It is now close upon twenty-five years since the first flints from beneath the Red Crag of Suffolk—and claimed to have been flaked by man—were placed before the scientific world. During the period of time which has elapsed since 1907, a great deal of careful excavation, carried out by means of generous financial support given by the Royal Society, the Percy Sladen Fund, the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, the Field Museum of Chicago and other Institutions, has been undertaken, and in consequence, a very considerable body of knowledge regarding the archaeological, and other contents of the Suffolk Bone Bed, has been accumulated.

I propose, therefore, to take as the subject of my Presidential Address, “The Culture of Pliocene Man;” to place before you the evidence which makes it possible to use such a title in describing the sub-Red Crag artefacts, and to draw your attention to certain remarkable facts and conclusions relating to these specimens which must now be faced and considered. But it is necessary, first of all, to give a brief account of the Red Crag and the Suffolk Bone Bed (sometimes also called the Detritus Bed or the Nodule Bed) which underlies it, and in which the relics of man have been found.

It has long been recognised that the post-glacial (25-ft.) raised-beach of north-east Ireland contains, in addition to flint implements of Early Neolithic age and aspect, artefacts of Lower Palaeolithic forms. The presence of these early types within this beach may be accounted for as:—

1. A recrudescence of earlier forms during Early Neolithic times;

2. Lower Palaeolithic artefacts which have been derived from the glacial and inter-glacial drifts of the locality:

3. A mixture embraced by categories 1 and 2.

The evidence for the determination of this question must be sought outside the beach itself owing to the masking of the surface variations of the specimens through the deposition of a creamy-white patination and through marine attrition, though, regarding the latter, it should be mentioned that glacial striae have been observed upon certain of the implements recovered from the post-glacial (25-ft.) raised-beach at Kilroot.

The purpose of this paper is to put on record the discovery of various sites, containing traces of prehistoric man, in the neighbourhood of Bombay.

The area of greatest importance is that of Worli. It is a cotton milling suburb of Bombay, distant some 4 miles from the Fort, and is situated on low lying marshy ground and bounded to the West by a low steep hill having a maximum height of 100 ft. O.D., and consisting of igneous basalt overlying amygdaloidal trap with a dyke of F.W. strata between. This dyke contains fossils of marsh tortoises, frogs and plants resembling bulrushes. The basalt is capped with red earth which is decomposing trap, and contains nodules of agate and blocks of chert. West of the hill is the Arabian Sea. The northern extremity of this hill ends in a spur which juts out into the sea, and here is the fishing village of Koliwada, consisting of mud huts.

Common sense and simple experiment have already indicated certain ways in which some of the more common forms of Upper Palaeolithic implements may have been held. Thus for example, there is a general consensus of opinion that knife blades were held either by the butt end only, or by the butt with the index finger extended along the back of the tool. When however, we come to consider other types of tools, such as the scrapers, we find that there are a number of possible ways in which such tools may be held. The actual way or ways in which these tools were held becomes therefore, largely a matter of conjecture unless we can fortify our opinion by relevant facts relating to some particular mode or modes of prehension.

To guide us in selecting the particular way in which a tool was held from the many possible ways in which it could be held, we have the following factors:—

(i) The general shape of the tool.

(ii) The character of the traces of wear on the cutting edge due to use.

(iii) The situation and character of any special trimming which may have been made to facilitate prehension.

(iv) The degree of comfort or freedom from constraint with which a tool may be used in a given position.

(v) The frequency of occurrence of tools of certain lengths and widths which are comparable with the average dimensions of the human hand when gripping an object in certain ways.

(vi) The mode of prehension of stone tools adopted by existing primitive races.

Since the publication of the 1926 Report on these excavations much important work has been accomplished, four pits, all of the intermediate mining phase, have been completely excavated and a fifth, (Pit No. 12) commenced. In addition, 32 sections have been dug, chiefly in the West Field, which have confirmed the evidence already published and provided further important evidence as to the extent and nature of the mining activities in general.

In the Antrim Collection at the Ashmolean Museum is a group of sherds said to be from a chambered cairn near Lame, co. Antrim. There are no exact details of the find available, but a label pasted inside one sherd states that it was found in a tumulus in 1869. Mr. E. Thurlow Leeds first drew attention to this pottery in 1927 and indicated its importance, but it has not hitherto been fully studied.

The group is unambiguously linked by certain sherds with a small series of Scottish Neolithic wares, represented by the well-known bowls from the Clachaig and Beacharra segmented cairns, but other fragments show remarkable features which serve to isolate it as a group sui generis.

The importance of the group lies in the mixture of styles represented. The actual forms of the pottery suggest kinship with the great Windmill Hill family of the British Neolithic wares, and certain sherds (Nos. 4, 5, 11, 12, and 16) exhibit features of decoration (transverse strokes on the rim, shallow grooves, etc.) characteristic of this class alone. On the other hand, the motifs of cord impressions, both plain and whipped, hatched triangles and herringbone on the other sherds are completely unknown in the pure Windmill Hill ceramics and occur in the British Neolithic only in the pottery of the Peterborough culture. The arrangement of the ornament in panels on Nos. 1 and 3 is, however, a distinctive Windmill Hill style.

The type of flint implement which we are investigating here was first distinguished by the late Sir John Evans in his Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain as long ago as 1872. Out of a total of 52 specimens noted in this paper, 12 were mentioned by Evans in his 2nd edition, 12 have been published elsewhere, and 28 are here recorded for the first time. Outlines of 50 and a photograph of another are given in Figs. 1-3,7 and 8.

They consist of long narrow blades carefully flaked over both faces, which are of roughly equal convexity, to produce two cutting edges. In plan the tip and the butt are usually defined by the more tapering character of the former, while the general outline is asymmetric. The type as thus defined is quite distinct from any other, though it differs only by its asymmetry from certain leaf-shaped blades flaked over both faces. There is, however, a further characteristic, namely a varying extent and degree of concavity of one cutting edge, which further defines our type and marks it off still more from other flint forms. We mention in this paper two examples showing asymmetry of form (Nos. 28 and 29), but lacking any degree of concavity in either cutting-edge, as they may be related to the true sickle form.

In this paper I shall endeavour to outline the progress which has been made recently in archaeological studies in the prehistoric periods in Wales. In the last number of the Proceedings (1931, 383–4), I contributed at the request of the Secretary a number of notes on this subject, taking as my starting point the publication of Dr. R. E. M. Wheeler's book, Prehistoric and Roman Wales, in 1925. In the present instance I propose to give a more detailed, as well as a more general account, demonstrating how recent research and discoveries have advanced our knowledge, clarifying the position in relation both to Wales herself and to the connexions of Wales with other external influences.

The publication of Prehistoric and Roman Wales in 1925 may truly be said to mark the end of one era and the beginning of a new. Drawing together the scattered threads of what had been done before, Wheeler has given them meaning and set forth the results of many years of unorganised, frequently ill-considered, work in tangible form. In so doing, he has exposed the gaps in our knowledge and suggested, specifically or by implication, a policy in the form of a series of problems the elucidation of which will lead ultimately to a more complete picture of the early cultures of Wales, and hence of Britain as a whole. Wheeler's survey therefore forms a natural and admirable jumping-off place, and the subject will be treated in the following pages in its natural chronological sequence.

Bodney Warren, in the neighbourhood of which the skull and beaker illustrated were found in the summer of 1930, though on a direct line between Thetford and Swaffham, is one of the most remote places in Norfolk. The parish is thinly populated, and the warren and neighbouring “brecks” occupy a considerable part of a tongue of hard land, about 2½ miles long and one mile wide, overlooking on the west, north and north-east the marshy valleys of the River Wissey and a tributary. The “Smugglers Road,” a track-road more or less parallel to the Peddars Way, runs straight towards Swaffham through the middle of the area, but tails off into a cattle track as it approaches two fords at the north end of the parish. The present main roads pass through more populous villages on the far side of the river valleys.

At the November Meeting last year I gave an account of some Bronze Age cooking places situated along the River Thet above East Harling. (Proc. P.S.E.A., Vol. VI, pt. IV, p.365). On continuing the exploration lower down the river, I came upon the peculiar mound known as Micklemoor Hill, West Harling. This is an isolated mound of glacial gravel in the middle of a long stretch of alluvium on the south side of the river, and is one mile S.W. by W. of East Harling Church. It is about 300 yards long, 150 yards wide and 25 ft. high, and is 100 yards from the river bank with its longer axis parallel to the river at this point, i.e., east and west. The Hill is grass-covered and given over, to rabbits, with the exception of the S.-E. corner, which, besides having been dug for sand and gravel, has on the top an eighteenth century ice-house surrounded by a few pines and firs.