East of Amman in Transjordan lies the basalt area called the Harrat er Radjil (the centre is approximately 37 deg. 30 mins. east and 32 deg. 30 mins. north), and this area is archaeologically most interesting. (Fig. I). The country consists mostly of basalt broken up into blocks of various sizes, with mud-flats scattered in all the hollows. The mud-flats are fed by small watercourses which are generally deeply eroded, and although they are usually dry, water flows in them after heavy rain. Pools of water sometimes lie in the watercourses and on the mud-flats till the commencement of the summer months. Here and there rise small crater-hills, a few hundred feet high, of volcanic formation; and here and there the larger watercourses have eroded the country, leaving many small hills which, when seen from afar, are not unlike the crater-hills.

The second edition of the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain gives us what we have never had before—a detailed account of the distribution of population over a large tract of the Roman Empire. Hitherto it has been impossible to say what principles governed the distribution of population during that period; and the result has been that everything written about the population of the Roman Empire has been somewhat vague and inconclusive, and has generally been confined to sweeping generalizations founded on induction from a very few facts, or to mere repetition of isolated statements, some doubtless true, others perhaps exaggerated or misleading, made by ancient writers.

The authenticity of the prehistoric paintings of the caves of Altamira has now been fully recognized for about thirty years, and with the many similar discoveries which have been made in France and Spain an entirely new light has been thrown on the mentality of prehistoric men. We must henceforth acknowledge that they possessed artistic tastes and a well developed aesthetic sense. No longer may we think of them as savages, solely concerned with the most material needs of daily life, but rather as men endowed with well-developed intellect and capable of considering things over and above the mere material side of the struggle for existence.

The discovery of skeletons, obviously buried with care, and surrounded with tools and ornaments, had already proved to us that respect was paid to the dead, and that there was a belief in an after-life. But with the discovery of works of art a fresh avenue of knowledge was opened up before us.

Dykes have been described as travelling, running or linear earthworks. All these terms express their essential character, that of a bank, usually of earth but occasionally of loose stone, extending for a considerable distance across country. The existence of a bank presupposes an adjacent ditch from which its material was derived, and the descriptive term Ditch is as common as Dyke in the nomenclature of linear earthworks. Both terms have indeed a common origin.

It seems amazing that an African negro should ever have been able with any sort of justification to style himself – Emperor of the World ', and perhaps even more so that he should have been an enlightened prince ruling a people who were in many ways quite as civilized as we are today. For though it might be easy to imagine a native military genius, it is difficult to picture him as a patron of the finer arts.

From the very earliest recorded times what is now the northern Sudan-in those days described variously as Nubia, Ethiopia, or Kushwas in close relation with Egypt; and between the two countries there was a continuous exchange, not only of produce and material, but also of ideas and customs.

Most prehistorians are aware of the existence of a group of rock carvings depicting oxen, ploughs,etc., on the slopes around Monte Bego in the Italian Maritime Alps. As long ago as 1650 they were mentioned by the historian Gioffredo in his History of the Maritime Alps. Since then the only people of archaeological importance who appear to have paid visits to a certain few of the carvings were M. Rivière, in 1877, Professor Celesia in 1885, and Sr. Barocelli in recent years. It was, however, only when the late Clarence Bicknell, a keen botanist who lived at Bordighera, visited the Monte Bego district in search of alpine flowers and became interested in the carvings that a systematic study of them was commenced. For the best part of twenty years, from 1897 onwards, Bicknell worked on both sides of Monte Bego examining and taking rubbings of all the figures he could find. In all, something like 15,000 figures were thus studied, and for the purpose Bicknell built himself a house in the Val Casterino. This is a high, upland valley leading off the Miniera valley which is itself a side valley to the Upper Roya and runs up from San Dalmazzo di Tenda on the Franco-Italian frontier. The Casa Fontanalba, as he named the house, is beautifully situated just at the mouth of the Val Fontanalba, a narrow, steep valley running up from the Val Casterino to Monte Bego itself. The existence of the Casa as a base of operations made a careful study of the carvings possible, but even so they cannot be reached without a two to three hours walk and climb from the house-and it is uphill going all the way !

Few monuments are more interesting to the general observer than the hill-figures carved on the chalk downs of Southern England. The publication of Sir Flinders Petrie's monograph has led us to revisit one of those he describes; and the resulting observations are here set down for what they are worth.

Whether Brentford was at one time Brigantford, or the ford of the Brigantes, is a question which the modern etymologist would not hesitate to scorn; nor is the identity of the site with the ford whereat conquering Caesar crossed the river on a celebrated occasion as substantial as the granite monument which now commemorates the event at the head of the ferry-stairs. Nor yet again is the name ‘Old England’, which the Ordnance Survey ascribes to the water-meadow on the Middlesex shore some 400 yards above the present junction of Thames and Brent, of authenticated antiquity. Nevertheless here and hereabouts, as our museums can show, was a great losing of swords and spears in prehistoric times, and here too, as we now know, were riverside dwellers at the end of the Bronze Age and, again, in Roman and later times. The name ‘Old England’ may stand.

Sometimes the Gods are kind, and so they seemed one morning during last season's excavations at Windmill Hill: when some minor official of that department which dispenses new ideas through such simple media as overflowing baths and falling apples, superintended the finding of a large quantity of fragments of ‘West Kennet’ type pottery, thickly ornamented with a clearly defined design and in the same layer-for this site singularly unproductivea small bird-bone.

The area considered in this study is roughly the drainage of the Wharfe and its tributary the Skirfare, above Burnsall, a typical ‘Yorkshire Dale’. The valley is excavated through the Yoredale series of alternating limestones, shales, and sandstones, into the Great Scar Limestone, the lowest member of the Carboniferous series. This lower limestone forms very imposing and massive scars along the valley sides, above which the fells rise in a series of steps and scars corresponding with the limestone and sandstone outcrops. The valley bottom is occupied by a series of glacial lake flats and moraines which have played a very important part in the settlement of the valley, the lake flats being swamp until recently drained, and still liable to flood through a great part of winter, the moraines providing dry crossing places and village sites throughout the upper dale. The dale under discussion is about 20 miles long, and from ¼ to ½ mile wide between the lower scars of limestone. The valley floor rises from 500 ft. above sea-level at Burnsall to 1250 ft. at the head of the valley near Oughtershaw,while the top of the first scar varies from 800 ft. to about 1600 ft., being a platform of good pasture about a third of a mile wide, on each side of the valley.

The origin of every nation lies beyond the range of written records. It is one of the principal tasks of prehistory to supplement and extend backwards the historical tradition until it brings those events within its purview. The difficulty of the task is greatest where the historical record is shortest. So the peoples of northern and eastern Europe who most deeply concern us Northerners present one of the most perplexing problems to the archaeologist.

In the case of the Teutons the problem has been materially clarified by Scandinavian investigators. Moreover Gustav Kossinna in Germany has devised for its solution a method all his own which the Vienna school has subsequently applied to the Illyrian question. But in western Europe the Teutonic invasions for the most part fall within the domain of history. The forerunners of the Teutons in England, France, western Germany and in parts of Spain and Italy were the Kelts. The latter in places maintained their identity side by side with the Teutons, and in any case constitute a vital element in the present population of the regions in question. No wonder then that archaeology turned early to the elucidation of the problem of Keltic origins.

The history of North Africa is dominated by the Sahara, which has always been a vital factor in the lives of the peoples of Barbary and the Western Sudan. The cultural and economic development of both has been profoundly affected by intercourse between the two. Yet they are separated by a desert which forms one of the world's greatest barriers to human intercourse.

A slight increase in the aridity of the Sahara would so extend the waterless stages that the caravan routes would become impassable to camels and therefme to men—leaving, of course, mechanical transport out of consideration. A correspondingly slight increase in rainfall would quickly multiply the waterholes and desert pastures and render man independent of the now necessary camel. The question of climatic change in historic times is therefore a matter of importance to the student of the history of northern Africa.

So Caistor-by-Norwich is to be excavated. It has long been known that in the 30-acre field adjoining the little church of St. Edmund a ghost of the Roman town shows dimly from time to time as a net-work of lines in the sun-dried corn. Last year on the 20th of July, during the midsummer heat-wave, a Royal Air Force aeroplane, flying at a height of 2400 feet over the ripening barley, took a series of photographs which were first published (as a single plate) in the Times of 4th March 1929. These photographs show, within the circuit of the existing Roman town-walls, the main street-plan of Venta Icenorum. With them appeared an appeal for funds for the purpose of excavation.

Arthur's knights are myths. They can be traced to Celtic deities, and there is no history to be gathered from attempts to analyse legends about them. But Arthur himself is not a myth: he is a tradition. Nobody has succeeded in identifying him with any god of prehistoric Europe. He arrives unadorned, at first; it was only later that romances dressed him up in the trappings of a Viking Age hero. He is announced simply as the Roman-Briton who won twelve battles against the Saxons. ‘Nennius’, who says this, is as unknown as Arthur himself, but the statement is backed by the very definite mention of the crowning victory at Mount Badon in the bit of autobiography of Gildas, and by the acceptance of this by Bede as a fact.

It is now 24 years since Dr Randall MacIver investigated the problems of the origin and age of the Southern Rhodesian ruins. Nothing of any scientific consequence has since been added to the evidence on the purely archaeological side, with the exception of the partial excavation of the so-called Western Temple of the Zimbabwe Acropolis.

In physical anthropology, we had, in 1924, Sir Arthur Keith's report on four ancient skeletons found in gold mines, and one from Zimbabwe itself. They were of Bantu type, but do they represent the original miners, and how old are they?

Recent discoveries in the Valley of Le Roc (Charente, France) have thrown entirely new light upon the art of the Solutrean period. Though gems of flint workmanship, like the laurel-leaf blades and single-sided shoulder-points occur, engravings and sculptures were formerly considered rare.

Before the Le Roc discoveries, the known Solutrean engravings were confined to an antelope head found at La Cave (Lot) by M. A. VirC, a horse identified at Solutrb by Dr F. Arcelin and the AbbC Breuil, a mammoth from Bavaria and another from Ardkche (France). To these should be added the sculptures of the Fourneau du Diable (Dordogne), found by M. Peyrony. These last were on blocks which rested on a typical hearth-level and their age seems quite certain. Their style, compared with that of Le Roc, is relatively primitive.