While most observers now agree that the Gundestrup cauldron originated on the Continent within a Celtic context and dates to the period 100-50 BC (Klindt-Jensen, 1960, 50; Powell, 1971, 205; Allen, 1971, 20, 23) its fantastic motifs have, despite Hatt’s (1965) imaginative rendering, remained enigmatic to most commentators. ‘The Gundestrup artists were influenced by strangely archaic, Oriental imagery and mode of composition’ (Klindt-Jensen, 1959, 167), which is a pronounced element of this unusual piece whatever its exact geographical origin.

In June 1926 my father, a master at the school in Hampshire in which I was an idle and unedifying pupil, received a letter from the Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey in Southampton, asking for details of a new Romano-British site at West Harting, on the downs just across the county boundary in Sussex. Crawford was collecting material for the second edition of the OS Roman Britain map: my proud discovery of sherds in moleheaps and rabbit-scrapes had found its way into the parish magazine and thence to the Portsmouth Evening News where it had been spotted by OGSC, and so the letter was really for me. Correspondence followed; the next year, in Southampton with my parents en route for a holiday in France, I was able to meet him for the first time. The Generation Gap had not then been invented, and we liked one another from the start, and from then on OGS (as we were all later to call him) took upon himself to be my archaeological godfather.

Originally there were two main points of controversy about Piltdown. Did the Piltdown cranium and the Piltdown jaw-bone (mandible) represent one creature, ‘Eoanthropus’ as Smith Woodward inferred; or did they belong to two creatures, the cranium that of a man and the jaw-bone that of an ape, as David Waterston, Gerrit Miller and A. T. Marston believed? The second point of controversy concerned the antiquity of the specimens.

On the resumption of excavation in the autumn of 1972, a funerary complex belonging to a community of priests was discovered among a group of religious buildings in the early urban Bronze Age centre of Altin-depe in South Turkmenia. All the material found there dates from the early stages of Namazga V, or, using the accepted chronology, from the end of the third millennium BC (Masson, 1973, 481). It had previously been established that the chief building of this religious group was a stepped, tower-like edifice which had clearly been built in the style of the Mesopotamian ziggurats and had been rebuilt three times in the course of its existence (Masson and Sarianidi, 1972, 117–18). The funerary complex excavated in 1972 corresponds chronologically to the first, relatively small, ziggurat and was situated southeast of it.

The earliest finds of copper objects in the Vinča group were made as early as the first half of this century, during the excavation of the eponymous site of Vinča-Belo Brdo, near Belgrade. Amongst other objects, a small group of oval beads was found at a depth of 6-6m, in a habitation level representing the beginning of the Vinča-Plocnik, or late, phase of this group (Vasić 1936, 43).

The Inventaire des mégalithes de la France—Région Parisienne is the fourth in the French series which began with Cordier's inventory of Indre-et-Loire (1963) and continued with Gruet's inventory of Maine-et-Loire (1967) and Despride and Leymarios's inventory of Loir-et-Cher (1974). All these have been published as supplements to Gallia Préhistoire and we are now promised a fifth volume by Jean Clottes on the megaliths of the Lot. The present volume is by far the biggest and most important in the series so far and it deals with the monuments in the present six departments of Paris, Yvelines, Essonne, Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de- Marne, and Val d'Oise, which used to be the departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise.

The author of this inventory is an English civil servant, now in high international office in Brussels, who formerly was in Paris and there spent his week-ends picnicking in megaliths, and what better employment could there be for our international civil servants? As he says, with characteristic modesty, of his Paris days, ‘Au commencement vers 1955 ou 1956, la prtparation de cet inventaire servait uniquement de distraction pour mes moments perdus et n'avait aucune prétention. Ce ne fut que beaucoup plus tard qu'il m'a été suggéré de le proposer à la présente série. La distraction transformée en devoir, c'est alors que le travail a commencé pour de bon.’

Gertrude Bell first visited the East in 1886 when, after graduating with a First in Modern History—the first woman to do so, she went to stay with diplomatic relatives in Bucharest ‘to get rid of her Oxfordy manner’. From Bucharest she visited Constantinople. In 1892 she went to stay in Tehran: before the trip she devoted herself to learning Persian. From her observations of Persia and Turkey she wrote her first book of travel, Safar Nameh—Persian pictures, which was published ‘reluctantly and anonymously’ in 1894. She also worked on a translation, Poems from the Divan of Hafiz, which was published in 1897.

Between 1795 and 1974 early Indian iron may be said to have had three separate phases of research. The first phase lasted from 1795 to about the middle of the 19th century. There were two types of writings in this period. The first type represented the metallurgical experiments on pre-industrial Indian steel called wootz, the term which is derived from the Canarese term ukku meaning steel, having been introduced into the English language by Pearson in 1795 (Yule and Burnell, 1903).

In 1968 Geoffrey Bibby, then carrying out an archaeological survey in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, was shown a collection of flint implements and ‘about two hundred potsherds, of a thin, greenish-yellow ware decorated with geometric patterns in dark-brown paint’ (1970, 376). They had been found by an American school teacher, Grace Burkholder, who, together with other amateur archaeologists from the headquarters of the Arabian American Oil Company at Dhahran, had scoured the nearby desert in pursuit of archaeological remains. Bibby with considerable astonishment recognized the pottery as identical with the Mesopotamian al ‘Ubaid.

The chambered cairns of Orkney are among the most sophisticated architectural products of prehistoric Europe. Maes Howe, since the chamber was re-entered a century ago (Petrie, 1861) has excited the admiration of all who have visited it. In Stuart Piggott’s words (1954, 244): ‘The assured competence and mastery over the building material shown at Maes Howe mark it out as a monument comparable in prehistoric Britain only to Stonehenge in its individual handling of an architectural problem. In both a contemporary existing conception—that of a chambered tomb or that of a stone circle—has been used to produce a superlative monument that by its originality of execution is lifted out of its class into a unique position.’

Quanterness has proved to be one of the best preserved of the Orcadian monuments, with four of the six side chambers still standing, very much as they were built some five thousand years ago. Much of the importance of the excavation comes from the detailed examination of the deposits within the chamber which have offered an unusual insight into neolithic burial practice, and these are fully discussed in the forthcoming final publication (Renfrew et al., in press).

In order to obtain a good site chronology the radiocarbon measurements must be carried out on samples having a firm archaeological basis and high probability of association with the event or structure the date of which is required. Patently the radiocarbon date can be no better than the sample provided for measurements, and any missassociation at this stage cannot subsequently be rectified. Often discordant radiocarbon dates are explained away by supposing that the sample was ‘contaminated’ with earlier or later material. Calculations based on these surmises may often disclose that excessively large amounts of contaminants must be postulated to secure a given result.

How do ideas, or ideologies, articulate with other cultural systems? This is a complex question, and archaeologists, in their study of the rise and growth of civilizations, have been hesitant to address it. There are obvious reasons for this hesitancy. Even in those instances where the archaeological record is text-aided it is difficult, and it is still more so where contemporaneous documentary materials are lacking or equivocal, as in Precolumbian America. Then, too, it is my impression that while many archaeologists are willing to grant ideology a role in cultural development they tend to look upon it as causally ‘secondary’. Subsistence, demography, technology, and ecology—perhaps because they are more directly susceptible to archaeological methods and inferences than are idea systems—are more apt to be seen as the seats of ‘prime cause’.

Many scholars have examined the changes that occurred in Greek life around the twelfth century BC. After a period of great prosperity during Late Helladic III B, there followed an era of war, uncertainty, and cultural disintegration that was part of a general upheaval extending from Italy to the Near East. In Greece the disruption was especially pronounced, and many areas were left relatively unpopulated. The ensuing ‘Dark Age’ witnessed the birth of a profoundly different society.