A Lower Palaeolithic handaxe found a few years ago at St Catherine's Hill, Christ church, is described. Various aspects of its technology and morphology appear archaic, and although it was found in a secondary context, with no clear geological evidence for its true age, relatively old Pleistocene gravels do occur at the summit of the hill. At the Ballast Hole, Corfe Mullen, a few miles west, J. B. Calkin and J. F. N. Green recorded some 25 years ago a number of handaxes very similar to this one, in a hill-wash deposit below bluff gravels; they suggested that the implements had originally been dropped on the surface of the Sleight (170 ft) terrace while the 130 ft terrace was forming nearby. These implements were demonstrably older than the well-made later Acheulian ovate handaxes from the same pit. They were called Middle Acheulian by Calkin and Green, but it is suggested that Earlier Acheulian would be a better description. Their likely context in the British sequence is briefly discussed. Early Acheulian occurrences in situ in early deposits are rare in Britain and Europe.

Two shoulder blades with healed lesions found at the Mesolithic settlement Star Carr are described, one of an elk (Alces alces (L.)) and the other front red deer (Cervus elaphus L.). Their presence at the site throws light on the question of seasonal occupation, indicating that the site has been populated at least during winter time. In addition, some comments are made on the supposed lesions on the elk from High Furlong, Lancashire.

Excavation of a headland on the north coast of Cyprus has revealed a neolithic settlement with well-preserved stone buildings which belong to one stage of a multiphase site. Evidence was obtained for changes in architecture, definable growth patterns and, in Cypriot terms, deeply stratified deposits with painted pottery that clearly links the early Troulli and the Sotira styles. Eighteen structures, many re-built two or three times, two winding passages and open yards were located in such deep, artificial hollows that the settlement may be considered as partly subterranean. Groups of houses were arranged in sectors, in one case divided by an uninterrupted 4 m. wide ridge. A series of Carbon-14 determinations indicates the fourth millennium for this phase; its predecessor was defended by an impressive 4·5 m deep ditch. Faunal and floral analyses disclose a range of domesticated species suggestive of a lively agricultural, rather than fishing-based, mixed economy. As a result of associated surveys, many unexcavated sites may now be placed in the dated Vrysi framework and a start made to the definition of neolithic settlement patterns on the north coast. The connections o Vrysi with excavated sites necessitates a reassessment of the prehistory of fifth-fourth millennia Cyprus which seems to be characterized by cultural continuity, regionalism and, the island's isolation.

The subject of this note is the chronology of the site of Khirokitia in Cyprus in the light of four recent radiocarbon determinations. Khirokitia has remained one of the most extensively uncovered prehistoric sites in the Levant since its initial excavation over thirty years ago (Dikaios 1953). The fourth millennium BC date then estimated for the site by Dikaios was revised markedly upwards to the mid-sixth millennium following the submission of samples for radiocarbon dating (Dikaios 1962). The fourth millennium estimate had assumed a stratigraphical continuity between the pre-dominantly aceramic occupation of the site and the appearance of well-made pottery in its upper-most levels. Since the radiocarbon samples were taken from aceramic contexts, Dikaios subsequently concluded that the pottery was the product of a re-occupation of the site in the fourth millennium bc, a date based on the ceramic parallels with and the radiocarbon dates from the site at Sotira (Dikaios 1962, 194).

This conclusion is borne out by a re-examination of the published evidence and, less conclusively perhaps because of its limited nature, by the evidence of a small sounding at the site undertaken by the author in 1972 (Stanley Price and Christou 1973). The four main aims of this 2 m square sounding included further observation of the aceramic-ceramic stratigraphy and the collection of additional radiocarbon samples in an attempt to determine the duration of the aceramic occupation.

In the last decade the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic has undertaken a number of projects to develop the economy of the country. The most important of these has been the construction of a dam on the Euphrates at Tabqa (fig. 1), 40 km upstream from Raqqa. This project will bring great economic benefits to Syria but, as the valley behind the dam fills with water, many ancient sites will be drowned. Because very little was known about the archaeology of this stretch of the Euphrates the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria organised an international programme of surveys and excavations to recover as much information as possible about past human settlement in the valley before the dam was completed. This programme has yielded excellent results; important sites in almost every period from the prehistoric to the Islamic have been discovered and excavated. The work has been carried out by the Syrian authorities themselves and fifteen other teams. We were asked to excavate a prehistoric site as our contribution to the programme and so in 1971 we made a brief survey of the valley to look for a site.

Pioneer surveys and excavations by de Contenson and others had established an outline of the later prehistory of Syria. Neolithic settlements (fig. 2) had been excavated at Ras Shamra (Schaeffer 1962, 153 ff.) and Tabbat el-Hammam (Braidwood 1940, 196 ff.) on the coast, Tell Ramad (de Contenson 1971, 279 ff.) and other smaller sites near Damascus, and Buqras (de Contenson and van Liere 1966, 182 ff.) in the Euphrates valley. From these excavations the later Neolithic of the sixth millennium bc and after was relatively well-known. This was the period when ‘dark-faced burnished ware’, the earliest pottery found in Syria, was first made. The archaeological sequence could be taken further back as seventh millennium aceramic Neolithic levels had been found at Ras Shamra, Ramad and Buqras. Then there was a gap in the sequence, representing the earlier seventh and the later eighth millennia bc. Only one earlier site was known; this was Mureybat which had been discovered when the first surveys of the Tabqa dam area were made (Rihaoui 1965, 106; van Loon 1967, 15). The first campaign of excavations here, directed by van Loon, had revealed tantalising remains of a settlement dating from 8000 bc (van Loon 1968, Table 1), the very beginning of the Neolithic in Syria.

Detailed regional studies of dated alluvial formations in Greece confirm the Vita-Finzi alluviation cycle and favour climatic causation. A review of recent work in this field reveals substantial, if unexpected, support for the cycle, and archaeologists and geographers are urged to recognise its validity and concentrate on its very significant effects.

Ever since the publication of Gordon Childe's Danube in Prehistory, almost fifty years ago, the first neolithic colonisation of temperate Europe through the Balkans has been one of the cornerstones of European prehistory. There is still a consensus of opinion in most of the recent literature on the general character of this process: that it involved the transmission of farming techniques and probably the movement of groups of peoples—the first farmers. Farming was ‘carried into central Europe up the Danube … a stone-using agricultural peasantry was widely established in eastern Europe by 5000 B.C.’ (Piggott 1965, 46). However, it has been extremely difficult to proceed beyond this kind of general statement, because there is still an alarming shortage of detailed economic evidence from early neolithic sites in the Balkans. Plant remains and animal bones have been reported from neolithic sites scattered across the area (Murray 1970; Renfrew 1973), but in many cases the recovery of this kind of economic evidence was not the primary objective of excavation and, as a result, the methods employed to gather such evidence have rarely been sufficiently refined to meet the stringent requirements of modern faunal and plant analysis. Alexander (1972, 34) noted recently that, in the case of the First Neolithíc of Yugoslavia, ‘there is as yet no detailed analysis of the animmal bones from any site’ and adequate faunal and botanical reports from early neolithic excavations are still all too few in the Balkan area as a whole.

In 1947 C. J. Becker, in his fundamental classifying work on the Early Neolithic phase of the socalled ‘Funnel-Beaker Culture’, described this set of phenomena within a frame of reference which can at best be termed ‘tribal’ (Becker 1947). For instance, in the late period of the Early Neolithic, Period C of the sequence, he observes certain differences, primarily of the type of decoration, in the pottery of respectively Northern Jutland and Southern Denmark. This result is connected with the differential patterns of distribution for other cultural features including forms of burial. Accordingly, the southern complex is baptized ‘The South Danish Megalithic Group’, the northern one ‘The North Jutland Non-Megalithic Group’. In Southern Denmark simple—‘earth’—graves are very few, while a much higher number of dolmens with Early Neolithic C pottery is known. In North Jutland the number of earth graves is considerable, but the picture is blurred by a relatively high number of dolmens too.

Each of these assemblages, and a few minor ones not to be mentioned here, is seen as referring to a ‘tribe’ or ‘a group of tribes’ sharing the said types of graves, decorations on pottery, and, for instance, specific types of weapons. No clear-cut borderlines can, however, be drawn between the complexes as the geographical differences of the distributions consist of statistical concentrations of one or another trait in one area rather than of mutual exclusions. Only the type of decoration on the North Jutland pottery does not seem to occur outside this zone, while the reverse is not the case.

The small oval burial mound at Alfriston, East Sussex, being one of only twelve certain burial structures of the 3rd millennium bc in Sussex, was totally excavated in 1974 prior to its final obliteration by ploughing. The barrow was found to consist of a simple dump mound derived from material out of flanking ditches. It covered a single burial pit containing the crouched skeleton of a young female. Information concerning the post-Neolithic land use of Alfriston Down was obtained from the ditch silts and expanded by an intensive field survey.

The aim of this paper is to present a summary of material relating to the earliest use of copper in an area of south-east Europe which is today partly within Romanian territory and partly within the USSR.

For more than ten years, Russian scholars, notably E. N. Chernykh and N. V. Ryndina, have been publishing work on Tripolye metal, but much of this is not readily available to archaeologists who do not read Russian, and it is hoped that this paper will in some measure redress this situation. In addition, considerable use has been made of Romanian material.

Probably at least a millennium is covered by this study, ranging from approximately 4000–3000 ± 500 years bc. Approximately 750 objects of copper can, with some degree of certainty, be attributed to all but the last phase of the Cucuteni-Tripolye Culture. There are also numerous chance finds, especially of axe-adzes and related objects, but these are not being considered here (see Căpitanu 1971; Monah 1969; Mataşa 1964; Nestor 1935–6; Szekely 1967; Vulpe, A. 1964; 1973; Zbenovich 1969; etc.).

The megalithic tomb of Pedra Branca lies at Montum, on the west coast of Portugal about 140 kilometers south of Lisbon by road (fig. 1). The tomb is the first in Portugal to have yielded Beaker graves overlying earlier burials; prior to its discovery, no Beaker remains had ever been noted further south than Palmela, in the estuary of the Sado river, approximately 40 kilometers from Lisbon. The tomb is situated on the top of a small hillock 100 m above sea level, separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a fertile undulating plain about 5 km in width. The Lake of Melides lies to the north and, to the east, the hills of Grandola rise steeply to an altitude of 300 m; an expanse of rough terrain stretches to the south, ravined by various small streams which flow into the Lake of Santo André on the coast.

When the tomb was discovered by surveyors of the Geological Services of Portugal, it was already very badly damaged; all the orthostats had been broken for use in local construction and part of the circular covering mound had already been ploughed under. The Services therefore, decided that a salvage campaign was called for, and a team made up of the authors, was invited to carry it out with funds granted by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

In 1940 Professor Thurstan Shaw excavated a trench in the cave known as Bosumpra at Abetifi (6° 41′N:0° 44′W) on the borderline between the moist forest and the northern marginal forest (fig. 1). Bosumpra is one of the four main ‘abosom’ (lesser) gods of the Guan pantheon (Brokenshaw 1966, 156). The report (Shaw, 1944) showed that the cave was formerly inhabited by a people with a pottery-using microlithic culture and provided the first analytical description of the microlithic industries from the forest regions of West Africa. As the site was the first of its kind to be excavated, and the excavation was carried out before the advent of radiocarbon dating, there was no way of knowing what age this industry was, or how long the cave had been occupied, beyond placing it within the rubric of the so-called “Guinea Neolithic”.

To attempt to clarify this problem a group of students from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Ghana and myself conducted the excavation of a small witness section (fig. 2) in the cave over New Year 1973/74 with the specific aim of collecting organic material for dating. We were fortunate in finding adequate amounts of charcoal at all levels. Two of these samples were submitted to Rikagaku Kenkyusho, Japan, for dating.

The renewed controversy over the question of Mycenaean trade with ‘barbarian’ Europe (Renfrew 1968; Branigan 1970, 1972; etc.) has emphasised the need for a thorough study of the various classes of evidence involved. Recent work on the faience beads of Early Bronze Age Europe (Harding 1971; Harding and Warren 1973) has tended to show that local production is likely, at any rate in continental Europe, while a study of the amber trade to Mycenaean Greece (Harding and Hughes-Brock 1974) has shown that two main periods of trade with the Baltic are likely, the first, via Wessex, in the sixteenth/fifteenth centuries B.C., the second around 1200, down the Adriatic. Here I should like to tackle another group of material, bronze tools and implements, some of which have been used (or mis-used) in the current debate. I include here agricultural, wood-working, metallurgical and general-purpose tools; razors and tweezers are omitted, and will be discussed elsewhere, as will ornaments and objects of personal use. Knives are included, but daggers await examination together with other weapons.

Tools and implements have not often been found as items of trade in the Bronze Age Aegean. They have intrinsic value as metal, it is true, but they are usually heavy and bulky, and most easily susceptible of adaptation to local needs by local smiths. Accidental loss and intentional imitation are correspondingly less likely.

For many years excavations within British prehistoric settlement sites were largely confined to selective sampling of a very limited nature since this approach, it was thought, offered the best chance of locating an intensively occupied area from which dating evidence and perhaps even the ground plan of a structure might be recovered. More recently, with the results of a small number of large-scale area excavations to draw upon, it has become possible not only to examine the plans of individual buildings in isolation but to identify standard structural designs used repeatedly on the same sites and, further, to learn something of the overall disposition of structures within the settlement plan. This increasing body of evidence is beginning to reveal, as analogy with historic and existent settlements might anticipate, a basic dichotomy between those which grew and those which were created. To establish a terminology, we should first recognize the essential distinction between a settlement plan and a planned settlement. All settlements have a plan, but not all were consciously planned. Many will have resulted from gradual growth over a period of time, developing from a nucleus to which additions and replacements were made as required (i.e. in the parlance of urban geographers, organic settlements). Accordingly, their plans should not normally be expected to display any great degree of orderliness and will be particularly unlikely to incorporate a systematic pattern of streets.

The Polden Hill hoard, first noted in 1803, has never been fully published. The hoard consist of many elements of horse gear and trappings of the first century A.D.

Commercial gravel working in the Devil's Wood Pit, Sproughton, situated in the flood plain of the River Gipping, has produced as chance finds two barbed points of bone and antler. Both came from the sand and gravel deposits which fill the buried channel of the Gipping. The points are discussed in relation to other barbed points found in England, particularly those which have associations which allow their dates to be assessed. Radiocarbon dates from organic material within the sands and gravels suggest that the barbed points were deposited during the latter part of pollen Zone III and the early part of Zone IV. A long blade industry has been recorded from the surface of the sands and gravels, and reference is given to further details of this industry.