Every prehistorian has heard of the famous volcanic rock of the Eifel from which querns were made in prehistoric and later times. The source from which the querns came has several names, and we read of Andernach, Niedermendig and Mayen lava. Actually, Andernach is merely the Rhineland town nearest to the quarries; there is no lava there. Niedermendig has lava quarries, but they did not begin to be worked until the Middle Ages, and then the output was only about one third of that of Mayen. Since however the output of Mayen passed through Niedermendig on its way to the Rhine, the latter name got attached, and we in Britain usually write of ‘Niedermendig lava’. But all prehistoric and Roman querns came, not from there but from the Mayen quarries, which are still being worked. During a visit to Germany in July 1953, I was conducted round them by Dr J. Röder of Koblenz. The following account, though made possible by that visit, is not an original composition but is derived from an authoritative article by Dr Röder and others, which has kindly been abstracted for me in English by Mr J. D. van der Waals of Amsterdam. I wish also to thank Dr Röder for the loan of illustrations, especially the blocks for FIGS, 1 and 3.

At the end of the last century, when I was a student at the seminary of S. Sulpice in Paris, and was studying the Bronze Age in the Somme basin, a Monsieur Boulanger, a notary of Peronne, who was then unknown to me, sent me some books unasked, and also a nice water-colour drawing (by Pilloy) of a palstave found in that region. Then later on I received a curious letter from his chief excavator of the Merovingian graves near S. Quentin. It was addressed to ‘M. l'Abbé Breuil, Superior of the S. Sulpice Seminary’ (where of course I was merely a pupil) and asking me, as being supposed to have correspondents in Rome who were members of the fraternity of S. Sulpice, to put him in touch with them so that he might buy, at a good price, a fish of Roman glass of the Christian period like one of which he had sent me a photographic print with no provenance given. This seemed to me to be suspect.

Of all the early prehistoric monuments of Britain the Dorset Cursus is both the largest and at the same time one of the least known. Its claim to pre-eminence in terms of mere size is sufficiently established by the facts that it is six miles in length, contains an area of two hundred and twenty acres, and in its original state comprised a volume of earthwork amounting to some six-and-a-half million cubic feet. The significance of these figures may better be appreciated by a comparison with Avebury, which had originally an earthwork volume of about three-and-a-half million cubic feet, or with the Stonehenge Cursus, which is a little less than one-and-three-quarter miles in length, and encloses only seventy acres.

The purpose of this paper is to give a brief survey of the Needfire ceremony and its variants as they occurred in various parts of Scotland. As the introductory example we take the case of a Morayshire farmer. ‘In the year 1850 a murrain decimated the herd of a farmer in the parish of Dallas. He proceeded at once with all ceremony to kindle the needfire. Then digging a pit in the ground he sacrificed an ox’ (1). This is fairly representative of the practice which was common all over Scotland. From time immemorial fires of different kinds have been kindled on certain days of the year. But besides these regularly recurring celebrations farmers resorted to fire rituals in seasons of distress above all when their cattle were attacked by epidemic disease, or, to ward off the devils of witchcraft. The general name by which they are known is needfire, Gaelic teine-éiginn, ‘churned’ or ‘forced fire’. It was by needfire that fire was originally produced at all fire festivals. Of the primitive ways of kindling fire the commonest was by the friction of wood, and two methods of producing friction in this way was clearly distinguished, the fire-drill and stick and groove or fire-plough. In its simplest form the fire-drill consists of two sticks, one of which is pointed and held upright with its point pressing on the other, which was laid flat on the ground; the upright stick, or drill proper, is twirled rapidly between the palms of the hands till the point bores a hole in the other stick and the continued friction generates first heat and then fire which is nursed into a flame by dry leaves or other suitable tinder. In the fire-plough a pointed stick is rubbed vigorously along a groove or depression in a piece of wood laid flat on the ground.

Professor Conrad Engelhardt, who was himself responsible for the excavation of the four great finds of Thorsbjærg, Vimose, Nydam and Kragehul, gave us in his Denmark in the Early Iron Age (illustrated by recent discoveries in the Peat Mosses of Slesvig) our first comprehensive picture of Danish archaeology in the centuries immediately before and after the birth of Christ. His book was published in English in London in 1866 and the engravings of the Nydam boat and the Thorsbjærg woollen trousers have been commonplaces of archaeological teaching ever since. Engelhardt lived and worked in stirring times—his excavations at Nydam had to be discontinued ‘when the two Allied German Powers, in the heart of the winter of 1864, assailed Denmark and conquered South Jutland’; and he was writing only thirty years from the time when C. J. Thomsen had formally proposed that the antiquities of the Danish prehistoric period should be divided into three distinct ages of Stone, Bronze and Iron. Engelhardt adopted Worsaae's classification of the Danish Iron Age into three periods, the Early Iron Age which he dated from 250 B.C. to A.D. 450, a transition period extending to the close of the 7th century, and the Late Iron Age terminating with the introduction of Christianity in the year 1000. He discussed whether the changes implicit in the Early Iron Age were the result of pacific intercourse or commercial relations with nations of higher civilization, rejects these, and says ‘the higher state of civilization was the result of an invasion, for in no other way can the sudden appearance of damascened weapons, of materials hitherto unknown, of horses, arts and letters, be satisfactorily explained’.

Now that more than a year has elapsed since the publication of Dr Michael Ventris’ brilliant discovery that the Mycenaean tablets inscribed in Linear B contained Greek, a preliminary answer may be given to the question of their bearing on the interpretation of Homer. My purpose here is to indicate where our 8th century Iliad and Odyssey agree with the tablets and where they differ.

When we look back over the past century of archaeological discovery, about a dozen ancient cities loom large in the mind's eye, a gigantic sequence of silhouettes which in turn inform us of their distinctive civilizations. Mycenae, Troy, Boghaz Koi, and now Mohenjo Daro and Harappa are signal examples of cities at which the brave work of the early pioneers was followed by the activities of another generation. These later workers, with an evolved and perfected technique, probed anew and established a more solid and elaborate edifice of knowledge on foundations which their gallant predecessors had often left insecure. If scientific work continues to keep pace with public interest we should be about to enter on another phase. Then the consolidated work of the second generation which has left so many tempting points of attack for a third, will be illuminated by new discoveries no less rewarding. Indeed what lies under land and water is still an immense treasure, for the recovery of which we are now better equipped than ever.

Probably every one of the hundred or so delegates who attended the Third Pan-African Congress on Prehistory would agree that it would be hard to imagine a more successful meeting. The organization was perfect, the papers read were mostly of an exceptionally high standard, and throughout the congress and excursions an atmosphere of good humour prevailed. We have returned rather bewildered from the number of sites visited and the amount of new knowledge gained, but with the satisfactory feeling that African prehistory has made enormous strides since we last met in Algiers in 1952.

Readers of Sir Mortimer Wheeler's archaeological publications are already aware of the high standard of photography demanded in his excavations. Now Mr M. B. Cookson, who has worked with him for many years, speaks in his own right and reveals in some measure how these standards are achieved.

Mr Cookson's book is addressed primarily to the archaeologist who is about to turn (at least temporarily) photographer. Nevertheless, much of what he has to say may be read with equal profit by the professional photographer who is leaving his well-equipped studio for a season on a remote excavation or by the professional archaeologist who has no photographic intentions.

This magnificent and monumental volume must be ranked amongst the trophies which Iran seems to engender for the bibliophile. That is chiefly due to the sumptuous and extensive architecture and sculpture to which justice can only be done by lavish illustration and panorama. Many of the half-tone plates are triumphs of photography which by skilful use of chiaroscuro bring into bold relief the mastery of the ancient stone-cutter over his material, his sense of space and proportion, his unending battle with the rock. Occasionally there is a photograph which has been better done in Arthur Upham Pope's Survey of Persian Art, notably for example the extraordinary quasi-Egyptian figure with the triple crown at Pasargadae, symbol perhaps of Cyrus's triumph over Syria; but en masse the views are glorious, be they reliefs, buildings or photographs taken from the air. It should be added that the anonymous architectural line drawings are also worthy of the book's distinguished format.

The archaeological background of the people of what is now Scotland south of the Forth and Clyde in the Roman period was a La Téne one, and specifically chiefly Iron Age B. This links them intimately with the Britons of southern Britain in the conglomeration of Celtic tribes who called themselves Brittones and spoke what we call the Brittonic or Ancient British form of Celtic, from which are descended the three modern languages of Welsh, Cornish and Breton. To the north of the Forth was a different people, the Picts. They too were Celts or partly Celts; probably not Brittones however, but a different branch of the Celtic race, though more closely related to the Brittones than to the Goidels of Ireland and (in later times) of the west of Scotland. Not being Brittonic, the Picts may be ignored here. Our southern Scottish Brittones are nothing but the northern portion of a common Brittonic population, from the southern portion of which come the people of Wales and Cornwall. Some historians speak of the northern Brittones as Welsh, following good Anglo-Saxon precedent, but this is apt to lead to confusion. The best term for them, in the Dark Ages and early Medieval period, as long as they survived, is ‘Cumbrians’, and for their language, ‘Cumbric’. They called themselves in Latin Cumbri and Cumbrenses, which is a Latinization of the native word Cymry, meaning ‘fellow-countrymen’, which both they and the Welsh used of themselves in common, and is still the Welsh name for the Welsh to the present day. The centre of their power was Strathclyde, the Clyde valley, with their capital at Dumbarton.

To investigate any topic properly, we should exploit all the evidence bearing upon it. The study, therefore, of any period of antiquity documented both by artifacts and texts, requires the synthesis of archaeology and philology. He who would control any period of history, must master its written as well as its archaeological sources.

The growth of knowledge, and the development of new techniques, evoke more and more specialization. This has happened particularly in the study of man as a result of the masses of data that keep pouring in, during an age of discovery through exploration and excavation.

This book is a proof of the persistence of scientific catchwords which continue to be used from sheer ignorance or mental indolence, although they have been exposed by research. For how long, for instance, have philologists and archaeologists been writing about Westgermanen and Ostgermanen, though people thus named never existed ? And how often do abstract terms or conceptions such as ‘people’, ‘tribe’, ‘linguistic group’ become confused with each other or projected back into periods where they do not belong ? Maurer's merit is to have clarified these problems of Germanic philology. He tells us the history of the subject as well as the relevant facts, and above all the interaction between linguistics and archaeology. His book is less a description of the interrelations between Nordgermanen and Alemanni than a history of the Germanic groups and tribes at the time of Tacitus.

These two articles which deal respectively with the chronological basis of Patagonian prehistory and with its rock pictures, are by the well-known prehistorian who today is Professor of Prehistory in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature in the University of Buenos Aires. They set out a scheme of outstanding importance for the prehistory of Patagonia which strengthens our opinion, already backed by evidence from all over America, of the great antiquity of Man in the New World.

It is inevitable that, when a European archaeologist has transferred his activities to the New World, he should see everything with European eyes, and look for parallels with the cultures he knew in the Old World. Thus it is natural that, in the few years which Professor Menghin has spent in Argentina, his untiring energy should have produced finds and theories of undoubted interest. These are summarized in a table in the first article, which boldly attempts to correlate the cultures of Patagonia with those of the Upper Palaeolithic and later periods in Europe.

In November 1954 the French Prehistoric Society celebrated its fiftieth jubilee with a séance solennelle extraordinaire in the cinema of the Musée de L'Homme in Paris. The séance was presided over by the Abbé Breuil, doyen of French if not of all European prehistorians, and attended by most French prehistoric archaeologists of importance. Guy Gaudron, the Secretary General of the Society, gave a brief history of the society's inception and development; the Abbé Breuil spoke on ‘La Perspective préhistorique et ses progrés’; messages of congratulation were sent to the Ćount Henri Begouen, who, with Gaudron, were made Honorary Presidents; messages were read from prehistorians and prehistoric organizations in other countries, and a small group of foreign representatives spoke in person—Sauter from Geneva, Kühn from Mainz, Frank Mitchell from Dublin, and Lacaille and myself from Great Britain.