Owing to the war I was unable to prepare for publication an account of the 1939 excavations at Atchana on which I had read a paper to the Society; the report was begun but never finished. Since then there have been fresh excavations (in the spring of 1946), but as the new work was on a comparatively small scale and was planned as a complement to the 1939 season, even covering in part the same area, it is far better to treat of the results of the two seasons together. I propose therefore in this report to describe the private houses and the Palace of Yarim-Lim, of which the former were entirely and the latter was mainly excavated in 1939, and to reserve for a subsequent report the description of the Temple site discovered in 1939 but thoroughly excavated in 1946, and of the stratigraphical results obtained mostly in the latter season.

With the outbreak of war in September 1939 many of the staff of the Ministry (then H.M. Office) of Works concerned with ancient monuments were drafted to other work, military or civil. Yet the tasks falling to the lot of their fellows, who were left at their normal desks, so far from decreasing, as their colleagues of other divisions often blandly suggested, were soon increased very far beyond their normal peace-time scope. It is true that work on the preservation of the structures of guardianship monuments dwindled slowly until it became insignificant in amount, but it never entirely ceased, because of a firm determination not to destroy the cadre of skilled foremen and masons which it would be extremely difficult to replace. The supervision of this work, therefore, remained as one task even in war-time.

Although fishing, together with most of its principal appliances, was found to be of almost universal occurrence by European explorers as they penetrated the remoter parts of the world, it seems to have appeared as a specialized activity comparatively late in the history of the hominids. Whereas even the anthropians had added the resources of hunting to the vegetarian diet of their simian forebears, it was left to Homo sapiens in his evolved form to explore the possibilities of fishing. Thus the fisherman is entitled to regard his pastime as deriving from an economic activity peculiar to Neoanthropic Man. It is true that a few fish-bones were found with Neanderthal remains at Devil's Tower, Gibraltar, which yielded ‘very few fish remains, mostly indeterminable’; but these may not have been introduced by man and, if they were, need not indicate more than the gathering of an occasional fish from the sea-shore, from which in the form of limpets and mussels the inmates of the rock-shelter derived a large proportion of their sustenance.