The Italian School of Archaeology in Athens, under the direction of Prof. Alessandro Della Seta, carried out excavations between 1930–36 on the small hill of Poliokhni near Kaminia on the east coast of the Island of Lemnos. The site was a vast Bronze Age town, without doubt one of the most important and significant that excavation has brought to light in the Aegean. Owing to the premature death of Prof. Della Seta during the war and to the fact that his successor, Professor Doro Levi was fully occupied with the activities of the School and the excavations in Crete, the results of these excavations have remained unpublished.

From the Summer of 1951, with the much valued collaboration of my colleagues in the Syracuse Museum, I have worked through the enormous amount of material recovered and have verified the facts by test excavations. In order to unify the various zones of excavation which had been made, and to fill up the lacunae still existing in our knowledge of the main outlines of the topography of the sites, I carried out further excavations in the summer of 1953, with the collaboration of Dr Giovanni Rizza. The excavations were made in the remaining untouched area near the centre of the town and brought to light the house now to be described.

From their onset, the first radiocarbon dates gave a range of the absolute chronology to come, but in their detail, they opened more problems than they settled, chiefly because of the possible or unsuspected questions in relation to the reliability of the samples themselves (Delibrias and Giot, 1970). It is only with the experience of great numbers of dates, and the possibility of considering them so to speak statistically, that one can evaluate the real implications of the time scales provided by the method.

In Brittany, beginning with a few dates provided by the Groningen Laboratory under H. de Vries, we have been afterwards nearly totally supplied by the Centre des Faibles Radioactivités at Gif-sur-Yvette (Giot, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971; Coursaget and Le Run, 1968; Delibrias, Guillier and Labeyrie, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969, 1970; Coppens, Durand and Guillet, 1968; Vogel and Waterbolk, 1963).

We now benefit with more than 200 radiocarbon dates for Brittany alone. We shall consider here about 140 of them, disregarding some duplicates, dates pertaining to periods older than the Neolithic cultures or on the contrary later than the Iron Age, and dates only concerning geological natural sites, though these can be full of interest by their information about the botanical scenery and the effects of cultivation or pasture.

In his important study of early wheeled vehicles from the Caucasus region, S. Piggott briefly considered two terracotta models of wagons with arched tilts from the Near East (Piggott 1968, 273). Following Speiser (1934), he argued that the actual wagons represented by these models had been introduced into the Near East from the Caucasus by the later 3rd millennium B.C. The present article aims at a more comprehensive review of the Near-Eastern evidence. It will be almost exclusively concerned with terracotta models of both four-wheeled wagons and two-wheeled carts, because these constitute practically all the documentation we have of vehicles with tilts. This material undoubtedly will be incomplete, since there must be more examples among the many models that have not been published, or published only inadequately. A full description will be possible only in the one case where we have personally examined the model (wagon A1).

The absence of earth-filled structural features or easily identifiable graves precluded any systematic sampling programme for environmental evidence. However, two samples for the analysis of carbonised plant remains were collected from each of the two insitu inhumations (SF55 and SF73). The samples consisted of the sediment associated with the burials which included the matrix of the overlying cairn (context 002), and were processed using manual flotation into an 0.5 mm mesh sieve. The sample sizes and results are given in Table 1.

The evidence was minimal: only three fragments were found, none of which could be adequately identified. In sample 1, one grass seed was found, but it was badly preserved and could not be identified to genus. In sample 2, one cereal grain was found, again too badly preserved to distinguish it as either wheat or barley. The Polygonumsp. seed from sample 4 again is too fragmented to allow an identification to species level.

At the time when the type-sites of the Dordogne were being explored French archaeologists were equally active further south in their country. From caves and surface sites in the Mediterranean provinces local landowners, doctors and clergy were collecting material which not only matched most of the palaeolithic tool forms being distinguished in the south-west of France, but was later to provide Déchelette with many of his illustrations for the neolithic and metal ages. It was not uncommon for flints, pottery and metal all to come from the same cave.

These old collections, or such of them as can be traced, are the basis of what is known about the prehistory of the south of France. Unfortunately, much of the material has come down to us with very little information, apart from provenance, and although some details of excavation were carefully recorded it seems generally to have been considered that plans of caves were more informative than sections through them.

Topographically the south of France consists largely of a narrow alluvial plain, stretching right round the Gulf of Lions between the Italian and Spanish frontiers and broadening out in the delta of the Rhône. Today the region is distinguished from the rest of France by its Mediterranean climate. East of the Rhône, in Provence, this coastal climate is soon modified to the north by the high mountains, but in the old province of Languedoc between the Rhône and the Pyrenees the typical Mediterranean vegetation is carried up onto the rocky limestone plateau, or Garrigue, until it reaches the barren Causses of the Massif Central. In France, the western limit of this climatic zone falls between Carcassonne and Toulouse, but eastward and to the south the Mediterranean conditions continue, so that the south French plain forms a climatic unit with the coastlands of Italy and Spain.

This plain, shut in to the north by high land, is most easily accessible from the sea or coastwise from adjacent Mediterranean countries. Easy communication with the rest of France is confined to the great river valleys of the Rhône and Aude which cut through the mountains to the north and west.

It is a commonplace that of all the mobile art-forms of prehistoric times pottery is the least mobile and the most domestic. It would be wrong to assert categorically that never before the Roman period or the years immediately preceding it was pottery the subject of trade and transport; but the traffic was at least on a limited scale. Unlike objects of metal, therefore, which may wander far from their place of origin in the course of trade or other movement, pottery closely reflects in its distribution the relationship between culture and geography.

Pot-making, too, is a comparatively lowly, if an expressive, craft. In a wealthy community, or in a community with varying levels of wealth, pottery takes second place to metal or (where it exists) glass: usually, therefore, pottery is the borrower both of form and of ornament. And while with an inventive people the result may in due course be something new and significant in itself, in less fortunate circumstances—as for instance under the mass-production methods of Roman times—the potter's debt becomes a lifeless imitation of, or a negative development from, the forms and motifs of the superior materials.

In the autumn of 1936, a prehistoric grave was discovered near the village of Janislawice, Skierniewice Voievodom, central Poland, by two local farmers whilst digging for gravel. The grave was located on the north bank of the Lupia River (a tributary of the Bzura River), 13m above the river valley and 159 m above OD. It was dug into gravelly-sandy fluvioglacial deposits of the penultimate glaciation, on the slope of a kame hill (fig. 1). Although the grave was partially damaged in the discovery, in April of the following year the site was investigated by K. Jazdzewski, from the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw. A stratigraphic sequence was recorded, and the skeleton and a variety of grave goods were excavated.

The single skeleton had been placed in a sitting position, the legs outstretched and the back leaning against the wall of the grave pit. Red ochre powder was also probably present in small quantities in the fill. The skeleton was that of a man, aged about 30, having a ‘robust’ build and showing craniometrical similarities to modern Lapp populations (Steslicka-Mydlarska 1954).

The discovery of Floor 85, in 1920, with its definite three period stratification, for the first time demonstrated what some people had long suspected, viz., that the Grimes' Graves industry was not confined to any one period exclusively, but was the outcome of a practically continuous local development from an early stage in the pre-historic period down to the end of Neolithic times, and the exploration of this Floor established three important facts:—

(1) That an early industry had existed on the site characterised by the practice of naturalistic engraving on flint crust and the production of flint implements of certain distinctive types from mined flint of the variety known as Floor-stone.

(2) That that industry was the earliest so far recognised at Grimes' Graves and was clearly not contemporary with any of the 366 visible mine shafts on the site, but ante-dated them so considerably that the implements of the lowest level, F.85c, had become patinated and buried beneath accumulations of humus, etc., before mining operations commenced at that place.

Excavation of a small ring-ditch in advance of gravel extraction at Bromfield, Shropshire, produced rare evidence for an Iron Age inhumation burial associated with a barrow. The burial, identified from a soil stain, was associated with fragments of a La Tene I iron brooch and a penannular iron bracelet with adhering textiles, and a bronze pendant, suggesting a date in the 5th–4th century BC.