In the year 1849 a Trustee of the British Museum, Mr W. R. Hamilton, at that time a man of 73 noted for his great interest in archaeology, particularly that of Greece and Egypt, was giving evidence before a commission enquiring into the affairs of the Musuem. ‘Have you’, he was asked, ‘ever turned your attention to the question of extending and improving the collection of British antiquities in the British Museum as distinct from all others?’ ‘I have not’, answered Mr Hamilton.

The question of ancient artificial dwellings or huts has been the subject of lively scientific discussion recently, though notices of their discovery at various palaeolithic sites in Europe have appeared in the literature from time to time throughout the past thirty years. Most of the archaeological evidence on the subject has been collected by Soviet workers whose discoveries of traces of ancient huts (in the course of extensive excavations at several palaeolithic stations in the U.S.S.R., both in Europe and in Siberia) have extended the history of domestic architecture to the remotest times. This journal contained a detailed account of these discoveries in V. G. Childe’s article ‘Cave Men’s Buildings’ (ANTIQUITY, XXIV, 4-11). I can now report on the latest excavations at the well-known upper-palaeolithic mammoth hunters’ settlement on the Pavlov Hills near Dolni Věstonice (south Moravia, Czechoslovakia), where fresh evidence of ancient artificial human shelters has come to light during the past few years. Before doing so, I should like to point out that the identification of these hut-sites in the course of excavations is surely a sign of considerable advance in archaeology, its methods of research and principal aims. While former excavations often exploited cultural horizons with the sole object of collecting the greatest possible number of relics of ancient cultures, and particularly of rarities, recent researches have a more fundamental object: to reveal behind the mere artifact the living man and artificer himself, and thereby the conditions of his life, and the development of human society. For this reason archaeological research to-day, employing modern methods in cooperation with experts in allied sciences, endeavours first and foremost to amplify material finds by a most detailed description of the circumstances of discovery, and by a study of the inter-relation of these finds with each other and with the site. It is this that constitutes progress in archaeological science, and at the same time indicates why hut-sites were not recognized during the previous systematic excavations directed at Dolni Věstonice by Dr K. Absolon in the years 1924-38. These excavations, surely carried out in masterly fashion (for their period), are principally known through the rich collections furnished by them for the Moravian Museum at Brno, which contained many objects of considerable cultural and scientific value. The remains of huts failed however to be recognized then, although Dr Absolon expected to find evidence of dwellings of permanent construction. Dolni Věstonice is therefore chiefly known in international palaeolithic literature as the site of great accumulations of mammoth-bones, of small baked clay figurines of animals, of statuettes of women (the Vëstonice Venus, 1925), of a carved female portrait of mammoth ivory (1936), and of the oldest musical instruments.

In a number of publications W. G. Collingwood has described the north country hogbacks and he has suggested that they were replicas in stone of the dwellings prevailing at the time among the people responsible for their erection. He was primarily concerned, however, with their development and dating, based upon the ornament employed. In this paper I have concentrated rather on the hogback as a representation of an Anglo-Danish house and its bearing on the origin of cruck construction.

The hogback is a recumbent tombstone in the form of a long, low house with a roofridge slightly arched lengthwise. Its ground plan (FIG. I, D) is bomb6 in shape, affording a plan which has only rarely been revealed by excavation. From Glendarragh, The Braaid, Isle of Man, Fleure and Dunlop have described two alignments which they consider represented the side walls of a boat-shaped house (FIG. I, A). These, they contend, were built of more durable materials to provide a stronger construction whilst the gable walls, which contained the entrances, were probably built of wattle. This is supported by the evidence of the hogbacks which show low stone ground-walls at the sides only and the walls at The Braaid are probably survivals of similar ground-walls. Fleure and Dunlop compare it to the ‘banqueting hall’ of Hofstaoir, Mývatn, in northern Iceland, which is 118 feet long and has incurved stone side walls varying from 19½ feet, at the ends, to 26 feet, in the middle, apart (FIG. I, B).

British archaeological literature has often been unfavourably contrasted with that of Central and North European countries in that it lacks modern, detailed and fully illustrated books dealing with particular periods or cultural groups. Thanks to Professor Piggott, students of European prehistory now find in their hands a book on the Neolithic cultures of the British Isles which will not suffer from comparison with the best continental manuals-in fact, is all the better for the delay in its production.

The Byzantine ruins known as Tsaritsin Grad (the fortress of the Emperor) lie near Leskovats in southern Serbia, between Nish and Skoplje. The excavation of the site was begun by Professor Petkovits between 1937 and 1940. Work was resumed in 1947 as part of the plan laid down by the Archaeological Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences. The direction in that year was in the hands of Professor A. Deroko and Professor C. Radojtschits; from 1949 work has been continued by Dr Mano-Zisi. The progress up to 1950 is shown on the air photograph (PLATE I).

The earlier excavations had already led Professor Petkovits to the conclusion that the site was Justiniana Prima, the city which Procopius describes in the following words: ‘Among the Dardanians of Europe … close to the fortress which is called Bederiana, there was a hamlet named Taurisium, whence sprang the Emperor Justinian, the founder of the civilized world. He therefore built a wall of small compass about this place in the form of a square, placing a tower at each corner, and caused it to be called, as it actually is, Tetrapyrgia. And close by this place he built a very notable city, which he named Justiniana Prima—thus paying a debt of gratitude to the home that fostered him . . . In that place also he constructed an aqueduct and so caused the city to be abundantly supplied with ever-running water. And many other enterprises were carried out by the founder of this city—works of great size and worthy of especial note. For to enumerate the churches is not easy and it is impossible to tell in words of the lodgings for magistrates, the great stoas, the fine market places, the fountains, the streets, the baths and the shops. In brief, the city is both great and populous and blessed in every way—a city worthy to be the metropolis of the whole region, for it has attained to this rank. It has also been allotted to the archbishop of Illyricum as his seat, the other cities conceding this honour to it as being first in point of size’.

The main routes of commerce into Asia beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire are now well charted, thanks to many vindications of the reliability of Ptolemy, and to the archaeological work of Sir Aurel Stein in the deserts of Central Asia and North Arabia. However, little is still known about the administration of this commerce. The classical geographers give very few hints on such questions as who organized and who travelled with the caravans; where were the stages on the route, and how the goods were handed over at each stage; whether currency or barter was used; and what arrangements were made for the security of the traffic.

What follows is an attempt to collect the scanty information on these questions in classical sources, and to compare it with what is known about the organization of caravan trade in Asia in medieval and later times. Commerce along three main routes will be considered, the overland trade route from the Aegean to India, outlined by Strabo (after Arternidorus) and Isidore of Charax, the Arabian spice road, and the silk road to China.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that for not a few archaeologists the examination of skeletal remains means the measurement of the cranium with the object I of establishing ‘ race ’. Indeed there may still be some who believe (or who have been led to believe) that the physical anthropologist can with confidence diagnose the ‘ race ’ or even ‘ subrace ’ of a single skull. What is perhaps worse is the idea that race allocation represents the entire potential biological interest of skeletal material or the sole activity of the physical anthropologist. These views are happily not so prevalent as they were not long since. There is a better appreciation of the scope of physical anthropology and of its greater concern with the general biology of human communities, their genetics and ecology-an approach which is necessary if the maximum biological information bearing on the life of extinct groups is to be extracted from the refractory material offered by skeletal remains. Human bones and teeth often give some insight into the conditions of life affecting the community as well as (sometimes) an indication of the origin and affinities of the group. For the skeleton is susceptible to modification both by the action of environmental agencies and by genetic factors. It is known, for example, that identical twins reared in different environments vary more in such ‘ classical ’ measurements as head length, head breadth and cephalic index, than do twins brought up in the same environment (Newman, 1940). The effect of change of environment in altering the head and body shape of descendants of immigrants has been demonstrated also by Shapiro (1939) and Lasker (1946) much more convincingly than was done in Franz Boas’ pioneer investigation which was subsequently criticised by Morant and Samson (1926). But much more work is clearly necessary before a genetic analysis of such polygenic characters as bone size and shape becomes available and we may hope that the current interest in studies of growth and physique in the living will provide the necessary information.

I have been repeatedly asked to record a few of the more picturesque pitfalls or potential pitfalls I have encountered in my fieldwork. In attempting to do so, I have selected examples which, although they deal with entirely recent events, reflect the kind of thing that has undoubtedly gone on in one form or another from time immemorial. Where they have no direct bearing on prehistory, they have a bearing on the general background of all archaeological fieldwork. Their picturesqueness neither hides, nor does it dull, the lessons they contain; rather the opposite, for the warnings within them need to be taken into account by all who work in the field. In some, the value is psychological as much as archaeological.

There is little in prehistory that provides a greater problem than that which the Abbé Breuil calls a ‘travelling piece’—that is a piece collected on one site and deliberately transported to another. We have repeatedly found that men who lived on or near the bank of a river during the Later Stone Age gathered material for their tools in the river-bed where, as likely as not, the stones they collected were derived from an implement-bearing deposit of the Middle or even the Earlier Stone Age. In this way, Stone Age man could, and indeed often did, transport a millennia- or million-year-old artifact up from one geological horizon to another often very appreciably higher and therefore later. I have frequently found Old Palaeolithic bifaced tools, such as hand-axes, used as cores or fabricators on Upper Palaeolithic ‘living floors’; and I have traced the ‘floor’ of the handaxes to a deep-buried aggradation in the vicinity.

The Roman road from Legioliuna (Castleford) to Calcaria (Tadcaster), and its modern descendant, the Great North Road, cross the Cock Beck at Aberford, eight miles north-east of Leeds, Yorkshire (FIG. I). The crossing is defended by a triple system of southward facing banks and ditches which total some 4½ miles in length. The main bank, distinguished by the steepness of its scarp, still rises to 25 feet above the bottom of its ditch, and shows in places the stonework which originally revetted it.

Serious and sustained archaeological broadcasting began only after the end of the 1939-45 War. It was the result of the general purpose of the S Third Programme and the particular endeavour of the West Region in the persons of Frank Gillard, Head of Programmes at Bristol, and Gilbert Phelps, one of the talks producers there. There had of course been archaeological broadcasts in the pre-war years, and Sir Leonard Woolley’s best-selling Digging up the Past began as a series of talks ; but it was not until The Archaeologist was created by the West Region, and taken over, first by the Third Programme—it was actually the first series of talks to appear on that programme—and then by the Home Service, that archaeology began to have a recognised and acceptable place in sound broadcasting. There have been plenty of archaeological broadcasts outside this series, and so there should be ; but it was the existence of a regular series providing for the discussion of current discoveries, new techniques and new ideas and demanding thought on the part of producers and editors that, to my mind, really put archaeological broadcasting on the B.B.C. map.

During a visit to Achill Island in 1946 the writer made notes and drawings of certain primitive types of buildings still surviving in ruin or in use, and of which no adequate record had been made. The intrinsic interest of these, as well as their significance in the wider comparative study of peasant architecture in the British Isles, makes their publication desirable.

Achill Island is in Co. Mayo, off the west coast of Ireland, though now joined to the mainland by a bridge and road across Achill Sound. The buildings described here all lie in the neighbourhood of Dooagh and Keem, at the western end of the island. The most important series is that associated with the practice of ‘booleying’, or the transference of cattle to summer pastures, which approximates to the use of shielings in the Scottish Highlands or of the hafod in Wales. This custom, and its associated folk-lore, has been discussed in a series of articles in Irish and English which includes a study of the area under discussion, though without adequate plans or structural details of the buildings involved.

The system of Minoan chronology proposed by the late Sir Arthur Evans remained almost unchallenged for many years. The first hint that it might not be equally valid for all sites in Crete was given by the excavations of Dr Joseph Hazzidakis at Tylisos where he found three archaeological strata, the first corresponding to Evans’ Early Minoan I, II and III and Middle Minoan Ia, the second to M.M. Ib, M.M. II, M.M. III and L.M. I and the third to Late Minoan III. On the basis of this M. L. Franchet proposed a new classification consisting of Early Neolithic (representing a site examined by Franchet himself), Late Neolithic, Bronze I, II, III and IV and Iron Age. This was tacitly ignored by most scholars, partly because the author was an authority on ceramics rather than on Aegean prehistory, partly because of the cavalier fashion in which this theory had been expressed. That Franchet’s opinions were not entirely without substance, however, was demonstrated later by L. Åberg in the far more serious and detailed criticism of Evans’ chronology expounded in his Bronze-zeitliche und Fruheisenzeitliche Chronologie, where he divided Evans’ Minoan periods into Pre-Palatial (E.M. I to M.M. Ia), Early Palatial (M.M. Ib to pre-earthquake M.M. IIIb) and Late Minoan or Late Palatial (including Evans’ post-earthquake M.M. IIIb). Within these three periods Åberg considered the various stylistic subdivisions to be contemporary. Åberg’s complaint that the earlier periods were not well stratified at Knosos was replied to by Pendlebury who in his Archaeology of Crete, published in 1939, tabulated significant and unmixed deposits at Knosos of E.M. I, II and III, M.M. ra, M.M. Ib, M.M. IIa, M.M. IIb, M.M. ma and M.M. IIIb pottery. So far Evans’ chronology had been shrewdly attacked but adequately defended so far as Knosos was concerned, though Pendlebury had admitted that certain categories were luxury wares and might be absent from other parts of the island.

Last summer an archaeologist, Mr R. J. C. Atkinson, taking photographs at Stonehenge, made a most remarkable discovery. He was preparing to photograph a name carved on the inward-facing (northwest) face of Stone 53, one of the Great Horseshoe Trilithons; for this purpose he had remained there after 5 o’clock on July 10th, waiting for the sun to move round and shine on it. Looking not directly at the stone itself but at the image on the glass of his reflex camera, he suddenly saw the dark outline of what appeared to be a dagger, and beside it that of an axe. The carvings were deeply cut and the edges smoothened by the erosive action of more than thirty centuries of British weather (PLATE I). Closer inspection revealed several more axes and some other markings, all probably artificial but now too much weathered for decipherment. Two days later a ten-year-old schoolboy, David Booth, found an axe on the outer face of Stone 4, one of the stones of the Outer Circle, and subsequent search revealed ten more axes on the same face (PLATES II, VI A). Later still, while engaged in making casts of the axes already discovered, Mr R. S. Newall has found many more, bringing the total for Stone 53 up to 12 and for Stone 4 to 25, including on the latter one exceptionally large axe measuring 14 inches in length and 10½ inches across the splayed cutting edge. He has also verified three axes like the others near the bottom left-hand corner of the outer face of Stone 3 (PLATE III B).

The barren hill-tops of Malta are scored in many places by ancient ruts cut deeply into the rock. They can be seen also on the slopes and on the lower plains, but less frequently because these areas are normally under agricultural soil. They always occur in pairs from 52 to 58 inches apart and were quite clearly used by vehicles. They have been discussed in print for 300 years but no agreement has been reached on how, when or why they were made or what vehicles used them. In fact, there are as many theories as there are authors. Of these writers only Captain E. G. Fenton and Professor Sir T. Zammit appear to have done any serious field work, and none has published a map. The present writer, therefore, decided to attempt the laborious task of plotting them, making such other observations and measurements as he could. Zammit, in the paper cited, reproduced some excellent photographs from both the ground and the air, to which the reader is referred.

Time did not permit an examination of the whole island and few observations were made in the low-lying south-eastern part. A fairly intensive survey was made of the high ground as far north as the Baida Ridge, which joins the northern shores of Ghain Tuffieha Bay and St. Paul’s Bay. Two portions of the map are reproduced here. Where there are a number of parallel tracks in close proximity they are shown on the map as one on account of the necessarily small scale used. The gaps in the routes are mainly due to cultivated patches, and no attempt has been made to bridge them by conjecture.

When I wrote a short history of archaeological and other air-photography in 1928 the earliest examples quoted were those taken by Major Elsdale between 1880 and 1887 ; this information was given me by the late Colonel Sir Charles Arden-Close, himself a pioneer of the craft. Since then two earlier instances have come to light. The Science Museum, South Kensington, has exhibited an air-photograph of Boston, Mass., taken in 1877 ; but unfortunately it has no history. In a book published in 1930 there is reproduced a photograph taken above Paris from a captive balloon, taken by that photographic genius who called himself Nadar. Through the good offices of Professor Vaufrey, editor of L’AnthropoZogie, prints were obtained from the Service Photographique des Monuments Historiques, and two combined are here reproduced on PLATE III. They look towards the Arc de Triomphe, and have on the left the Avenue du Bois de Bouiogne (Avenue Foch) and on the right that of Victor Hugo : note that these splendid thoroughfares, then only a decade old, were still only half built-up (the left hand part of the photograph is defective). Photography itself was not much older, Fox Talbot’s first efforts having been made from 1842 onwards.