In his great study of practical ways and means of daily life in prehistoric Europe, our former Hon. Editor, and President, wrote of the archaeology of horse driving and riding as being ‘slight and difficult to interpret’ (Clark, 1952, 301), and these words have remained very true twenty years on. The study of horse drawn vehicles, and of items of bridling and harness, has, nevertheless, received a good deal of attention, and the leading references have been usefully brought together by Piggott (1968, 313–18), and by Littauer (1969, 300). Much more difficult is the matter of the ridden horse in temperate Europe not only for the scarcity of direct skeletal material, and the usually deplorable circumstances of its excavation, but on account of confusion in the application of terminology, zoological and veterinary, no less than in the existence of many traditional assumptions about the identity and characteristics of the earliest horse domesticators, not to speak of the animal itself. From an archaeological point of view, it has been too easy to forget the animal for the trappings, and to appear to assume that any horse could be decked out regardless of shape or size to perform specialized tasks.

In this short contribution, most gladly dedicated to Grahame Clark, an attempt is made to bring together material for an interim statement, and to consider what guide lines in interpretation can be followed in the light of information on horsemanship in adjacent regions of the Ancient World that are considerably better documented.

The concentration of prehistoric monuments, broadly of the later third and early second millennium B.C., in the upper Tay valley, has been noted by more than one archaeologist in recent years (Stewart, 1958–9; Coles, J. M. and Simpson, 1965). The multiple stone circle to be described lies no more than 2 miles (3·2 km) from the north-eastern end of Loch Tay at Kenmore, and 4 miles (6·2 km) west of Aberfeldy, at Nat. Grid Ref. NN/797472 (fig. 1). It stands some 400 feet (122 m) above sea level, near and to the south of the main Aberfeldy–Kenmore road near the farm of Croft Moraig or Morag, and has long been known as a prehistoric monument: ‘Yon's the Druid Stones!’ shouted the coach drivers to their passengers sixty years ago, and only ‘the begoggled motorist’ of the day was thought likely to miss it (Coles, F.R., 1909–10, 139). Probably the earliest record of the site is that made by Robert Burns on his Highland journey in 1787 (quoted in Gillies, 1938, 14):

This is the first report by C.B.A. Group IV (Yorkshire) on the petrological identification of stone axes since 1962 when the group undertook to help members, in part financially and in part with organisation, to obtain sections and petrological identifications of implements in their possession. Some of the sectioned artifacts are in the possession of individual members but the bulk belongs to public museum collections.

The programme was initiated by Mr D. P. Dymond, a former group secretary, and since 1964 has been continued by Mr Laurence Keen. A considerable quantity of axes remains to be sectioned. The rate of sectioning at present is about one hundred and twenty a year. Attempts by the writers to increase the rate of sectioning have been unsuccessful because it has proved impossible to interest capable technicians in the project. However, grateful acknowledgment must be made here to Mr E. D. Evens who has willingly arranged for the sectioning of virtually all the axes in the following Register. The majority of thin sections was made by Mr E. W. Seavill. The writers would also like to thank Dr F. S. Wallis, who has also kindly checked the geological part of this report, Dr D. W. Humphries, Professor W. F. Grimes, Mr J. Bartlett who has kindly made available for publication material in his keeping, Mr H. Coope, and Dr K. C. Dunham, who have made the petrological identifications.

C-14 datings can not only provide us with estimates of the absolute age of objects or occupation layers, but also, when available in sufficient numbers, with initial and terminal datings for cultural phases, thus defining their duration. The value of this is obvious: differential duration in different areas can at last provide definitive answers to long-disputed questions concerning the direction of cultural movement.

Working with large numbers of C-14 dates is, however, not entirely free of problems. We are, for example, regularly confronted with larger differences between datings expected to be of similar age than can be accounted for by mere statistical error (Vogel, 1969a) or which can be explained by contamination or other simple causes. One can stop at this point and accept a limited testimonial value for C-14 dates (e.g. Steuer and Tempel, 1968), or one can try to go further by calculating average dates, assuming (for the most part incorrectly) that the chance of a date being too young is equal to its chance of being too old (Neustupný, 1968). The danger in this procedure is that one loses sight of the individual character of each determination: in fact one sample is much more securely associated and more closely contemporary with finds of a particular cultural phase than another, and the chance of contamination or admixture is different for each sample.

Another problem is that the number of C-14 dates that one must take into consideration is often so large that they cannot be digested without some form of graphic presentation, and for this there is as yet no uniformity of practice.

Current belief ascribes the origins of agriculture in the Nile to diffusion in the fifth millennium B.C. from southwest Asia of plants and animals the domestication of which had first begun there in the eighth millennium or earlier. A growing body of evidence is now becoming available which shows the cultural pattern in the Nile Valley at the termination of the Pleistocene to have been appreciably more complex than was previously thought and necessitates a re-examination of the evidence on which the belief for the late appearance of domestication in Egypt is based. This pre-agricultural complexity, when examined in the light of the abundant historical and ethnographic evidence for distinctive man/animal, if not also man/plant relationships in north and northeast Africa, suggests that a process of pre-adaption using the local animal and plant resources is most likely to have preceded the introduction of the Asian domesticates. Many of the indigenous practices relating to local animals and plants persisted as late as Middle Kingdom times (2052–1786 B.C.). The appearance of the Asian food plants and animals in the fifth millennium may reflect, therefore, not the beginnings of domestication in Egypt, but the replacement of genetically less suitable local species by more satisfactory, exotic forms, a situation made possible by the beginnings of regular communication between the Nile and the Levant from that time onwards.

Jacquetta Hawkes in a paper called ‘The Proper Study of Mankind’ (Hawkes, 1968) has made an impassioned plea against what she considers to be the ‘dehumanization’ of prehistory at the hands of those who have sought to apply to it numerical methods and the techniques of the natural sciences. There can be few who do not sympathize with her denunciation of aimless manipulation of data and the use of techniques for their own sakes; and many must share Clark's fear that prehistoric archaeology will serve merely ‘… to provide intellectual games for the meritocracy’ (Clark, 1967, 472). But such comments as these only prompt the question ‘what are we studying prehistory for?’ or ‘what is prehistory about?’

The well-being of any academic discipline depends upon the posing of questions like these, for if a subject is to develop at all, it must undergo periods of self-analysis when some of its practitioners take stock of what they themselves and others are doing. The analysis may be concerned with methods and techniques and may either tacitly or openly accept the existing philosophy. Or it may consider the philosophy of the subject directly, by asking if the priorities of a past age are still acceptable or whether in the different climate of thought of the present, they must be changed. Self-analysis of this kind may however produce a state of unease and disquiet.

Eight years ago Grahame Clark published in these Proceedings a fundamental study of the earlier prehistory of archery in north-western Europe (Clark, 1963), and last year Roger Mercer developed the theme in a discussion of the evidence provided by metal arrow-heads from Reinecke Bronze B to Hallstatt D (Mercer, 1970). Between these two papers there may be thought to be little opportunity for useful additional comment, but within the ambit of the Beaker cultures of Europe (discussed only incidentally by Clark, and antecedent to Mercer's survey) some evidence seems worth critical examination, and such an examination is offered here as a footnote to Clark's wide-ranging paper. The primary suggestion to be made is that certain distinctive forms of arc-shaped or bow-shaped pendants from a restricted group of Beaker graves are in fact miniature representations, in some detail, of actual archers' bows of uniform type.

The purpose of this paper is to give an account of the prehistoric fortifications (pa) of New Zealand, firstly by describing the cultural background as it is reconstructed by ethnographers for the period immediately preceding European contact, and then by presenting new information from two excavations which have yielded valuable results on the form and function of these sites.

The New Zealand fortifications, which are mainly of the earthwork type with timber superstructures, have long been on record, and were first described by James Cook for the year 1769 (the initial discovery of New Zealand, by Tasman in 1642, was not accompanied by a landing). Recent surveys indicate that there are about 4,000 pa in New Zealand, most distributed in coastal situations in the North Island and northern South Island, and this distribution correlates with that of prehistoric populations living by simple horticulture and the exploitation of marine and forest resources. In the southerly parts of the South Island, where climate was not favourable for horticulture and where population density was slight, there appear to be no fully prehistoric fortifications. From 1769 onwards increasing European contact introduced pigs, the white potato, muskets, metals and other items which, in combination, gave rise to radically different technological and economic patterns. This paper is concerned solely with prehistoric Maori culture.

Morphologically, New Zealand pa resemble the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age earthwork hillforts of north-western Europe, and many, by their size and strength, show clear evidence of engineering skill and the ability to organize large labour forces.

A number of distinctive physiographic regions fall wholely or partly within the county of Lincolnshire: the limestone and chalk uplands of the Lincoln Edge and the Wolds, the valleys of the Trent, Ancholme and Witham, and the low lying areas of the Isle of Axholme, the Fens and the Marsh (fig. 1). The scatter of finds of Later Bronze Age metalwork shows considerable local variation (fig. 2).

These differences in distribution can be analysed statistically using the Chi Squared test (Gregory, 1963, 151–66). A comparison is made between the observed distribution of objects (o), and the pattern expected if the distribution was the product of random factors alone (e). A null hypothesis is tested by applying the formula:

.

The probability that the null hypothesis is true can then be shown graphically (Lindley and Miller, 1953). A high reading (e.g., more than 95 per cent) would indicate that the observed distribution was consonant with a random scatter, while a low reading (e.g. less than 5 per cent) would suggest that some factor other than chance governed the distribution.

The investigation of settlements as functional units is one of the cornerstones of the approach to prehistory that Grahame Clark has done so much to foster over the years. I hope therefore that the following account of the earliest phases in the development of one which played a role of major importance in the prehistory of Crete, and so of Europe, may be an appropriate contribution to the present collection of essays in his honour.

The beginnings and subsequent expansion of the Neolithic community of Knossos has become fully intelligible for the first time as a result of the two seasons of excavation carried out in 1969 and 1970. The early soundings of Evans and Mackenzie, though they indicated that the Neolithic deposit had covered a large area, threw little or no light on the growth of the settlement, and, apart from the Late Neolithic houses in the Central Court, which were cleared in 1923–4 (Evans, 1928, 1–21), none at all on its nature.

In der Fachliteratur wird oft darauf hingewiesen, dass die Schlüsse über die Dichte der urzeitlichen Besiedlung in bestimmten Gebieten, die hauptsächlich aus kartographischen Darstellungen der Fundplätze auf Grundlage des der-zeitigen Forschungsstandes abgeleitet werden, in der Regel zu früh gezogen werden und dem tatsächlichen, bisher noch weitgehend unbekanntem Stande nicht entsprechen. Manchmal erbringen weite Territorien, die als von manchen Kulturen unberührt gelten, erst unter dem Drucke konzentrierten Interesses und systematischer Forschung Beweise darüber, dass sie keine Ausnahmen darstellen, sondern gleichfalls den vorgeschichtlichen Gesellschaften in den jeweiligen Phasen ihrer anthropogeographischen Entwicklung Unterkunft boten. So war dies auch bei der postpaläolithischen und mesolithischen Besiedlung in Mitteleuropa und namentlich auf dem Gebiete der Tschechoslowakei, von welchem es noch knapp vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg (J. Skutil, 1936) nicht möglich war, verlässliches und beweiskräftiges Fundmaterial jener Periode zu erbringen, für deren allseitige Erkenntnis sich J. G. D. Clark schon damals besondere Verdienste erwarb.

Within recent years pollen-analytical studies carried out in lake sediments and raised bog peats around the head of Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, have disclosed extensive evidence for anthropogenic change at the British Pollen Zone VIIa–VIIb (Atlantic–Sub-Boreal) boundary, including characteristic ‘Ulmus Decline’, and Landnam phenomena (summarized by Oldfield, 1963). The question immediately arose as to the archaeological identity of the prehistoric communities responsible. The beginnings of Neolithic settlement in north-western England were quite obscure, and have largely so remained. The principal archaeological evidence for any Neolithic penetration of the region derives from the accidental discovery, nearly a century ago, of a bog-site at Ehenside Tarn, close to the west Cumberland coast (Piggott, 1954, 295–9; Walker, 1966), and to the presence of numerous stone axes occurring as stray finds throughout the region. More recently, the discovery of ‘stone axe factories’ on the high screes of Great Langdale and Scafell, and the wide distribution of Group VI axes therefrom, have emphasized the potentialities for further investigation (Fell, 1966, and refs. therein).

The work presented in this paper arose from an attempt to study society and economy in England during the period conventionally referred to as the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. The discussion of questions of this sort is traditionally supposed to be less reliable and important than taxonomic studies aimed at the construction of a relative chronology; this is largely because the basic assumptions of typology have not been questioned very much recently. The establishment of an absolute chronology has also been a major object of research, but now that the Mycenaean import horizon has finally collapsed (Newton and Renfrew, 1970) there is a vacuum which is hardly filled by the handful of radiocarbon dates available. We have the vaguest of ideas about what was actually happening in terms of people, but our understanding of when it was happening, and in which order, is only marginally better.

Most information has come from the contents of burial mounds, but the topographical aspects of the barrows have been neglected, despite the immensely valuable information collected by Grinsell for much of southern England, including lists of all known barrows and what has been found in them. Without this information, this kind of study would have been impossible. Grinsell's maps of round barrow distributions in Dorset (Grinsell, 1959, maps 2 and 4) and Wiltshire (Grinsell, 1957, maps IV and V) suggest that even on one geological solid (in this case chalk) there are great differences in the densities of these monuments, that bell- and disc-barrows are not distributed at random, and that a study of the sizes and types of cemetery might prove rewarding, although maps at this scale can only provide general indications.

During the last fifty years, research in the Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods in Denmark (to use the now generally accepted terms) was decisively influenced from outside. The interesting paper by Gustav Schwantes (1928) was unfortunately published when there was little activity in Denmark regarding ‘Early Stone Age’ problems. When J. G. D. Clark a few years later wrote his classic work The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe (1936), the situation was different, and the book came just in time to stimulate one of the real active periods in the study of Danish Mesolithic. Since then many new finds and excavations have been known from this country but without altering the main lines and the general picture of the hunters and fishers during the Boreal and Atlantic phases.

It would not be quite correct to say that our idea of Clark's first period in question has remained unchanged. The following lines are meant as a short survey of the time of the Northern reindeer-hunters or, according to later suggestions (e.g. by J. G. D. Clark (1950, 91)) the Late Palaeolithic. In 1936 it was only possible to register stray finds of implements here (mainly from reindeer-antler), and following Schwantes most of them were ascribed the still rather theoretical Lyngby culture (Schwantes, 1923; Ekholm, 1926). During the late thirties Alfred Rust began his revolutionary excavations in Holstein (1937; 1943), and they were, of course, followed with keen interest also by Danish archaeologists.

In the first of his three chapters forming Aspects of Prehistory (1970), Grahame Clark discussed one important aspect of prehistoric archaeology about which he has not hitherto written much, namely the historical development of that branch of historical science which, by his own researches in the last forty-five years, he has done so much to further. This chapter, the first of three lectures he delivered at Berkeley in the spring of 1970, is entitled ‘The Relevance of World Prehistory’, and is mainly concerned with listing the story of the discovery of archaeological facts. The interpretation of archaeological facts is of equal importance and in this paper I am concerned briefly with some aspects of the history of archaeological theory and interpretation, and more particularly with the changing models of thought used by prehistorians.

Here, we need not go further back than the three-age technological model of C. J. Thomsen. Before that we note the mythological models of the medieval and later antiquaries who floated Trojans and Phoenicians and the sons of Noah across their invented prehistory, and the literary and theological models of the later antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who, eschewing invention, sought prehistorical information in the Bible and in Classical writers, and made over our prehistoric monuments to the Druids, and our gravels to an Universal Deluge.

In descriptions in the archaeological literature of the marks of workmanship characteristic of certain bronze objects of the insular Iron Age, confusion exists concerning terminology and possibly (though the imprecision of wording makes it difficult to be sure without re-examination of individual pieces) concerning technology also. Macrophotographs are seldom provided to illustrate discussion of Iron Age bronzework, even when marks of workmanship or supposed techniques of manufacture are cited as chronological or cultural symptoms, so that the confusion has been able to multiply and is now endemic in work in English in the field; individual publications need not be listed in this connection. In the present paper we illustrate, describe and as far as possible distinguish one series of tool marks experimentally produced, with notes on the methods used to produce it, in the hope of making clear the need for further experimental studies and an agreed descriptive terminology. We have chosen as the subject of the study a set of marks which illustrate some ideas associated with the so-called ‘rocked graver’ technique which have been specially liable to confusion. Since our intention is not to offer any new analysis of Iron Age bronzework, but to point out in a few details criteria which may be found useful and to offer a terminology of them, the notes are mostly concerned with the experimentally produced type series; few ancient objects are cited (as examples only, not necessarily insular, and with no implication that other ancient examples of the use of the same technique do not exist) and only two are illustrated, though references to accessible illustrations of others are given.

The great family of Carp's-Tongue Swords clearly embraces a number of varieties. The anatomization of this considerable mass of material has not yet received the attention it deserves; but the subject is a slippery one, and it is not easy to isolate a starting-point for analysis.

One assemblage, however, of mutually related, idiosyncratic, and uncommon forms can readily be identified, and their position examined. The material consists of two interlocking groups together comprising fourteen swords (or hilts) from ten finds; and a third, closely akin to the second group, represented by three daggers, distinguished alike by a highly specialized form and an uncommonly scattered distribution.

All but one of the swords come from hoards, but I cannot detect that this material significantly differs from the general run of hoards in which Carp's-Tongue swords are commonly found all over Atlantic Europe. In broad terms they may on current views be assigned to Late Bronze 2 or 3; for the strikingly devolved forms found at Monte Sa Idda need be no more than provincialisms. So far as is known all the daggers are unassociated finds.

From ethnography and social anthropology ‘the prehistorian learns how particular peoples adapt themselves to their environments, and shape their resources to the ways of life demanded by their own cultures: he thus gains a knowledge of alternate methods of solving problems and often of alternative ways of explaining artefacts resembling those he recovers in antiquity. Study of ethnography will not as a rule … give him straight answers to his queries. What it will do is to provide him with hypotheses in the light of which he can resume his attack on the raw materials of his study’ (Clark, 1957, 172). Such a controlled use of ethnographic parallels has recently been applied successfully in the spheres of art and burial practices (e.g. Ucko, 1969, 262 and references there cited) but not as yet to the study of prehistoric settlement patterns or economy. In this paper it is hoped to show how the consideration of ethnographic parallels can help us to reach some possible alternative interpretations of two classes of excavated evidence: the pits and the two-, four-, five- and six-post-hole structures found mainly on Lowland Zone Iron Age settlements in Britain. These, usually interpreted in the literature as storage pits, ‘drying-racks’ and ‘granaries’ have been taken to be characteristic features of the ‘Woodbury Type’ economy of the earlier pre-Roman Iron Age in the Lowland Zone (Piggott, 1958, 3–4 and Bowen, 1969, 13–5), bearing in mind that ‘the type site must be clearly distinguished from the economy, and the economy itself seems to have been as variable as possible within the rather narrow Iron Age technical limits, (Bowen, 1969, 13).

Chevaux-de-frise is a term used to describe the (normally stone) stakes placed upright in the ground outside the walls of early fortifications with the intention of making access more difficult for an approaching enemy, be he on foot or on horse back. The existence of this defensive technique outside prehistoric forts in Britain or Ireland was first mentioned in 1684 when Roderick O'Flaherty described the Aran Island fort of Dun Aenghus in his Ogygia (O'Flaherty, 1684, 175), and it has often been discussed since, among others by Christison (1898), Westropp (1901, 661), Hogg (1957) and most recently and judiciously by Simpson (1969a, 26). Some writers, for instance Raftery (1951, 214) and Hogg (1957, 33) have suggested that the origins of chevaux-de-frise in Britain and Ireland should be sought in the Iberian Peninsula, where they occur in greater numbers (Hogg, 1957 and Harbison, 1968, a), and chevaux-de-frise are often taken as one of the most important pieces of evidence of close ties between Spain–Portugal and Britain–Ireland during the Early Iron Age. The purpose of this paper is to put forward a hypothesis that the Spanish–Portuguese examples on the one hand, and the Scottish–Welsh–Irish–Manx ones on the other, are not so closely related to one another as has hitherto been thought, but that both are merely distant cousins in so far as both are descended from a common ancestral wooden prototype which originated probably in Central or Eastern Europe.

The following is a preliminary report on excavations undertaken at this site under the aegis of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Cambridge. The work was carried out during a number of seasons over the past ten years, partly as a research project and partly as field training for third year and research students under the direction of C.B.M.McB. To P.C. fell the eventual task of collating and summarizing the extensive stratigraphical observations made by us and by previous excavators, and doing the same for the pollen samples and palaeontological data. Responsibility for the report as a whole is shared, but many others too numerous to thank separately at this stage have contributed basically to the collection and analysis of field and laboratory data. It is hoped that the full results after further field work will provide the material for a detailed monograph. The work would of course have been impossible but for the kind permission of the Société Jersiaise and the active assistance of many of its members on numerous occasions.

The site, the largest and most productive cave or rock-shelter site in the British Isles, was originally made famous by the discovery of a rich Mousterian industry, fauna, and eventually fossil traces of Neanderthal man at the turn of the century.