This lecture was written on shipboard in an untidy sea, and, if its matter and its T sentiment pitch and toss a trifle, you may properly expect me, as an archaeologist, to blame environment. I belong in fact to a generation of students who have learned to make something of a fetish of environment, even at the expense of forgetting occasionally the extent to which we are the authors of that same environment. It is not difficult to think of examples where mankind has created a desert and called it civilization; and when in the long run the desert wins, as is its habit, we once again short-circuit logic and arraign environment.

More than a decade has passed since the ship-burial at Sutton Hoo was excavated, but owing to the war serious study of the finds has been of much shorter duration. Even so, in spite of much intensive research in laboratory and study, all of first-rate quality, certain vital problems still remain unsolved. We still do not know in whose honour the cenotaph was made; though we can say ‘with complete certainty that no body, either cremated or inhumed, ever occupied the “body-space” at the west end of the burial-chamber, where everyone is agreed the primary burial should have been’. Before the king can be identified the date must be determined, and that in turn may depend to some extent upon the coins. Since I first discussed this matter, further pronouncements have been made by coin experts, but there has still been no full and frank statement of the evidence upon which the date (A.D. 650-70) has been arrived at, and it is now long overdue. As a layman who has already somewhat rashly broken a lance with the coin experts, I feel that unless we are soon given something more substantial to discuss, the case for the date 650-70 may be said to have been lost by default. Dr Gordon Ward seems to think that that has already happened. The critical article of his which is printed below assumes a knowledge of Mr Bruce-Mitford's in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology; for this reason, and because of its intrinsic importance, I have summarised it and printed it here. The summary has been submitted to Mr Bruce-Mitford and is approved by him as representing his own views correctly. Some of his arguments assume that the date of 650-70, handed out by the coin experts, must be provisionally accepted. But most of them would be just as cogent, and his main conclusion equally valid, if the date should eventually be put back about a quarter of a century and the cenotaph assigned to Redwald.

In 1903 and 1904 Giacomo Boni undertook a stratigraphic excavation to the N.W. of the fountation of Equua Domitiani in the Forum Romanum. The finds, unfortunately never published, are preserved in perfect order in the storeroom of the Forum Museum; and thanks to the generosity of Italian colleagues of whom I wish to mention in particular Professors P. Romanelli and S. Puglisi, this material was placed at my disposal for study and publication. When it turned out to be necessary to carry out a supplementary excavation, permission was readily granted me by the Italian authorities.

In Professor Garstang's two final seasons’ work at Jericho, he established the remote antiquity of the origin of the settlement on that site. He showed that beneath the long sequence of Bronze Age levels lay a considerable depth of Neolithic occupation, with beneath it again soil containing flints of the Palestinian Mesolithic period. At Jericho, therefore, there was evidence of the earliest settled occupation hitherto discovered in Palestine, and the underlying Mesolithic levels suggested that the site might provide evidence for the transition from a food-gathering to a food-producing economy.

In 1855 C. Müller published the first volume of his Geographi Graeci Minores: in the introduction to the ‘Periplus of the Erythraean Sea’ he states that he has studied six hundred writers on the question’ what was murrhine, but that it may be now regarded as certain that murrhine vases were made of fluorspar’. Since, however, the opinions which Müller discarded have been revived by writers entitled to respectful consideration, some of whom have also given reasons for rejecting the identification with fluorspar, it seems desirable to review the matter and to put on record certain new evidence.

There were found in the great ship burial two silver spoons, ten inches long, of a type well-known about the 6th century A.D. They have inscribed on them in Greek the names SAUL and PAUL (FIG. I). Although several spoons of this character are known to students, their precise use remains obscure. Since they mostly bear the names of saints it is possible that they served some special liturgical purpose, but it is equally possible that they were strictly comparable to the christening mug of later ages (see discussion by Ernst Kitzinger in ANTIQUITY for March 1940). At Sutton Hoo the spoons were closely associated with a set of silver bowls bearing a cruciform decoration and were placed close to the right side of the position which should have been occupied by the head of the deceased. R. L. S. Bruce Mitford of the British Museum (Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, Vol. XXV, 1949), writes as follows:— ‘We may accept the spoons without hesitation as a present for a convert—not a Christening gift for an infant, but as a gift intended to mark the baptism of an adult convert relinquishing his pagan state, and no doubt a royal convert’.

[It should be observed that the Milankovich Chronology, the alternation of core and flake cultures, and the association of flake-tools with Neanderthaloid types and of bifaces with Homo Supiens are all very much in question at the present time. But subject to this qualification, the figures here printed may give some sort of approximation to the length of the periods covered. EDITOR].

Our knowledge of man's ancestry and of the early phases of his own existence can only be increased by new discoveries of flint tools and fossil man in association. Such finds have been very rare because industrial excavations like gravel pits, which might yield the evidence if carefully watched by skilled observers, do in fact destroy it. The unearthing of the Swanscombe skull in 1935 shows what might happen if the ability to recognise flint forms became more widespread and it therefore seems worth while to give a popular summary of our present knowledge.

In 1931 I wrote an article maintaining the thesis that Cerdic’s ora, where in 495 Cerdic and in 514 the West Saxons landed, was to be located near Totton at the head of Southampton Water; and that he advanced westwards along an old track called the Cloven Way to Cerdic's ford, which is certainly to be put at Charford on the Salisbury Avon. I still think that the latter part of the advance must have been along the Cloven Way which led to the ford down a deep hollow way that can still be seen. But certain new discoveries have caused me to abandon the theory of a landing at Totton and to locate Cerdic’s ora on the coast between Calshot and the mouth of the Beaulieu River.

The place of the oval house in the evolutionary development of folk architecture is of particular interest. Although sporadic in occurrence it has been responsible for one of the principal present-day dwelling types, the hipped-roof. Innocent contends that the round house was the earliest and that the rectangular plan evolved through the intermediate oval stage which was produced by the joining of two circular frameworks. He further postulates that the ridge-pole was devised to connect two such frameworks.

I have already indicated elsewhere that simple rectangular plans have been employed at least from the Iron Age and it is apparent that the rectangular gable-ended structure is certainly as primitive as the circular. Some oval houses undoubtedly resulted from the union of two circular frameworks but the motive force behind this development was a desire on the part of peoples accustomed to building circular huts to emulate the rectangular type. Having seen the increased living space afforded by the rectangular plan, these peoples tried to copy it by joining two of their circular frameworks. This was not the only way in which oval houses originated.

Inyanga is a district in Southern Rhodesia whose monuments were brought to the notice of readers of ANTIQUITY a short while ago. A Fund raised by private subscription mainly from Rhodesian sources has recently sponsored excavations in this district and at the conclusion of the second season's work it seems desirable to make a preliminary report. The excavations were directed by the writer who was fortunate in having the very skilful assistance of the Colony's Inspector of Monuments, Mr K. R. Robinson. Unfortunately no amateurs were able to assist us.

In April, 1938, I had a short holiday in Schleswig, chiefly in order to see and walk along the Danewerk. During my stay there, Professor Jankuhn took me to see the province of Angeln; and on a little hill above the small town of Süderbrarup we inspected the much disturbed remains of a circular stone-setting, perhaps once covered by an earthen burial-mound (barrow). The spot is marked B on the plan (FIG. 7), and is to be seen also on PLATE I. It was for centuries the meeting-place of the district, at which discussions were held, just as at our early Hundred Courts, to which it may have corresponded. Here, said Dr Jankuhn, the Angles of Angeln must surely have met to discuss their forthcoming expeditions to England. It is seldom possible to nail down decisive historical events to a particular spot; and this revelation seemed to me most dramatic and would, I said, make an admirable article for ANTIQUITY. But other events supervened, and this earlier invasion receded into the background. Now at last the article has come into being, not quite perhaps in the form originally planned, but none the less welcome. O.G.S.C.

Nearly forty years ago Sir Charles Peers read a paper of outstanding importance on Caernarvon Castle. The description he then gave of the various buildings of which the castle is composed is printed in the Transactions of the Cymmrodorion Society. It will never be bettered, combining as it does a mastery of detail with a simple and lucid presentation of a most complicated structure. It is prefaced by an analysis of contemporary documents bearing on the original work of construction, on the gradual progress of building and on the castle's subsequent history. On the strength of these records a concise building sequence is established, and this has in its turn been adopted as the basis of all subsequent writings on the castle. A dated ground-plan, setting out this sequence in graphic form, accompanied the printed account, and has since been widely reproduced.

Dr Gordon Ward says that my paper ‘Sutton Hoo-Recent Theories’ is described by me as ‘embodying the official views about Sutton Hoo’ and ‘thus claims very particular authority’. What I said in fact was (op. cit., p. 1) that, since opposite opinions had recently been expressed on certain critical aspects of the find (Pagan or Christian ? Grave or Cenotaph ? English or Swedish ?),’ it is desirable that an official assessment of the issues should be offered to students, even though it cannot be regarded as final’. Anyone who can get into print can say what he likes about Sutton Hoo. Those officially engaged on the study and definition of the material naturally bear a greater responsibility for their utterances. They should also be acquainted with the facts, which not all commentators have been. By ‘official assessment’ I meant no more than that, as a sympathetic reader must at once have seen.