole subject.

When one speaks of tradition, that is to say, of the transmission of human knowledge from one generation to another, one implies that there are two methods by which that transmission is effected—the spoken and the written word; thus one draws a distinction between oral and written tradition.

Nowadays written tradition alone is of importance; but one recognizes that it has gradually replaced that oral tradition which alone existed, as one supposes, in prehistoric times. We wish here to call attention to yet another mode of transmission which certainly played a part, perhaps even an important part, in the Stone Ages, and disregard of which might in certain instances seriously confuse the study of prehistoric archaeology.

The Iraqi Government is proposing to supersede the Antiquities Law drawn up eleven years ago, and approved by the League of Nations, by one which will admittedly be far more onerous to the foreign excavator working in Iraq. As a prelude to the introduction of the bill before the Iraqi Parliament there has been a regular campaign of propaganda intended to show that under the existing law Iraq has been robbed, by concessions made to foreign missions, of the treasures which were legally and morally hers, and that Iraq never has had fair treatment and will not have it so long as the division of the objects from excavations is conducted by a foreign Director of Antiquities. To what lengths this campaign has been carried may be illustrated by the following: in March 1934 Abdal Rizaq Effendi, the Curator of the Baghdad Museum, personally repeated to me the statement, published in the local press, that the normal share accruing to the Baghdad Museum from the division of antiquities with a foreign mission, as conducted by the Director, was no more than one half of one per cent. of the objects catalogued.