The excavation of the earthwork and part of the interior of a C-shaped enclosure in south Norfolk produced evidence of a Neolithic occupation from the mid fourth to the late third millennium B.C. The earthwork was constructed at the end of the third millennium B.C. and palaeobotanical analyses of the fossil soil beneath it produced information concerning the environment of the time. Quantities of pot-sherds and stone tools were recorded from the earthwork and from clusters of pits, and a study of grain impressions on the pottery has given some indication of the crops cultivated in the third millennium B.C. in East Anglia. The report is concluded with a discussion of a system of fossil ice-wedge casts uncovered during the excavation and their relevance to archaeological investigations.

This opaque red glass occurs at an early date in Egypt in the decoration of glass vessels (Fossing, 1940) and other material has been found from excavations in the Near East at Nimrud, as circular cakes (Turner, 1954, 454), and at Persepolis, as a bead, a slab and a lump (Matson, 1957, 130). This ‘specialized’ glass continued to be made in Mediterranean countries down to the Roman era, and chemical analyses have been published of specimens from a number of sites including Pompeii and the Isle of Elephantine; these have been recorded by Caley (1962), who has conveniently collected many analyses previously published in various journals.

As a result of the present work it is clear that there are two distinct types of opaque red glass. In the type which occurs earlier and then continues in use the colour and opacity are due to metallic copper in a colloidal state; in the type which occurs later, for a more limited period, much lead oxide is present and the colour and opacity are caused by small particles of cuprous oxide. Previous authors have not always clearly distinguished between the two types and therefore the frequent identification of an opaque red glass as a cuprous oxide type must be treated with some caution unless supported by microscopic or chemical evidence.

For many years a programme of examining stone implements has been organized by the Council for British Archaeology's Sub-Committee for Implement Petrology. The East Anglian aspect of this programme, covering the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex, has long been active, being administered from Norwich Castle Museum under the auspices of the CBA, first by the late R. Rainbird Clarke and more recently by the authors of this report. The petrological work has been very largely undertaken by Dr F. S. Wallis and Mr E. D. Evens in co-operation with the Geological Department of Bristol University. The results embodied in this report, with those for Yorkshire recently published (Keen & Radley, 1971) and other identifications noted in the CBA's Annual Reports, and with the Fifth Report on south-western implements which appears elsewhere in these Proceedings (Evens, Smith & Wallis, 1972), may be taken together as a measure of the debt which prehistorians owe to Dr. Wallis and Mr Evens—the ‘Evens and self’ of much correspondence.

This paper attempts to bring together all the figurines of Syrian and Anatolian character that have been recorded from Bronze Age Europe. Several groups are distinguished, Syrian figurines from south Russia, Hittite and Syrian figurines from Mycenaean Greece, figurines from northern Europe, and post-Mycenaean forms in Greece.

Notes to the text appear at the end of the paper.

Among the objects from Romanian collections exhibited at the British Museum from January to March 1971 was a disc-butted axe from Someseni, near Cluj, Romania, the condition of whose surface is so good that a detailed study of the technique of its decoration is possible. A silicone rubber mould of it was made for this purpose (Pl. XV). The results of examination of the mould are interesting enough to justify summary publication even though no directly comparable material has been published in this way.

For illustrations of the axe, and discussions of its provenance and date see Nestor (1938); Mozsolics (1967), 33 f., 163, and Taf. 13, 3, a–d; Hänsel (1968), 61 f. and 189; see also p. 26 of the catalogue, Treasures from Romania, of the exhibition, in which it is No. 18. We use here the terminology and methods outlined by us in Lowery, Savage, Wilkins (1971).

With one notable exception, the study of Italian prehistory has developed with little emphasis on the economic interpretation of cultures. The exception has been the so-called ‘Apennine’ Bronze Age of central and southern Italy, which has commonly been defined as a cultural phenomenon involving an economy of pastoralism and large-scale stock-keeping. In 1959 Professor S. M. Puglisi published his major examination of the Apennine Bronze Age, which has remained the principal statement of the ‘pastoralist’ hypothesis (Puglisi, 1959). In recent years the Swedish Institute in Rome has carried out an important series of excavations on the acropolis of Luni sul Mignone in northern Lazio (Östenberg, 1967). The excavations discovered imposing house foundations cut into the soft volcanic tufo or tuff; from this architectural evidence, as well as the analysis of faunal and plant remains from Luni and other sites, Professor Östenberg concluded that ‘the Apennine culture had a mixed economy with agriculture and stock-breeding as basic components … pastoral nomadism cannot therefore be looked upon as the primary characteristic feature of the Apennine culture’ (Östenberg, 1967, 260). Puglisi based his argument upon both ethnographic and archaeological evidence.

The earliest copper alloy of the British Bronze Age is arsenical copper, a material relatively short-lived when compared with the succeeding tin bronze but of no little importance when tracing the stages and progress of prehistoric metal working. Like tin, arsenic functions as a mild deoxidant and confers the useful property of work-hardening upon the metal. Copper-arsenic alloys need to be strengthened by cold working, and it was probably this requirement as much as any other that would have led to their eventual disuse and replacement by cast tin bronzes. The normal source of arsenic for such alloys is generally agreed as a constituent of the copper ore actually smelted, usually the grey tetrahedrite tennantite mineral (Coghlan and Case, 1957; Tylecote, 1962), although other suggestions have been made (Charles, 1967).

The hoard of gold torcs from Ipswich comprises five found in 1968, to which must be added a sixth found on 18 October 1970. The five found in 1968 were in immediate association with each other and are here numbered 1 to 5. The 1970 find, my number 6, may be accepted as from the same hoard but separated from the others during the course of earth-moving in the area concerned.

All the torcs are outstanding examples of early Celtic craftsmanship, and the group is of exceptional technical interest and great sociological and economic significance.

The present report is the fifth to be issued by this Committee in the course of 35 years' work on the petrological identification of stone implements. The four earlier reports (Keiller, Piggott and Wallis, 1941; Stone and Wallis, 1947; Stone and Wallis, 1951; Evens, Grinsell, Piggott and Wallis, 1962—hereafter referred to as the Fourth Report) were concerned primarily with stone implements from South-Western England, but also included implements from other parts of the British Isles. Since the early 1960s, when a series of regional implement petrology surveys was set up under the aegis of the Council for British Archaeology, this Committee's official work has been confined to the South-West, a region which, for administrative purposes, now comprises the seven counties of Berkshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire, together with the Channel Islands. Hampshire, formerly within this Committee's area of special interest, has been allocated to the South-East, with Sussex, Surrey and Kent. The present report is concerned, therefore, exclusively with implements from the South-West, as defined above.

The group of bronzes from Surbo, Apulia, published in volume 36 of the Proceedings (Macnamara, 1970) form a most important addition to our knowledge of prehistoric relations between the Aegean and the Italian peninsula. They also form a suitable basis for further discussion of four related problems, the date of the Surbo group itself, the chronology of the Mycenaean short swords of Sandars type F (Catling's type Fii), the feasibility of Mycenaean contacts with western Europe, and the reliability of hoards for the dating of bronze tools and weapons. I should like to comment briefly on each of these problems in turn.

Interest concerning the origins of the faience beads found in Britain has led to much discussion and speculation. Occurring as they do primarily in Scottish EBA contexts and Wessex cremation burials, these beads link together British cultural extremes of the second millennium BC. By their occurrence also in Europe and more profusely in the Near East, they suggest trade connections which require the most searching examination of the evidence before definite conclusions as to their source can be reached. The classic studies on faience beads were completed by Beck and Stone (1936) and Stone and Thomas (1956). Their carefully considered opinions indicated positively an Eastern origin for the British beads, but this view has been challenged recently by Newton and Renfrew (1970) using as a basis for their thesis the spectrographic analyses reported by Stone and Thomas who had ruefully regarded them as non-indicative of provenance. It must be stated from the outset that the work to be described here does not indicate the exact source of the British beads but it can be claimed to resolve adequately the problem of the local as opposed to Eastern origins.

The site was first occupied in the Bronze Age by a small agricultural settlement, consisting of two circular timber houses with ancillary structures and ditches. One house was eventually replaced by a stone structure. A single radiocarbon determination suggests that the settlement is to be dated within the period 1700–1300 B.C. The Iron Age settlement of Trevisker Round was probably established in the second century B.C., if not earlier. An original inner enclosure, half an acre in area, housing a single defended farmstead, was later superseded by a larger defended enclosure, 3 acres in area, also with circular timber houses and occupation areas. This occupation was followed at the end of the first century A.D., by a Romano-British phase of occupation, which lasted until the middle of the second century.

Non-hominid faunal remains associated with cultural deposits have long been of interest to archaeologists. Recent archaeological work (Coutts and Higham, 1971; Daly, 1969; Drew et al., 1971; Flannery, 1966; Higham and Leach, 1971; Shawcross, 1967; Ucko and Dimbleby, 1969) is showing an increased utilization of these associated faunal remains for detailed analysis of prehistoric man's environment, hunting techniques, dietary habits, the effects of domestication upon animals, changes in these over time, and seasonal dating.

As analysis becomes more detailed and the need to extract increased amounts of relevant and sophisticated data from faunal remains grows more demanding, the representative quality of our samples of faunal remains becomes more critical. Many of the demands made upon our samples require that increased attention be paid to the recovery and analysis of some of the less obvious constituents of these faunal assemblages.

If the fine structure of the carbon-14 deviation curve published by Professor H. E. Suess (in Proceedings of the 12th Nobel Symposium, I. U. Olsson (ed.), 1970) is correct, then the period from c. 2200 bc to c. 1700 bc in radiocarbon years falls within one of the insensitive regions in which carbon-14 determinations could have a number of alternative chronological values and hence could not be used to order archaeological evidence. Without disputing the now well established general trend of radiocarbon variation, it is the purpose of this paper to suggest, from recurrent evidence drawn from four recently studied Late Neolithic enclosures, that the detailed structure of Suess' curve is not necessarily valid. Uncalibrated radiocarbon dates based on the conventional 5570 year half-life of carbon-14 are used throughout this paper.