In 1884 I was initiated into the study ot flint and its fracture while accompanying Mr. John French, of Felstead, Essex, on his rambles alter “Chipped Flints,” some of which were for many years accepted as Palæolithic implements. From 1887-92 my apprenticeship continued under the late John Allen Brown, F.G.S., who did so much pioneer work among the Thames gravels. From those days to the present I have spent most of my spare time “Flint-hunting” in Essex, East Anglia, and the London District.

From 1896 to 1900 (in view of the geological positions in which they were found), I gradually became dissatisfied with the law laid down by authorities, that facetted flints and bulbous flakes were prıma facie evidence of Man; and I began to wonder whether man had really made them, or whether Nature in her diverse methods had chipped them during the more recent geological formations. These doubts were strengthened in 1906 by the discovery that my treasured Palæos from Felstead were probably derived from the base of the Westleton gravels, which out-cropped near the fields in which we found them. In a pit I found chipped and facetted flints of absolutely meaningless shape.

Prehistory, in Great Britain, is usually taken to denote the whole story of human activity in our country before its invasion, or before the invasion of any given part of it, by the Romans in the 1st century A.D.; it may also denote the totality of research upon, and interpretation of that story. The adjective Prehistoric was first popularized in the 19th century by Sir John Lubbock, the first Lord Avebury, and it and its cognate substantive Prehistory have been found so convenient, that we take their use for granted. Yet to a strictly logical mind they are tiresome and problematic words. Since what is Prehistoric must precede in time what is Historic, Prehistory should precede History; and History, to Lubbock, was evidently History in its restricted sense of the story of human activity known to us from written documents. But History can mean more than that: even the original Ancient Greek word historía did not mean history only in Lubbock's sense—the word for that was syngraphé—but rather, anything found out by enquiry. Thus to-day in the 20th century, when the range covered by documentary history has been enormously extended, both in time and space, by archaeology and anthropology in all their branches, we can speak also, as Elliot Smith did in his book of twenty years ago, of Human History as covering all the human story—all of What Happened in History, as Professor Childe's book called it in 1942—without restriction. In other words, History in the broad sense includes Prehistory, which must yet precede History in the narrow sense. We, as prehistorians, are of course quite used to this; and we seldom notice the patient smile on the face of the logician.

Survey in the inhospitable steppe lands of eastern Jordan has revealed late neolithic settlements, part of a settlement pattern probably of the sixth millennium BC. Faunal and artefactual evidence is sparse, but the sites are characterized by lithic assemblages dominated by burins. Analysis of the structures and their relationship to artefactual deposits offer opportunities for further research.

The pioneer study of seed and plant-finds from prehistoric and Roman sites in this country was made by Helbaek and Jessen in 1944, and it was with the assistance of their findings that the present paper was originally written. Subsequently Helbaek carried the same research further, publishing his results in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society for 1952. These new results have considerably modified our notions of the cereal crops grown in both the prehistoric and Roman periods in Britain, partly owing to the examination of hitherto unanalysed finds and partly to the accumulation of experience in identification, which made it possible to correct previous errors. Thus, it has now been established that Triticum vulgare (Breadwheat) and Triticum compactum (Clubwheat) are much rarer among prehistoric finds than previously thought; and many specimens previously identified as Emmer were found by Helbaek to be Spelt. These modifications have necessitated a reconsideration of the bases of the present paper, but seem to the writer to confirm its main thesis.

Two celebrated archaeological studies laid the foundation upon which the prevailing conception of the Late Bronze Age in Britain has been built. In ‘A Prehistoric Invasion of England’ O. G. S. Crawford isolated a number of intrusive forms characteristic of British Late Bronze Age hoards, pointed out how these could be connected with intrusive ‘Deverel-Rimbury’ types of pottery by means of the maple-leaf razors, which occur in settlements as well as hoards, and inferred that these types, including leaf-shaped swords, represented an invasion, which he at first attributed to Goidelic Celts. Peake's Bronze Age and the Celtic World was wider in scope but less critical in method. The evolution of the sword in Bronze Age Europe was analyzed and an almost exclusive reliance placed on the diffusion of the successive types of sword as evidence for far-flung folk-movements. The importance of Peake's work for this study lies in the special turn given to its leading idea a few years later by Estyn Evans, who, in an able paper laid special emphasis on a particular type—the ‘carp's-tongue’ sword—as evidence of a definite folk-movement from the West Alpine area into south-eastern England. Soon afterwards Professor Hawkes gave fuller definition to the ‘Carp's-tongue’ sword complex, to which he assigned bag-shaped chapes, end-winged axes, socketed axes with winged decoration, ‘bugle-shaped objects,’ ‘hog-backed’ razors, and various other types, and clarified the distinction between it and the more widely distributed group of undifferentiated Late Bronze Age hoards regarded as representing the reaction of the native bronze industry.

The excavation of this site on the southern outskirts of Ramsey (nat. grid ref. SC452936) was undertaken as a rescue operation when a building estate was to encroach upon the large mound which formed a conspicuous feature in the field. The Manx Museum and National Trust acknowledges the co-operation of the Planning Committee of the Isle of Man Local Government Board in stipulating as a condition of planning approval that opportunity must be given for scientific examination of the site. The excavation (necessarily accommodated with other commitments, and briefly delayed through snow) took place within the period December 1968 to April 1969.

Early References to the Site. As well as a strong local tradition that the mound was a burial place, references to the site occur in the local antiquarian literature. The earliest appears to be that in Oswald's Vestigia (1860, 57–58), where he notes the inspection of this site by the Rev. W. Kermode of Ramsey at the time when it was first given over to the plough, c. 1850. Kermode remarked that the ‘mound of considerable dimensions … had on the top the usual kist vaen,—a rude stone grave, consisting of a few upright stones with a large heavy slab resting on the top; within were found some very small pieces of unbaked pottery, with a black substance which was probably charred human bones.’ From the north–south orientation of the cist he surmised that it might have been a Viking grave.

This round barrow, a bowl type, was built in two phases, its construction and use extending from about 1600–1400 bc (2000–1675 B.C.). The first mound was constructed with a mixture of chalk and sand from an oval ditch, covering a contracted burial of a child in a grave cut out of the chalk. The child was accompanied by a hybrid beaker. In the second phase the centre of the first mound was removed and partly pulled back into the ditch, and a contracted burial of an adult accompanied by a late beaker interred just off centre of a new mound built of sand covering the first, and capped in chalk obtained from a second ditch. Either simultaneously, or within a very short time a further burial, unaccompanied, in a tree-trunk coffin, was placed nearby, and this was followed by subsequent interments, the earliest of which was accompanied by jet beads and a spacer plate. Finally a further digging out of the mound took place on the east side to establish a cremation area, afterwards mounded over.

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.

As a result of the exclusive use of extremely small megaliths (miniliths), the prehistoric stone settings of Exmoor, south-west England, challenge current approaches to the interpretation of monumental stone architecture during the later Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. Whilst the broader context of the practice of erecting tiny upright stones (a seemingly diverse and widespread phenomenon) and the reasons why this diminutive architecture has tended to escape sustained critical comment have been explored (smaller stone elements being relegated to a generalised background or subsidiary role such as ‘packing’), attempts to explain the settings have been remarkably few. Drawing upon the results of ten years of piecemeal fieldwork on the moor the present paper seeks to rectify this, arguing that far from being generalised ritual structures or metaphorical expressions of hunting groups, the tiny stones were, instead, an integral part of a dynamic human–animal landscape of movement and pause.

This paper sets out the results of radiocarbon, histological, and contextual analysis of human remains from non-mortuary contexts in Middle and Late Bronze Age Britain. In the latter period in particular, human bone (much of it fragmentary and disarticulated) has frequently been recovered from settlement contexts and from other locations, such as waterholes, across the wider landscape. However, the source and post-mortem trajectories of such finds are poorly understood. The results of our analyses indicate that some of these finds come from primary burials while others were the result of post-mortem processes such as excarnation. Certain fragments appear to have been curated for lengthy periods of time but there is much less evidence for deliberate curation of bone than there is in Early Bronze Age graves, although other forms of manipulation, such as cutting and shaping of bone fragments, have been recorded. In contrast to the Early Bronze Age, where it has been argued that curated bones may have belonged to venerated ancestors, some of the individuals from the sites discussed in this paper had suffered violent deaths, suggesting that bones selected for manipulation, curation, and deposition may have belonged to a variety of different categories of person.

In the west we are accustomed to walking on bog, we therefore learn to tread light, seeing around us, but just out of reach, the contours of a more solid landscape. We have sequence and relative chronology, but if we tread too heavily, feeling for the subsoil of absolute dates and historical nomenclature, we are apt to flounder, if not to sink. Nevertheless in some places the bog has shrunk exposing solid, rock-like dates, dates that belong to a subsoil of history in a continent already mapped. As such we are concerned with the discovery of those false stepping-stones that lie deceptively on the surface of the bog. In the disclosure of the true rocks and exposure of the false, Gordon Childe has led us for long.

One may preach on almost any subject from a text in The Dawn of European Civilization: I am however more concerned at present with the paper written in 1948 for these Proceedings in which Childe reviewed the beginnings of the Late Bronze Age north of the Alps, and the nature of the connexions between temperate Europe and the Near East at that particular moment, and especially as shown by a number of bronze ornaments, implements and weapons. More interesting still was the suggestion of a possible link between the exploitation of metal in the eastern Alps and the last phase of prosperity of the Minoan-Mycenaean world just before its collapse with the repercussions of that collapse.

The recent discovery in the reserve collection of the Cyprus Museum of a bronze cut-and-thrust sword of the form well known as Naue Type II provides an opportunity for a fresh consideration of the significance of the appearance of this weapon type in the Eastern Mediterranean during what, in that area, were the closing stages of the Late Bronze Age.

This paper begins with a detailed account of the sword in the Cyprus Museum both on its own account and as an illustration of the class as a whole. Then follows a catalogue, illustrated by the distribution map (fig. 1), of the known examples from the Eastern Mediterranean, in which emphasis is laid as far as possible on the dating evidence for individual examples. Finally, a general summary is attempted of what is known about their origin and some discussion is offered on their general implications.

This paper discusses the complex societies which flourished on the central plateau of southern Africa between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers between c. AD 800 and 1500, and the models which can be proposed for how they functioned and why they developed. The principal archaeological monuments left by these societies are their regional political centres, the stone enclosures or zimbabwes (fig. 1), of which Great Zimbabwe is the best known and most elaborate (fig. 2). (The traditional spelling zimbabwe(s) is used in this paper rather than the correct but lesser known spelling dzimbahwe singular and madzimbahwe plural.) They varied considerably in size, but the largest probably housed populations numbering several thousands — Great Zimbabwe itself has been estimated to have had a population of some 30,000 people (Huffman 1984) — and their construction implies organized labour on a substantial scale. The main population lived in densely clustered huts outside the stone enclosure. Artefacts suggest that they were commoners, with the servants of the king and minor officials living close to the central hill. Beyond was an outer ring of prestige residences with their own housing units (fig. 2). ‘Great Zimbabwe was the product of a highly stratified society: the stone walls are essentially demonstrations of the prestige of a ruling class, a symbol of political authority that spread over the whole plateau’ (Garlake 1973, 14).

Therfield heath, the expanse of chalk downland on the west side of Royston, has long enjoyed a local fame for the number of barrows and other antiquities which diversify its surface. On the north side it is bounded by the Icknield Way and so is well placed on the corridor between Wessex and East Anglia.

By far the most important monument on the Heath is a small long barrow notable as the only example known in East Anglia, its nearest neighbours being the destroyed Dunstable barrow 25 miles to the west, and, further still, the Churn barrow west of the Thames near the Goring Gap.

The outward form of the barrow is well-preserved (fig. 1, plan 1), exhibiting the typical club-shaped plan, the broader and higher end to the east. It is 110 feet long, 56 feet wide and 6 feet high at the east end, and 25 feet wide and 2 feet wide at the west. The Ordnance Survey references are Herts 6 inch 4 NE and 25 inch 4, 8. The latitude is 52°2′35″ and the longitude 0° 2′ 40″ w. The height above sea level is 385 feet.

It is unfortunate that the late E. B. Nunn of Royston, who opened most of the barrows on the Heath, completely gutted the interior of this long barrow. By the courtesy of Dr W. M. Palmer, M.A., M.D., F.S.A. I am able to publish the following extract from Nunn's manuscript describing his operations here eighty years ago. Fig. 2 is a reproduction of the sketch which illustrates his account.

New discoveries during recent years of Palaeolithic implements near March and other places in the Fen District are important, because little is known of the cultural stages which can be correlated with the marine March Gravel. As far as I know, the only palaeoliths which have been reported so far from the Fenland area are:—

(1). A flake of Levalloisian type from Griffin's pit, one mile south-east of Wimblington; and a flake of Clactonian type from Bedlam Farm, 1 mile north-east of Manea (Baden-Powell, 1934, figs. 4–5, p. 217).

(2). An ‘almond-shaped’ implement reported from March by the Geological Survey (Skertchly, in Whitaker, 1893, p. 113). Apparently this specimen has not yet been fully described or figured.

(3). Five Acheulian implements and various flakes from Tottenhill south of King's Lynn; also flakes from South Wootton north of King's Lynn. Most of these implements were found by Dr C. B. Plowright, and were mentioned by H. J. Hillen (Hillen 1911, p. 118) and by J. E. Marr (Marr, 1920, pp. 186–7 and 1926, p. 120). These specimens were presented to the King's Lynn Museum, where there is also an Acheulian implement from East Winch, near the Nar Valley.

(4). A number of implements from various gravels in and around the south-eastern Fens, mentioned by J. G. D. Clark (1938, pp. 253–4). One from Burnt Fen was identified as Levallois v.

The original draft of this paper was read at the First International Congress of Prehistoric Sciences in 1932, and a summary was printed in the ‘Proceedings of the Congress’ (p. 144). It has since been re-written and incorporates new evidence.

The English long barrows have not been dealt with as a whole since the classic paper of Dr Thurnam in 1868, but a series of regional studies, mainly the production of the archaeological department of the Ordnance Survey, have made the material available in convenient form. The publication of the Survey's complete map of British megaliths will enable many problems to be approached from the view point of distribution, but the southern English material, which is already published, raises one problem, at least, of first-class importance.