It is doubly appropriate that the Prehistoric Society should celebrate its jubilee in Norwich. The Society was born in the Castle on 23 February 1935 of a parent conceived improbably enough in the Public Library at a meeting held on 26 October 1908 to inaugurate an East Anglian Society ‘for the study of all matters appertaining to prehistoric man’. The question I want you to consider in this address is how the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia developed so rapidly to the point at which it achieved national status as The Prehistoric Society. Let me begin by removing one misapprehension. My hands are not dripping with East Anglian blood nor have I just wiped them clean. The Prehistoric Society was not the outcome of a revolutionary putsch. It stemmed from nothing more dramatic than a recognition that the Prehistoric Society had long ceased to be East Anglian. When we met at Norwich Castle for our Annual General Meeting in 1935 and passed the resolution which eliminated the words ‘of East Anglia’ from our title we were merely recognizing a fact, that we had long ceased to be East Anglian in anything but name. There were no dissentient votes.

The two men who between them set the Prehistoric Society on its feet came from different but complementary backgrounds. W. G. Clarke was Norfolk born and bred and earned his living as a working journalist in Norwich, while cultivating a wide-ranging interest in natural history and prehistoric archaeology.

Towards the beginning of her novel Excellent Women Barbara Pym recounts a telephone conversation of more than passing relevance to our meeting today.

I dialled the number fearfully and heard it ring. ‘Hello, hello, who is that?’ a querulous elderly woman's voice answered. I was completely taken aback, but before I could speak the voice went on, ‘If it's Miss Jessop I can only hope you are ringing up to apologize’. I stammered out an explanation. I was not Miss Jessop. Was Mr Everard Bone there? ‘My son is at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society’, said the voice. ‘Oh, I see. I'm so sorry to have bothered you’, I said. ‘People are always bothering me — I never wanted to have the telephone put in at all’.

After a further apology I hung up the receiver shaken and mystified but at the same time relieved. Everard Bone was at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society. It sounded like a joke. (1952, 29–30)

Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen, if this is a typical reaction to the Prehistoric Society, then on 23 February we become a fifty-year-old joke! If we allow for the history of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, then we reach well and truly back into the days of the Music Hall joke.

Investigations into the ceramic typology of the southern Italian neolithic have helped little in the understanding of neolithic origins there. In this paper the evidence of the radiocarbon chronology is used to demonstrate the antiquity of the southern Italian neolithic. There are now sufficient sixth millennium bc dates to suggest that the appearance there of a neolithic with mixed impressed and red-painted wares was contemporary with the earliest neolithic of both Greece and the West Mediterranean, while the penetration of those traits further north into Italy seems to have been delayed.

Models of population and resource pressure to explain developments such as technological innovation, increasing cultural complexity and competition and warfare, have been commonly used in studies of the earlier neolithic (Bandkeramik and early TRB) of Central Europe, in the fifth and fourth millennia bc. The usefulness of such models is questioned for this period, with reference in particular to Central Germany. After initial colonization, there was no simple pattern of continuous settlement expansion; rather, initially widespread settlement developed generally into a more aggregated pattern, with a contraction of the settlement area and virtually no internal or external expansion of settlement. Models of environmental change or resource exhaustion to explain these developments are also challenged, and emphasis placed on social and subsistence changes which provided the impetus for the dynamics of the settlement pattern. Changes in settlement, with the emergence of larger villages and enclosures, culminating in the appearance of major enclosure sites and a break in settlement continuity in the early TRB, are linked with other developments; the regionalization of culture, changes in material culture and burial types, and social organization. The origins of the settlement and social patterns in this period can be seen, not in the changes forced by external factors, but in the internal developments of the neolithic groups themselves.

This paper is an exploration of the chronological development of a series of elaborate and architecturally distinctive chambered tombs on the Islands of Orkney. It begins with a short critique of the present views of the Orcadian Neolithic and highlights a failure to understand chronological developments as the most significant problem. Thus after a brief classification of the monuments there is a detailed discussion of the chronological evidence which consciously avoids typological assumptions. This is followed by an examination of the various uses the tombs were put to and involves an assessment of the location and architectural visibility of the monuments and the remains found in the chamber. When combined with the chronological evidence a series of changes in monument size, type, location and use can be hypothesized for the neolithic period. This culminates in a shift away from burial monuments to physically defined spaces, presumably used for ceremonial purposes. These changes can be interpreted as deliberate manipulation by groups within that society to change the ideological concepts which defined the role of the individual in relation to the other members of the society.

In the Secondary Products Revolution model advanced by Sherratt it was predicted that increased use of animals for labour and dairy products would be visible archaeologically in animal bone collections. Published faunal data from Spain and Portugal for the period 5000–1000 bc show that horses, traction animals and dairy products all became more important after 2000 bc. An historical-geographical analogy from pre-industrial Spain suggests that by 1500 bc there was a degree of specialization in stockraising which could be understood best if sites were integrated economically over a wide region. This is the ‘policultivo ganadero’ of Spanish geographers, and the title is selected deliberately to compare with the Mediterranean polyculture based on plants.

Excavation of the surviving half of a barrow, identified from aerial photographs as having three concentric ditches, revealed a sequence of at least six major alterations. The site may originally have been a Class I henge monument subsequently adapted for use as a barrow. Features of all phases were mainly in the central area of the barrow and included two inhumations in coffins, one accompanied by a Yorkshire-type food vessel. A cremation in a Primary Series collared urn was accompanied by a bronze razor/knife and two flint plano-convex knives. A further cremation in a collared urn was found in the middle ditch. The barrow lay close to a settlement; early Bronze Age flintwork and pottery, including Grooved Ware and Beaker, were recovered from the several phases of mound make-up.

To the north of Milfield, Northumberland the A697 cuts through a cluster of ring-ditches centred at NT933347. Discovered during aerial survey by Professor N. McCord, these were included in Dr A. Harding's survey of the ritual henges and related monuments of the Milfield Basin (Harding 1981, 101). Subsequent aerial reconnaisance by Mr T. Gates has increased the number of visible ring-ditches to at least eleven and, of these, three types may be tentatively isolated (fig. 1). The smallest appears to have a diameter no greater than 3.5 m, but with a ditch some 2 m in width (3 examples); in the second type the ditch appears less than a metre in width, but enclosing a larger area estimated at between 9 and 20 m (3 examples). A single example (Site 1 below) lies outside these dimensions and it was this, together with an example from the second group, that was chosen for excavation in 1982 and 1983.

Eskbank Nurseries, a market garden allotment some 200 m long and 30 to 40 m wide, lies at approximately 70 m OD on a relatively level terrace overlooking the south bank of the river North Esk (fig. 1). The excavated area is centred on NT320660 and lies within the two superimposed Roman camps first noted as crop marks by St Joseph in 1965 and subsequently excavated by Maxfield in 1972. Her excavation areas I and II were sited to investigate a pit alignment, visible on the aerial photographs and plotted by her (Maxfield 1974, 142, fig. 1). In the event no pits were discovered by excavation, a fact attributable to an unfavourable combination of weather and soil conditions (Maxfield 1974, 150). The pit alignment did not, of course, appear as a crop mark in the deep market-garden soils of the Nurseries but, by extrapolation of Maxfield's plot, it was clear that it must cross the northern half of the allotment, possibly intersecting the north ditch of the earlier of the Roman camps (Maxfield's Camp A) on the west edge of the site.

This study attempts to define patterns in the artefact distributions from subsoil features at Winklebury Camp, an early Iron Age hillfort in lowland Britain. Two aims are identified: the first is to elucidate the nature and organization of past human activities within early Iron Age hillforts; the second is to determine whether meaningful patterns can be identified within the artefact distributions preserved in subsoil features. A variety of hypotheses drawn from the literature are presented and these are compared with the results of a number of statistical techniques. It is possible to distinguish patterns within the artefact distributions from Winklebury and some interesting results are produced. Specifically, it can be suggested that Winklebury was not participating in specialized craft production, that round-houses had a variety of functions, and that four-posters did not have a domestic function.

Round houses and an enclosure, surviving parts of a nucleated settlement on boulder clay terrain at Roxby (near Staithes, north-east Yorkshire), discovered from the air in 1972, were excavated 1973–81. Most were dated to the immediately pre-Roman Iron Age, but one round house, standing in an area of marks of former cross-ploughing, had native Romano-British pottery, and in the last phase of ditch silting, sherds of sixth century AD Anglo-Saxon stamped ware. The economy was based on mixed farming, but two of the Iron Age houses also contained iron working comprising both smelting and smithing. These houses also yielded fragments of jet and glass and were interpreted as a repair workshop, rather than a production unit. Great structural detail had been preserved and was recorded. The houses were architecturally different and represent a significant addition to the prehistoric round house data. They lie in that part of the township of Roxby which escaped medieval ploughing, and probably represent a fraction of the total original settlement. This and other data in north-east Yorkshire show that an economy based on settled mixed farming, not on semi-nomadic pastoralism, was widespread across the boulder clay encircling the North York Moors.

Two farmsteads, one of late Iron Age (second-first centuries BC) date and the other dating to the early Romano-British period (first-second centuries AD), were excavated at Copse Farm, Oving. The site is situated within the Chichester dykes on the Sussex/Hampshire Coastal Plain. The Iron Age farmstead produced pottery spanning ‘saucepan’ and ‘Aylesford-Swarling’ traditions, a transition in ceramic production which is poorly understood in Sussex. Information on the agricultural economy and small-scale industries (principally metalworking) practised at this site give an insight into the way the Coastal Plain was settled and exploited at the end of the first millennium BC.

Strap-unions of the types discussed in this study were made during the later part of the pre-Roman Iron Age and during the earliest part of the Roman occupation of Britain. Their distribution (fig. 1) and details of their chronology and cultural associations and also the evidence for their precise use are considered in the concluding sections of this paper.

Observations made soon after recent major earthquakes in Algeria, California and Japan have shown that repeated motions on buried fault planes in seismically active areas cause incremental folding of the overlying rocks and sediments. The deformation causes characteristic changes to river profiles and is therefore a factor which must be considered when applying techniques of site catchment analysis in areas of tectonic uplift. Here we examine the relationship between tectonic uplift and the palaeoenvironments of palaeolithic sites in North-west Greece, which is one of the most seismically active areas of Europe. Uplift can substantially alter local topography and sediment distributions and therefore undermine the economic viability of human settlements. Paradoxically uplift can also create stable conditions highly favourable to long-term habitation in two ways: by maintaining well-watered sediment traps which provide a climatically insensitive environment; by accentuating enclosed topography, which facilitates the control of mobile prey species.

The sediments of Kirkhead Cave, a truncated phreatic conduit in the Morecambe Bay karst of northern England, have been investigated by scanning electron microscopic, granulometric, petrographic, palynologic and stratigraphic methods. These show that almost all the deposits in the cave are glacigenic sediments, reworked into the cave by a variety of transporting agencies. Investigation of the deposits by radiometric, magnetostratigraphic and biostratigraphic methods suggests that the fill represents a near-continuum of deposition from at least pollen zone III of the Late-glacial until modern times. Within the deposits is evidence of use of the cave by man from later upper palaeolithic (Creswellian) times onwards. However, no definite evidence has been found of later upper palaeolithic use of the cave prior to the middle of pollen zone III. It is therefore suggested that the occupation of marginal areas of upper palaeolithic colonization, such as the far north of northern England, after the last glaciation may have taken place somewhat later than has previously been recognized.