A few years ago Professor Ole Klindt-Jensen, in publishing the results of his excavations of Migration Period sites on the island of Bornholm, described a remarkable find from the Sorte Muld settlement. Here, just outside the entrance to Building II, was a small pit containing the skull of a horse, its severed fore-legs, and a pelvic bone, accompanied by a few bones of sheep, pig and dog, and sherds which dated the pit to the main occupation phase of the site, in the 5th century A.D.(FIG. 2, 1).

During the last two decades discoveries of buried features of archaeological and historical interest have been widespread in south-east England, on many different soils supporting varying vegetation, the gravel terraces of the principal rivers and the chalk country yielding most information. Not the least productive area is the Isle of Thanet, where such ground as is free from the spreading housing estates of coastal resorts displays, for example, groups of ring-ditches of Bronze Age barrows, enclosures of the Iron Age, Roman villae, and even practice-trenches of the 1914-18 war. If discoveries of such variety and number could be made in Thanet, what of the other side of the Channel, where extensive tracts of chalk country are crossed by valleys with wide plains of alluvial gravel? Occasional discoveries made by members of French flying-clubs, for example, by M. Roger Agache in the Somme valley, had by 1961 shown that ‘crop-marks’ were to be seen; indeed it would be very surprising if they were not.

But to undertake abroad a programme of air photography involving widely ranging flights, planned for research, is not quite so simple a matter as in Britain. Maintenance requirements appropriate to aircraft operating abroad impose limitations on the work, while above all there is need to obtain permission for such photography from the responsible authorities. It was largely owing to the continued support of M. Seyrig and Professor Will that such permission was granted at all, and grateful thanks are due to them, to the Direction de l’Architecture of the French Ministry of State, under whose auspices the work was carried out, and to the British Academy, which made a grant towards the cost of the operation.

The results of the research carried out in these last years by the Istituto di Antichità Sarde e di Paletnologia of Cagliari University, particularly in Southern Sardinia, enable us to make a new and useful analysis of the stratigraphy of the cave of S. Bartolomeo, discovered and excavated by Orsoni in 1878 on the limestone promontory of Cape St. Elia at Cagliari, and re-explored by Patroni in 1901.

The cave, as Childe has already pointed out, is the only place in Sardinia which up till now has provided the possibility of stratigraphical observations which (though still under discussion) nevertheless provide us with some reliable and objective data concerning the prehistoric cultures of pre-nuraghic date.

Orsoni found a cavity measuring 5 m. × 4, completely filled from the roof to its rocky floor by an ancient deposit containing human and animal remains. The upper strata of this deposit were largely disturbed by modern graves, contained in a ditch walled in by ‘stones cemented with reddish mud’—and without any grave goods.

Skin boats have an assured but unsatisfactory place in history. Assured, because the literary references to them are many and interesting. Unsatisfactory, S because archaeologically it is unlikely that any remains, by their nature, will ever be found to give an idea of what they were 1ike. James Hornell has summarized many of the literary references to the part they played in Northern Europe during the Classical and Dark Ages in his well-known work on British coracles and Irish curraghs. In the Roman period they are mentioned by Caesar, Lucan, Pliny, Strabo, Solinus, Sidonius Apollinaris and Avienus. Pliny specifically mentions their part in the cross-channel tin trade. The references in Caesar and Lucan are also particularly significant, as will become clear below.

Later in the Dark Ages, according to the old Irish stories, Bran and Maelduin used curraghs, or hide-covered boats, for their voyages and Teigue, son of Cian, raided nearly to Spain. In the other direction, St Brendan reached the Shetlands and possibly Iceland as well. St Columba, of course, travelled from Ireland to Iona in a curragh. Niall of the Nine Hostages raided Wales in a fleet of curraghs and his grandson, Breccan, lost 50 in Breccan’s Cauldron, the Corryvreckan which fishermen still avoid today. In the medieval period, Froissart and Holinshed show that Caesar’s use of leather-covered coracles to get armies across rivers survived amongst the troops of Edward III and Henry V, though one imagines they were stouter craft than those described by Giraldus Cambrensis in his Description of Wales, which, Giraldus claimed, could be overturned by a blow from the tail of the salmon which the coracle fishermen were trying to catch.

For some time now, there has been an increasing tendency amongst archaeologists to think of pottery vessels, not so much as the products of a human mind, which may reflect the many, varied factors which influenced their style of manufacture, but as impersonal objects which serve little more useful purpose than to fill out a complex typological classification. In our preoccupation with compiling these sequences to establish nothing more than the relative and absolute chronologies (vital though they are) of countries where literary records of an historical nature are lacking, we have begun to lose sight of the human element, which is, after all, a more basic constituent of pottery than clay or temper. I little expected, when I embarked on a study of the Cypriote Bronze Age pots found in Egypt, that they would lend themselves so readily to a revelation of the very human reasons which inspired their shapes, created a demand for their contents, and so brought about their exportation to Egypt. It is really to Mr H. W. M. Hodges, to whom I took my technical problems, that I owe the disclosure contained in this paper. Even more it was he who re-orientated my approach to the subject along far more personal lines, which has made the task of assembling and interpreting the data a most rewarding excursion into Levantine life during the Bronze Age.

One of the most interesting facts to emerge from even a cursory study of the Cypriote Base-ring I ware, which occurs in Egypt during the first half of the XVIIIth Dynasty, is the limited number of shapes involved.

Dr Napier and Dr Weiner quote from my preliminary reports and add, ‘All these opinions must be regarded as quite provisional for only detailed anatomical and statistical investigation will permit the assessment of the precise position of these new East African hominids within the evolutionary sequence’. Having said this, they then proceed to devote several pages to trying to assess the position of these new discoveries, when neither of them has made any detailed anatomical or statistical investigation of any of the skull and jaw material referred to, while the first author (at the time of writing) was only at an early stage of his study of the limb bones of the pre-Zinjanthropus juvenile.

Since 1950, the attention of the Czechoslovak Archaeological Institute has been focused on the study of the Early Neolithic in Czechoslovakia, and since 1960 the investigation of Neolithic society in all its aspects has been one of the principal assignments of the Academy of Sciences in the field of social sciences.

In the years 1950-1952 a survey of a Neolithic site of the Danubian I or Bandkeramik, and Late Lengyel cultures, at Postoloprq in NW Bohemia, was undertaken and its results are now in the press. This investigation has shown, however, that NW Bohemia belongs to a peripheral region and that thus any findings made there have a local validity only. Unless they are taken in conjunction with evidence from a less peripheral region, they present a very distorted picture. For this reason a suitable site was looked for in eastern Bohemia, where it could be assumed (on the basis of an analysis of earlier finds in local museums) that particularly suitable localities could be found in the region.

I do not see that Professor Palmer has any adequate grounds for his refusal to accept the definitive opinion of Evans and Mackenzie that the Linear B tablets found at Knossos were all of them—or the great bulk of them—from the ruins of the Palace and other buildings destroyed at the end of the Late Minoan II period about 1400 B.C.

This opinion was based, not upon a few isolated ‘facts’ of the kind which Professor Palmer has, with commendable diligence, mustered against it, but upon their observation of the ruins of the ‘Last Palace’ (as they called it) as a whole. In these ruins they found, on the one hand Linear B tablets, on the other remains of vases decorated in the ‘Palace Style’ of Late Minoan II, which falls in time between what Evans called Late Minoan I (c, 1550–1450 B.C.) and Late Minoan III (c. 1400 B.C. and later). It is to the end of the Late Minoan III period, about 1200 B.C. or later, that Professor Palmer wishes to transfer the tablets.

The book, prepared originally as a dissertation for the Oxford Doctorate of Philosophy, is published posthumously. It gives the measure of the scientific quality of its young author, prematurely deceased in November 1958 at the age of only thirty-four, and it constitutes without doubt one of the most relevant contributions offered during the last few years to our knowledge of the figurative world of ancient Etruria. J. Boardman and Mrs Brown have edited the manuscript for publication, completing it with careful and valuable analytical indexes of sites, museums, bibliographical sources, and subjects. J. D. Beazley has added a short biographical note.

As the author himself explicitly declares in the preface, the book is a history of the representation of the lion in Etruscan art from the end of the 8th to the end of the 3rd century B.C. The work does not set out to be a corpus, but in effect it assembles and makes use of all the material which offers even the slightest interest from the diverse points of view of typology, technique, or style. The research is carried out on the basis of iconography as a study of the origins, the rate and means of penetration and diffusion of individual typological variants of the lion figure, and of the backgrounds, chronological succession, and inter-relationships of the different classes of lion representations. However, in view of the exceptional importance which this theme assumes in the figurative production of the Etruscan world chiefly in the orientalizing period, but also later, in the 6th and 5th centuries, the survey inevitably finishes by discussing the major problems in the history of Etruscan art: its links with Greek and Oriental sources of inspiration, its original qualities and conservatism, its individual centres of production, and its overall stylistic development. In his direct and detailed analyses, the Author says the last word about certain monuments or groups of monuments which are classed among the most famous and significant in the whole Etruscan art—for example, the Regolini-Galassi fibula, the situlae from La Pania, the bronzes from Perugia, the lion of Val Vidone, and the chimaera of Arezzo.

Nearly two years have passed since Dr L.S.B. Leakey announced the first of a series of remarkable discoveries at Olduvai Gorge, Tanganyika. The great importance of this region as a palaeontological hunting ground has been appreciated since 1911 when, by chance, a German entomologist picked up a number of fossil bones which had been eroded on to the surface of the slopes of this East African Pleistocene canyon. Since 1931 Dr Leakey has made repeated visits to the Gorge where steadily he has been building up the evidence of an early stone-age cultural sequence.

In July, 1959, Dr and Mrs Leakey discovered a hominid skull which was lying partly exposed on the slopes, 22 ft. below the upper limit of Bed I, the lowest stratum of the Pleistocene sequence at Olduvai. Excavation of the site revealed that the skull was fragmented but almost complete and was lying on a living floor containing tools of a recognized culture (Oldowan) as well as waste flakes and unworked stones, all foreign to the site; in addition there were a number of broken and splintered bones of small animals which had apparently constituted part of the diet of the incumbents. Subsequently, a tibia and fibula were recovered from the same living floor. Dr Leakey named the skull Zinjanthropus boisei (PLATE x (a)). During 1960, excavations were started at a slightly lower level of Bed I and in December, 1960, Dr Leakey reported the discovery of a number of adult and juvenile bones of the hand and foot, two clavicles and some skull (parietal) fragments. This was rapidly followed by the important discovery of a juvenile mandible from the same level (PLATE XI). A number of stone artifacts of an Oldowan culture have also come to light from the juvenile site.

The discovery of an Early Geometric (9th century B.c.) grave containing an array of iron objects at Athens has led to a quickening of interest in the beginnings of ironusing in South Eastern Europe. Two main theories about this have, for lack of conclusive evidence, been current for decades and while all admit iron was known earlier in the Near East than in Europe, the route by which that knowledge reached Central Europe has been hotly debated.

Dr Foltiny has recently restated the case for iron-using being brought to Hungary by horsemen from further east and has added to it the suggestion that not only did the knowledge then spread into Central Europe but also southwards into Greece. If he is correct and iron was known in Central and Eastern Europe before 900 B.C. then a major alteration to our ideas of the events of that period becomes necessary. Any theory must, at present, rely on the correlation of the Central European evidence with the better known and closer dated events of the east Mediterranean so that the interpretation of the objects in the Athenian grave mentioned above is vital to Dr Foltiny's theory. It is hoped to show elsewhere that their evidence is ambiguous and in this paper another body of material, from Jugoslavia, a region contiguous to Dr Foltiny's early iron-using centre in Hungary and athwart its communications with Greece, will be considered. The conclusions to be drawn from it are quite different from those which might be expected if Dr Foltiny is correct, for they are that much of Jugoslavia gained its knowledge of iron through trade connexions with Eastern Italy in the 8th–7th centuries B.C. and that Hungary and Greece played little part in the event.

In archaeological mapping, just as in its other fields of work, the British Ordnance Survey leads the world. Nationalistic as it sounds, this plain statement of fact need not offend our brothers in other countries: they could without any doubt all do as well, although often indeed not easily. Not easily, because behind a great Period Map like this, and its predecessors for Roman and post-Roman times, there runs throughout the Survey’s history, and through the last forty years pre-eminently, its steady tradition of archaeological recording on the ordinary large-scale sheets. This is carried in unexampled measure to the popular smaller-scale editions, but neither that nor the Period Map production would be practical possibilities without the fundamental large-scale work, year in year out carried on by the Survey’s Archaeology Division. The forty years since it was set up, in the form of O. G. S. Crawford single-handed, are divided into almost equal halves by the great destruction at the Southampton office in 1941. Hard recovery and big development have ensued throughout the Survey; but in this Division the recovery was particularly hard, and the development has had to be relatively big, to produce a unit of workmanlike capacity, small though this is amongst the.rest. Before praising the new map in all its excellences, then, let us remember that like all its kind, it is the fruit not only of special but of incessant ordinary work performed in the routine of the Division, patient yet intensive. The ill-informed gaucherie of a recent Government remonstrance on this intensiveness has already been answered by ANTIQUITY, in the name of all sensible opinion; one must hope it will now be quietly laid aside. The intensiveness is no less needful than the patience; and Mr Charles Phillips, the Division’s chief all through these years, fully merits his high reputation on both counts.

Recent work on Archaeomagnetism has been concentrated in two main fields, first, detection of sites with magnetic anomalies using instruments like the proton magnetometer, and secondly the construction of a dated graph of the earth’s magnetic field with the ultimate aim of providing an absolute chronology for fixed fired sites, mainly kilns and hearths. Important work in a third field, using the changing angle of inclination of pottery to provide a relative chronology for a series of vessels entirely independent of archaeological means, has fallen out of fashion despite the efforts of the pioneers of Archaeomagnetism and more recently the researches of Mr R. M. Cook on Corinthian pottery, at Cambridge and Dr M. J. Aitken on Chinese porcelain at Oxford. It is with this third method of approach that the present article is concerned and its application to a series of British beakers.

When a clay vessel is fired its temperature is usually raised well above the Curie-point, about 500-600° C.; at this point the magnetic elements in the clay will begin to orientate themselves with the prevailing Earth’s magnetic field rather as though they were myriads of minute compass needles. Upon cooling, this uniform orientation will remain ‘fossilized’ and under normal conditions a permanent record of the Earth’s magnetic field at the time and place of firing. However, the finished vessel will then be used and removed from its firing position, thus for ever removing any chance of comparing its angle of declination (or compass bearing) with that now existing, since their positions relative to geographic north cannot be determined. If it can be shown that the vessel was fired in a vertical position the angle of inclination (dip) is still recoverable for comparison with the modern angle and with that preserved in other similar vessels. Since the angle of inclination alters a little every year (non-linearly)—it should be theoretically possible to arrange them in relative order of firing or date, thus providing an invaluable relative chronology.