It is a curious reflection that although palaeolithic art has been known and recognized as such for over a century, and despite the fact that during this time an enormous volume of literature has accumulated on the subject, yet the publications consist almost exclusively of articles dealing with limited aspects. These comprise descriptions of individual finds, or particular sites, but there are virtually no works on any scale to present the art as a whole in its so-called ‘mobiliary’ manifestations (that is to say, the decoration of loose and individual objects), together with the decorations found on the walls of caves. There have of course been many contributions of significance to certain general issues, such as chronology and correlation with the cultural succession; among the most important early works on the mobiliary art for instance is Piette’s L’art pendant l’âge du renne of 1906. Again, in his magnificent pioneering studies on the sites of Altamira, Font de Gaume, and Les Combarelles, the Abbé Breuil devoted a number of chapters to general discussion of fundamental importance; many of these deal with all sides of the evidence in connexion with different problems, such as representation of different types of animals. But in no case has the archaeological public been rewarded with a full-scale work on the art as a whole by the greatest living authority. Although in his introduction the author of the work under review disclaims any intention to provide either a treatise or a complete corpus of the artistic achievements of the Palaeolithic, and describes his work rather as a ‘panoramic view of that prodigious phenomenon which is the birth and development of the most ancient art in the history of man‘, yet he has in fact gone some considerable way to fill this important gap.

The early farming culture of Southern Turkmenistan, widely known since the work of R. Pumpelly at Anau, has been systematically studied during the last decade by Soviet archaeologists. Excavation of the major settlement of this culture, Namazga Tepe, has made it possible to propose a new stratigraphy (Namazga periods I-VI). The Namazga III period fills the gap between Anau II and Anau III, and has its closest analogies on Iranian sites such as Sialk III, 4-7, and Hissar IB to IIA; it is now possible to revise the synchronization of sites in Turkmenia and Iran proposed by McCown. (See table on p. 212).

It is a commonplace of current archaeology that the publication of radiocarbon dates is revolutionizing our ideas of the past. Dr G. H. S. Bushnell, Curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in the University of Cambridge, England, has already published in ANTIQUITY and elsewhere some of his views on the impact of radiocarbon dating on New World chronology. Here he studies the whole problem in detail. He adopts the useful convention of referring to a date already fully published in the Radiocarbon Supplement to the American Journal of Science simply by its laboratory designation and number {thus K-554 is reading no. 554 of the Copenhagen Laboratory), but in some cases, where the date is not fully published, he gives fuller information.

Evidence has for long been accumulating to show that the shores of the Thames estuary now lie at least 15 ft. lower in relation to the sea than in early Romano-British times (summarized, e.g. Wheeler, 1928; Francis, 1932). Francis has suggested that this submergence began early in the 2nd century A.D., its effects being widely felt by the end of the century. Similar evidence has been noted both from the east and south coasts of England though, in the East Anglian ‘Great Estuary’ (Yare-Bure-Waveney) behind Yarmouth, it had formerly been assessed as about 2 ft. only.

Most writers, however, have been content to assume without confirmatory evidence that these changes took place in a simple progression, so that a graph of them from Roman times to the present day might be represented by a roughly straight line. Godwin, indeed, had sounded a warning note in his analysis of the Fenland deposits at Wiggenhall St German (Godwin and Edmunds, 1933; Godwin, 1940), Jennings had pointed to a ‘standstill’ or slight regression after the Romano-British transgression of the Broadland valleys (1952, 50) and a short note by Swinnerton (1955) discussing pottery found below marine clays at Chapel St Leonards, Lincs, came to confirm them. But now substantial evidence from the Yarmouth district has been adduced to show that, after the Iron Age—Romano-British marine transgression, represented by the Broadland ‘Upper Clay’, land emergence took place during the Saxon period to culminate about the time of the Norman Conquest or soon after, the ‘Saxo-Norman Marine Regression’ as it has been named (Green and Hutchinson, 1960). Under the South Denes at Yarmouth, a beach with its low water mark now at - 17.5 ft. O.D. has been dated by pottery finds to the 13th century, with a silt covering-layer also containing pottery, inferred to have been deposited by the great flood of A.D. 1287. Supported by a variety of other evidence, they have shown that, at that date, the coast here still stood some 13 ft. higher in relation to the sea than it does today. Thereafter a rapid submergence began which, by Tudor-Stuart times, was much retarded and which today has been reduced to the very low rate of some 1.6 mm. per annum.

J J. A. Worsaae’s recorded words during his travels in the British Isles in 1846-7 indicate that he neither underestimated the significance of his visit, nor lacked confidence in the tenability of the ideas he expressed. His previous journeys in Norway, Sweden and Germany were a useful preparatory experience. Notwithstanding his youth and his high spirits, Worsaae must have appreciated his influential position as the exponent in Britain of ‘an entirely new enquiry into the history of the earliest state of the European nations, by means of the antiquities alone’. The discovery of ‘a stone period, in the history of Europe’ was, he declared, the first achievement and the vindication of the method.

At the request of the Cambridge Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science, Professor Atkinson, now Professor of Archaeology in University College, Cardiff, gave a public lecture on Neolithic Engineering, and subsequently agreed to allow its publication in ANTIQUITY. This article is a condensation of his lecture, given in 1958, with subsequent additions.

Mr J. C. MANN holds that ‘each civitas of Gaul (and of Britain) was presumably a city, and like all true cities, each will have consisted of a single physical city surrounded by its territorium, the whole under the control of its magistrates, council and assembly, the last no doubt usually of little importance.’ I, on the other hand, following Jullian and Stevens, have suggested that the civitas was the whole tribal area, its capital (caput) normally ranking merely as a vicus where the government happened to have its seat. This, Mr Mann suggests, is a myth, which he doubts whether a Roman lawyer would understand.

The evidence admittedly is not all that it might be; yet as the question is important for a correct understanding of the development of local government in Roman Britain (and elsewhere), I may venture to take it up once more, especially as Mr Mann’s note appears to me to be erroneous in one or two particulars, and to exhibit the triple weaknesses of a too narrowly legalistic outlook, an inadequate account of historical development, and a neglect of some of the relevant facts.

This new sword comes from the collection of Mr Evangelos Loizou of Famagusta, and has been brought to my attention by my former colleague Dr Vassos Karageorghis of the Cyprus Museum. The sword (PLATE XVI (a)) was given to Mr Loizou’s father by a villager of Enkomi some years ago, and almost certainly comes from the famous Late Bronze Age city and cemetery site a few hundred metres west of the village. It could well have come from a grave. The sword lacks the extreme tip; one edge is chipped. Apart from superficial corrosion it is in excellent condition.

The preserved length is 0.47 m.; the handguard is 0.05 m. wide, and the length of the hilt, 0.10 m. The greatest width of blade (below handguard) is 0.035 m. The rivets diminish in length from pommel to handguard in the range 0.023–0.018 m. There are two rivets in the handgrip and six in the handguard. The pommel ears are prominent, but there is no spur. The hiltplates were made of some perishable material, but, as often, their outline can be restored from the ‘shadow‘ left by the corrosion pattern on the handguard. The junction of blade and handguard is more angular than on any other Mediterranean example known to me; also unusual is the even taper of the blade from handguard to tip in place of edges normally either parallel, or even slightly swelling.

The wildness and desolation of moorland, even when seen on a fine summer’s day, can give an overpowering impression of land untamed by man, land in which man is the interloper and not the master. The word primaeval usually comes to mind and, indeed, even modern geography books sometimes describe these areas as the last strongholds of wild nature. It is recognized, of course, that man burns the moor at intervals to facilitate turf-cutting or to provide better conditions for his animals whether sheep or grouse, but as this practice has been going on from time immemorial and the moorland still looks the same, it is tacitly assumed that it has always been the same.

How far from the truth this assumption can be has recently been shown by an investigation into some archaeological sites on the watershed of the Cleveland Hills. Such sites contain organic remains, particularly pollen and charcoal, which reflect the contemporary ecological conditions. The conclusions reached here do not necessarily apply to all moorland areas, of course; the Cleveland Hills receive less rain than moorlands further west, so their early history may have been different. Today this relative dryness is reflected in the predominance of heather (Calluna) rather than the plants of blanket bog. Nevertheless, these North Yorkshire Moors today have as strong an atmosphere of wilderness as anywhere in the North of England. To anyone who knows them the old name of Blackamore graphically expresses their present character.

The scientific study of rural settlement in Britain was initiated in 1883 when Seebohm published The English Village Community. In this study he argued for a continuity between the Roman villa and the Anglo-Saxon vi1lage. In 1897, however, Maitland published his Domesday Book and Beyond by way of rejoinder to Seebohm’s views. Thereafter it became customary for historians, geographers and archaeologists alike to regard the nucleated settlements of the English lowlands as Anglo-Saxon creations, implanted by groups of free English settlers in a countryside emptied, by force or fear, of its Romano-British occupants. Of late this hypothesis, which lays so much stress on Germanic as distinct from earlier achievements, has come under criticism from several quarters. Archaeologists are increasingly conscious of the survival into the Dark Ages of a British tradition in ornamentation even in England. As a philologist, Jackson has adduced sufficient linguistic evidence to undermine, even for eastern Britain, the old theory of the nearcomplete extermination of the Celts and has argued for a bilingual phase when English settlement was being effected. On a narrow front in the Cotswolds the historian, Finberg, has cogently portrayed various facets of continuity between the Roman villa and the adjoining village at Withington. On a broader front, Aston has demonstrated the limitations of Maitland’s thesis on the origin of the manor; he suggests that the primary Anglo-Saxon penetration of England was carried out not by freemen, each owning one hide of land, but under lordly direction and was therefore organized by large estates. The vacuum created by this sapping of the traditional view of Anglo-Saxon settlement has not been filled by the adoption of a convincing alternative hypothesis. This absence of an alternative is largely due to fundamental misconceptions about the organization of that Celtic society which occupied England before the advent of either Romans or Saxons. The purpose of this article is to remove these misconceptions and, by so doing, to show that the basic patterns of settlement distribution in the English lowlands date from at least Celtic times.

Professor Bernabò Brea, in his review of Professor J. D. Evans's Malta (ANTIQUITY, 1960, 132), did not dispute the sequence of cultures there described, but he questioned the interpretation of this sequence in three important particulars, namely, the continuity between the first (Għar Dalam) and later phases of Evans's sequence, the absolute chronology of the Neolithic period, and thirdly the role which Malta played in the prehistory of the Central and West Mediterranean. These three criticisms were met by Evans (ANTIQUITY, 1960, 218) and now Dr D. H. Trump, Curator of Archaeology in the Malta Museum, discusses all these problems in relation to his recent excavations at Skorba.

The Antipodean archaeologist has more than passing interest in the opinions expressed in ANTIQUITY concerning the reliability of radio-carbon 14 age estimations. To him, objective prehistory seems unattainable without the combination of stratigraphy and radio-carbon. Other geochronological schemes remain to be devised and tested in Australia, while the material simplicity of aboriginal culture deprives the prehistorian of many customary ancillary aids, such as coinage, pottery or sophisticated typology. Even the ubiquitous faience bead has proved elusive. In the Polynesian world there is dispute concerning the value of genealogies and traditions, but even the most ardent critic must grant that they contain more apparent historicity and chronology than Australian concepts of ‘the dream time’. In this generation, therefore, carbon 14 is likely to provide the basic clues for the interpretation of the past. This brief article is intended to record a series of dates which, it would seem, neither physicist nor archaeologist can impugn.

Despite the pressing need for a carbon 14 chronology, few age estimations are available for aboriginal cultural material. However, some of them are subject to the qualifications stressed by previous contributors to this journal. The sites have been dated by estimations on single samples, collected under circumstances where controlled, stratified excavation was not possible. The artifacts and the source of the samples were first exposed by natural erosion. Unfortunately, in some instances, the artifacts are such generalized types that they are of doubtful utility for cultural analysis. In the writer’s opinion, the three oldest Australian stone assemblages, and the only Tasmanian midden deposit dated so far, all suffer from one or other of these limitations, and they are relevant to any assessment made of the evidence. The relevant sites and antiquity are as follows. (Dates B.C.)

At a classic meeting of the Prehistoric Society, held during April 1948 in the old home of the Institute of Archaeology of London University, V. G. Childe and C. F. C. Hawkes presented two papers, each complementary to the other, on the chronology of the Late Bronze Age in Europe. This joint approach was focussed on the relative and absolute dating of the Urnfields of the North Alpine foreland, whence Hawkes applied the results to the West, and pre-eminently to Britain; but, by arrangement, Childe approached the crucial area from Hither Asia by way of the Danube corridor, and from Greece through the Balkans, while Hawkes worked his way forward from the Aegean up the length of Italy, and so northwards over the Alps.

It is worth recollecting that this was the first time that British archaeologists had formally addressed themselves to this most difficult set of problems in detail, and on Central European territory. Furthermore both papers suffered, one feels, from being among the first essays in archaeological synthesis to be attempted in this country after the war, with all that is implied in that. At all events within a year of publication Childe was saying that he no longer had any confidence in his derivation of the flange-hilted bronze sword from Hither Asia; and he had also by then become less assured of some of his other Asiatic derivations. While in the course of the international discussion which followed, Hawkes felt obliged to revise a number of his dates, chiefly in the direction of a longer chronology. Nevertheless, both essays commanded a splendid range of material, and were fortified by a sufficient exposition of the history of research in this field to give a sound sense of perspective. If today they have been outmoded in many particulars by the work of a small army of scholars working in half a dozen countries, they remain for English-speaking students an indispensable starting-point, and an admirable introduction to their subject.

Ideas about the prehistoric past have for long been based upon pieces dug from the mounds and hollows which are the remains of man’s activities. Only recently has it been clearly realized that monuments are continually being modified by nature and that evidence of weathering, denudation and silting can be as informative as the artifacts sometimes found in them. A recent conference showed that there was relatively little exact knowledge of how such processes take place and, in particular, of their quantitative aspects. As has been recently emphasized archaeological excavation is a means of investigating the truth of an hypothesis by destructive analysis. It thus emerges that any study of the action and interaction of natural processes affecting a prehistoric monument must clearly involve the converse, i.e. a monument must be built and studied, in all its component parts, under controlled conditions. Today an impressive and substantial ditch and bank, cut into and heaped upon the chalk of Overton Down in Wiltshire, stands a shining witness to the execution of this principle.

The work of construction was undertaken with hand tools, but not all of these were modern picks and shovels. A part of the bank was dug and heaped with primitive tools and appliances—antler picks, shoulder-blade shovels and wicker carrying-baskets. It has long been known (from the not infrequent discovery of examples apparently discarded) that antler picks were the primary digging tools of those who dug the ditches and heaped the long and round barrows, the causewayed camps, the henges and the cursuses, but precise appreciation of the real potentialities of antler picks was slight. Greenwell and Pitt Rivers commented upon the use of such implements, while the subject was pursued in some detail by Horace Sandars in his paper On the Deer Horn Pick in the Mining Operations of the Ancients, among others. Curwen’s accounts of the Sussex flint mines further stimulated such studies as did Clark and Piggott’s classic paper. From Sandars’s, Curwen’s initial and subsequent study and from summaries of the past two decades the view emerged that the antler picks were almost invariably used as punches and levers to break up chalk. Thus, such thought as has been given to prehistoric mining and digging has been to some extent inhibited by acceptance of that notion.

Mr Don Brothwell of the Sub-Department of Anthropology in the British Museum (Natural History) here discusses whether anthropophagy in prehistoric Britain is fact or fiction.

MR S. Hood’s article on the date of the Knossos tablets (Antiquity 1961, 4) is much to be welcomed as providing a further opportunity of removing mis- conceptions. In view of the magnitude and the contentiousness of the issues it is fortunate that the question can be reduced to one of simple physical location. No scholar can date a tablet from its physical appearance. There is no such thing as an LM II tablet. This is a pottery classification. The chronology is determined by the ceramic associations. Thus we simply ask where and in conjunction with which particular pieces of pottery these inscribed lumps of clay were found. A simple pattern of enquiry is imposed, which, I hope, will be followed by future contributors to the discussion. I first identify the particular deposit by their Scripta Minoa II numbers and then quote my sources for their location.

Exactly three centuries ago last year, Johan Picardt, parson of Coevorder in Drenthe and Adviser for Land-Reclamation, wrote in a regional study worthy of comparison with his contemporary John Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica: ‘Our fore-fathers had not pen, ink, nor paper, which had they possessed would have enabled us to learn of strange things. Howsomever, they have bequeathed us signs enough if only it were that we could read them.’ Each one of the three volumes from the second of which my quotation comes clearly shows the ways in which archaeological research in the Low Countries has vindicated Picardt’s statement. Today archaeology in the Netherlands is a matter of exemplary close-knit co-operation between State institutions, universities, local societies, and the private individual, while recently Belgium has taken important steps in the systemization of pre- and protohistoric studies.

Although the Low Countries can hardly be regarded as a primary area of development, their coastal position at the north-western limit of the transcontinental routes has made them a cultural entrepôt of particular significance for the British archaeologist. In this context Professor De Laet’s book in the ‘Ancient Peoples and Places’ series is all the more welcome in that it is the first English summary of the pre-Roman archaeology of the region.

De Voorgeschiedenis der Lage Landen is a much expanded and corrected version of De Laet’s volume, with Professor Glasbergen’s collaboration giving a more balanced account of the Dutch evidence. The third book, a double volume of Antiquity and Survival, offers a lavishly illustrated symposium of one hundred centuries of the Netherlands, and although the promised English language edition is not to be, the Trustees of the Prince Bernhard Foundation and the Rijksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek are to be warmly thanked for giving their support to Honderd Eeuwen Nederland.