The tenth season of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania began work in the field on 25 November 1931, and closed down on 19 March 1932. In addition to my wife, my staff included Mr. J. C. Rose, who came out as architect for his second season, and Mr. R. P. Ross-Williamson, who acted as general archaeological assistant; Mr. F. L. W. Richardson of Boston, Massachusetts, was also attached to the Expedition to make a contoured survey of the site (pl. LVIII). NO epigraphist was engaged, for the work contemplated was not expected to produce much in the way of inscriptions; but an arrangement was made whereby Dr. Cyrus B.Gordon, epigraphist on the Tell Billah Expedition of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, could be called upon to give his services when required; actually a single visit enabled him to do all that was essential. To each of these I am very much indebted. As usual, Hamoudi was head foreman, with his sons Yahia, Ibrahim and Alawi acting under him, and as usual was invaluable; Yahia also was responsible for all the photographic work of the season. The average number of men employed was 180. This relatively small number of workmen, and the shortness of the season, were dictated partly by reasons of finance but more by the nature of our programme, which envisaged not any new departure in excavation but the clearing up of various points still in doubt and the further probing of sites already excavated, with a view to the final publication of the results of former seasons; the work was therefore rather scattered, five different areas being investigated in turn.

The fact that the examples of Medieval Painting surviving in England are but a fraction of the pictorial production of this country during the period in question, is, of course, a commonplace among all students of the subject; and whenever you follow up a special line of investigation in this connexion you inevitably get a fresh and vivid illustration of this fact.

The alabaster reliefs which I have the privilege of laying before the Society this evening are a miscellaneous collection, arbitrarily grouped together on three slabs of slate painted a deep blue. There is no reason to suppose that any of the tables or images, altogether nine in number, had any original connexion with one another. They have been for many years fastened to the walls of the chapel of Naworth Castle in Cumberland, where they were noticed last year by our President, who was good enough to call my attention to them. Lady Carlisle very obligingly brought them up to London, and I undertook to have the modern paint in which they were smothered removed at the Victoria and Albert Museum; it is to Lady Carlisle's kindness in allowing them to remain in my charge for some months that we owe the opportunity of looking at them this evening. So far as I know, no facts as to their previous history are ascertainable.

‘Was there’, asks Mrs. Cunnington in the January number of this Journal, ‘a Second Belgic Invasion (represented by bead-rim pottery)?’ The answer on her last page is that it ‘remains extremely doubtful’. Her article is in fact a vigorous challenge to belief in this invasion, as maintained by us in a paper published last year, entitled ‘The Belgae of Gaul and Britain’. To this paper she does not indeed allude by name, for her notice is confined to one or its six sections only. In bringing the issue here once more under discussion, we feel bound to restore this section to its context, if only to give it no more importance than its due, for there are sundry points that have thus lain outside the scope of Mrs. Cunnington's article which may nevertheless perhaps prove important in estimating the matter as a whole. We will follow her arguments in order.