Once upon a time (so tradition says) a region of extreme fertility lay between the Scilly Islands and Cornwall. This land was called Lyonesse; and where now roll the waters of the Atlantic there once stood prosperous towns and no less than a hundred and forty churches. The rocks called the Seven Stones, seven miles west of Land's End, are said to mark the site of a large city. This country was overwhelmed by the sea, and the sole survivor, one Trevilian, escaped destruction only by mounting a swift horse and fleeing to the mainland.

Such, stripped to the bone, is the famous legend of Lyonesse. Had it any real basis in fact, or is it merely an invention of the “dreamy Celt”? There are good reasons for believing that the substance of the legend is true, that within prehistoric times there did actually exist land which is now covered by the sea, and that it has been gradually overwhelmed. In one respect only does the modern critic disagree with tradition. He believes that Lyonesse was the Scilly Islands themselves, not a completely vanished region between them and Cornwall; and that what is now an archipelago of islands was a single large island, surrounded perhaps by a few rocky islets.

It is not easy to compare the existing hill-top villages of Algeria with the prehistoric settlements of Britain before the Roman invasion.

The writer cannot claim any profound knowledge of British archaeology, but seven winters spent among the Shawiya Berbers of the Aures mountains in south-east Algeria have enabled him to observe modern life in that country, and to form opinions on the origins of its customs. The extent to which that life may serve to illustrate the mode of existence of our forbears in pre-Roman times must be left to the consideration of those more familiar with the prehistory of Britain.

The importance of the part played by agriculture in the economic history of our country is sometimes apt to be forgotten, for its place has, during the past hundred years, been largely taken by manufacture. Down to the beginning of the nineteenth century the bulk of the population still made a living by tilling the fields, just as their fathers had done from time immemorial. It becomes, therefore, a matter of great interest to trace the beginnings and growth of agriculture in our country before the dawn of history.

Agriculture may be taken in its broadest sense to signify the artificial growth of plants for human use, as opposed to the gathering of wild products, but the term may also be narrowed down to cover only the cultivation of farinaceous seeds which we call cereals. It is chiefly in the latter sense that the subject will be discussed here, but it must be remembered that the nature of the evidence does not altogether allow of such a distinction.

Students of human origins agree that man was not separately created, but evolved in the remote past from an apelike ancestor. To such as reject the evidence of man’s emergence from a lower animal form, the place of his original home is not a subject for discussion but rather a tenet of faith, or a simple geographical identification of the Garden of Eden.

Even if one is uninfluenced by ecclesiastical tradition it is difficult to avoid prejudice in the search for the cradle of humanity. The ex oriente Zux hypothesis, which Reinach once so vigorously contested in the field of archaeology, numbers among its submissive acceptants a majority perhaps of anthropologists and students of primate evolution. Much of human culture and many peoples have come out of Asia. Because of the antiquity of its civilizations, the multifariousness of its inhabitants and its vast extent and physical diversity, that continent has become a natural residuary legatee for all unknown origins. The paucity of knowledge concerning the archaeology and palaeontology of Asia has determined its selection as the mute scapegoat of all our original sins.

The Scottish area is particularly rich in prehistoric remains, in some measure due to the fact that being a hilly and mountainous country large tracts of the surface have never been torn by the plough, nor suffered from the iconoclastic hand of the improver. Save for the effects of drainage, and some change in the character of vegetation arising from alteration of climate, much of the moorland country must have changed little in aspect since a remote past.

Among the various prehistoric structures in Scotland none is more remarkable than the broch. It does not occur out of Scotland, and neither its development nor period of occupation are generally understood.

Three years ago, when the Survey of English Place-names was initiated, the present editor of ANTIQUITY wrote an article for the opening volume of the Survey publications with the above title. In it he attempted to show how fruitful might be the mutual relations of place-names and archaeological studies. The Survey is now well under way. It has completed its work in four counties—Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Worcestershire (shortly to be published) and the time seems not inappropriate to take stock of some of the results achieved in this particular field of studies.

The island of Ithaka in the Ionian Sea has been famous throughout the centuries that have passed since European literature began with Homer. In itself it is small and mountainous, and but a poor spot on which to stage a noble drama, but its association with the far-famed hero of an immortal epic has more than made up for the insignificance of the terrain. In recent years it has achieved further distinction as the subject of a lively, and at times embittered controversy about its actual position on the map. Most scholars are content to believe that by Ithaka Homer meant the island which still bears the name, now modified to Thiaki; others affirm that the scene of the poet's story was really Santa Maura to the north, while others again have given the honour to Cefalonia to the west. Quite recently a German geographer has even proclaimed that ‘Corfu is Ithaka.’ Samuel Butler, in his famous Homeric escapade, convinced himself that Ithaka was to be found in one of the Aegadean Islands off the coast of Sicily. So far, it has not been said of it that it never existed save in the imagination of the poet, but it may yet be the victim of that last infirmity of Homeric geographical speculation.

Interest in the island due to certain observations by the ancients was quickened by the visits of travellers-Gell, Dodwell, Leake, Mure and others-in the course of last century. The general aim of their explorations was to test the correctness of the Odyssean descriptions, and this they did with thoroughness. Their fault was that generally they went too far; they expected, and sought to establish, perfect correspondence. The modern expert comments that a poet is a poet; that freedom in his dealings with time and space is only his right; and that trifling discrepancies between the poetry and actuality are not to be regarded as vitiating the whole description and stamping it as purely imaginary. And all that may be conceded. The old explorers were certainly the victims of an excess of zeal. It has even been said that the inhabitants of the island made profit of their eagerness, by inventing names of localities to do duty as the remains of the appellations to be found in the epic.

It was Augustus who first realized that the Roman Empire could not go on expanding for ever. Horace could write

Caelo tonantem credidimus Iovem

Regnare; praesens Divus habebiiur

Augustus adiectis Britannis

Imperio gravibusque Persis;

but a very real part of Augustus' claim to grateful veneration lay in the fact that he made up his mind to leave Britons and Parthians alone—to seek in them not new subjects, but peaceful and respectful neighbours. Coercere intra terminos imperium was the advice he left to his successors; and in principle they never departed from it. Claudius might conquer Britain, Trajan Mesopotamia and Dacia; but these were “rectifications,” as we say nowadays, not obliterations, of the imperial frontier.

For the frontier of the Empire, as Augustus left it, was far from perfect. Tiberius, concerned above all to maintain intact the system created by Augustus, played here, as everywhere, a waiting game, and did not meddle with the Augustan frontiers. But his successor Gaius, or “Caligula,” may have contemplated a conquest, or at least an invasion, of Britain; he certainly made a demonstration on the shore of the Channel. And Claudius, the fourth Emperor, took the decisive step. Britain and Gaul were too close together, too intimately linked by geography, blood and civilization, to permit of an unfortified Channel frontier. Southern Britain was already in part Romanized, and the flag followed trade.

After the latest glacial advance of the Quaternary Ice Age, the climate of north-west Europe did not simply recover to its present level, but underwent a series of fluctuations, at times becoming warmer and drier than at present, and again approaching glacial conditions. The pioneer in the investigation of these postglacial climatic changes was the Norwegian Axel Blytt, who as long ago as 1876 made out a succession of dry and wet periods, which he termed Boreal, Atlantic, sub-Boreal and sub-Atlantic. The existence of these four periods has been abundantly confirmed; they are best shown in the peat-bogs of Norway and Sweden, where they are represented by layers of tree-stools alternating with beds of peat, but they have now been connected with de Geer's geochronological time-scale derived from the banded glacial clays. It is found that the dry, mainly cool Boreal period extended from about 6500 to 5200 B.C., the moist warm Atlantic period from 5200 to 3000 B.c., the dry warm sub-Boreal from 3000 to 850 B.C., and the wet cool sub-Atlantic from 850 B.C., to about 300 A.D. Thus the Neolithic in north-west Europe falls partly in the Atlantic and partly in the sub-Boreal period; the Bronze Age entirely in the latter. The early Iron Age, on the other hand, falls mainly in the sub-Atlantic.

A succession of dry and wet periods can be recognized over a wide area in northern and central Europe and again in Scotland and Ireland. The Swiss lake-dwellings are strong evidence of a dry climate during much of the Neolithic, because when they were established the levels of the lakes must have been very much lower than at present, especially if, as seems probable, the dwellings were first built not in the waters of the lakes but on peat-bogs on their Neolithic shores. In Scotland James Geikie obtained a sequence similar to Blytt's, though he stressed the changes of temperature rather than of rainfall. Geikie named his stages Lower Forestian, Lower Turbarian (i.e. Lower Peat), Upper Forestian and Upper Turbarian. The Scottish peat mosses have since been examined more closely by F. J. Lewis1, who found that the Upper Forest Bed extended over the whole mainland of Scotland almost to Cape Wrath, rising in places to nearly 3000 feet above sea level, or far above the present limit of trees. In the Highlands however it is split into two layers separated by one to three feet of peat, indicating a break in the dry conditions. It is interesting that a similar break in the dry Neolithic climate is shown by the history of the Swiss lake-dwellings. The Upper Forest layer is not found in the Shetlands.

The district with which we are concerned constitutes the northern section of Galilee between the Nahr-el-Kasmiyeh and the Merj Ayun to the north, and the plains of Haifa and Asochis (Sahel-el-Buttauf) and the Wadi Hammam to the south; to the east and west its boundaries are respectively the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The greater part of the region is occupied by a central limestone massif, the Galilean highlands, which rise in a series of terraces from the Jordan valley to a height of nearly 4000 feet above sea level, and then descend steeply to the Mediterranean coastal plain. Much of this country, especially on the western side of the watershed, is barren and uncultivable, but the high central plateau in the north from Yarun to Tibnin and the lower plateaux of Kades and Safsaf include some of the most productive corn-growing districts west of the Jordan. The beds of the larger valleys also, which even in summer are not entirely waterless, provide fertile garden land and are mostly highly cultivated. The more rocky parts of the region provide scant pasturage for flocks of goats, and in most places the olive is cultivated to a limited extent.

It is surprising how little classical authors of the time of Augustus choose to tell us about the Etruscans. For Livy, Vergil and their contemporaries it might almost seem as if the Etruscans had already become a dim legendary background to history, hardly less unreal than King Arthur is to us. If they ever knew the facts they have taken great pains to conceal how much of their state religion and political organization was due to Etruscan rulers, and how completely the city of Rome itself was based upon Etruscan foundations. This is to some extent the result of a deliberate conspiracy. It was the set policy of the Augustan writers to suppress everything that did not obviously tend to the enhancement of Roman prestige; it was their policy to distort facts, to invent legends and to carry into their literature the same single-minded fanaticism that had made the success of their nation in politics and war. We must not look therefore to the Latin writers for any scientific account of the extraordinary people that preceded the Romans almost everywhere in North and Central Italy, and, but for some strange inherent weakness, would have ruled the whole peninsula in their stead. Merely as a prelude to his story of the rise of Rome, Livy tells us that Etruria had ‘filled with the renown of her name the whole length of Italy from the Alps to the Sicilian strait.’

The term “Orientation,” as applied to a structure of any kind, means the direction in which its principal line is laid out on the ground. Originally, as the word implies, orientation signified “eastwardness,” only, and had special reference to churches, because (in western Europe) practically all churches were built with the longer side laid out in an east-and-west direction. In some, the line is to True East, exactly; in others the axis lies at an angle of some degrees either to the northward or to the southward of True East. This divergence in either direction from the Orient is called “the angle of orientation.” Nowadays, the term “Orientation” has lost its original “Eastward” distinctiveness, and has become a general expression merely indicating “direction,” and may imply any point of the horizon, and not necessarily the eastward.

Originally the angle of orientation was measured from True East as a zero, but now it is reckoned from the Meridian, or North (true).

Since Plato announced that the course of history returned upon itself in 72,000 years, since Polybius discerned a “circular movement” by which the history of states came back, over and over again, to the same point, the theory of historical cycles has been a commonplace of European thought. Familiar to the thinkers of the Renaissance, it was modified by Vico in the early eighteenth century and again by Hegel in the early nineteenth; and a complete history of the idea would show many curious transformations and cover a long period of time. Here no attempt will be made to summarize this story; the subject of the present paper is the latest and, to ourselves, most striking exposition of the general theory, contained in Dr Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West.

The fascination of Archaeology consists in reconstructing the life of the past, but by a curious paradox we obtain most of our raw material from the graves of the dead. We profit by the superstition which ordained that the dead man should be supplied with tools and weapons, and the dead woman with ornaments, to accompany them to the land of shadows. We profit also by the conservative instinct which regulated the construction of the tomb and the accompanying ritual. Nothing changes so slowly as burial-customs, even in these radical times. In all essentials the modern funeral procession remains Victorian in its gloomy respectability, its tawdry finery, and its obsolete methods of transport.

The origin of barrow-making being unknown, one is free to speculate without the risk of being upset by evidence. The earliest deliberate burials occurred in the Mousterian period, in caves; and although connecting links are not numerous, one cannot help feeling that the natural cave must have been the ancestor of the megalithic passage-grave. In all essentials the cave and the passage-grave are the same; the 'points' so to speak, of a habitation cave are (I) the ground in front of the mouth, ( 2 ) the mouth, and (3) the dark, little used interior. Of these the mouth was the most important, and was often walled off; and it is natural to suppose that the darker recesses were used for sleeping in at night. These three features correspond fairly well with the typical arrangement of a passage-grave ; and if the houses of the dead were modelled upon those of the living, as is usually supposed, there may be some truth in this suggested evolution ; but there are many difficulties. However this may be, megalithic burial-places were very often—and always in our country—covered with mounds of earth or, in stony country, cairns of stone : they were in fact the first barrows ; so we must consider them. The subject is a very thorny one, and in order to avoid being drawn into argument, I shall avoid problems and keep to a description of facts. The title of this paper suggests that geographical and ethnographical deductions may for once be given second place.

The astronomical controversy about Stonehenge may perhaps be approached from an impartial view of one who is neither an archaeologist nor an astronomer, who offers no new or original observations, and proposes to examine facts rather than to discuss theories.

Sir Norman Lockyer was one of those who held that many Egyptian and Greek buildings were set so that they faced certain points on the horizon at which the sun or some bright star arose. But the buildings do not face these directions exactly, and the suggestion is that the discrepancies are due to a well recognized astronomical principle—that the points of rising and setting gradually move on the horizon; and the rate of motion being known, the date of the building may be ascertained.

Most writers, ancient and modern, represent all Vikings as enemies of Christianity. It seems to be still believed that wherever they went, and at all periods, they sacked churches, massacred monks and nuns, and played havoc with civilization. That was certainly the view of politicians and chroniclers from Alfred to William the Conqueror. Even recent historians repeat the charge, sometimes with quite unnecessary emphasis.

In this article it is not proposed to whitewash the race in all respects—that would be impossible—but to bring forward certain scraps of evidence, not generally recollected, to set off against the too universal chorus of reprobation. In a word, there were such people as Christian Vikings; that is to say the immigrant Danes and Norse of that turbulent age, though always pirates on occasion, softened their manners as time went on, long before their general conversion to organized Christianity. Strange to say, some of the churches that are still with us owe their foundation to the Viking settlement in Britain.