Since the work of Breuil and Koslowski on the Somme Valley and the publication of a summary of this work in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, new finds have been made, and new points of view developed. I shall not give here a restatement of Breuil's work, but rather indicate the points where our interpretation differs and give our reasons for differing.

The object of this article is to record the discovery of a group of Maglemosian spearheads from Brandesburton and of a single specimen from the foreshore at Hornsea, both in the Holderness region of East Yorkshire; to describe the new finds in detail and to compare them with those previously known from eastern England; and to record (Part II) the results of a palaeoecological investigation of the immediate area of the Brandesburton discovery. The opportunity has been taken to examine and describe afresh all previously known specimens of closely similar type from England, each of which has been redrawn from three aspects and details of which have been photographed to illustrate the technique of manufacture.

The site described in this paper lies on the Yorkshire Pennines, slightly over 1,200 feet O.D., half a mile north-west of Stump Cross Cavern and five miles east of Grassington (Nat. Grid 082640). The solid rock there is an eastward extension of the Great Scar Limestone, pitted by numerous swallow holes and clothed by a thin and intermittent mantle of clayey glacial drift. Only a hundred yards to the north and half a mile to the south-east of the site the Millstone Grit replaces the limestone at the surface. In the vicinity of the site the vegetation is dominated by Calluna vulgaris and Eriophorum vaginatum growing over a podsol or a shallow, highly humified, peat.

With the working of high level dry gravels now such a rarity, students of palaeolithic archaeology have to be extremely grateful for the large collections of implements made from them when various pits were open. Although these collections have drawbacks, the chances of recovering so great a quantity of specimens from so many localities may never occur again. It is well-known that the majority of the large palaeolithic collections were made by the purchasing of specimens from workmen employed in the gravel pits. The provenance or horizon of any artifact may therefore be debatable, as it depends on the integrity of unknown people. There are stories of hand-axes from prolific, famous sites being taken to other sites in order to increase their market value. Some of these stories are undoubtedly true, but it would have required a thorough knowledge of typology and Pleistocene geology to have perpetrated any large-scale fraud and, as none of the large collections of labelled specimens have ever been in marked contrast with more recent finds, their validity can be generally accepted. If forgeries were purchased it is of no consequence for they would be evident as such. The only serious objection to these older collections being used as a basis for palaeolithic study is that they rarely give a true representation of the artifacts contained in the deposit: flakes were rarely preserved and ruder workmanship was often unrecognized.

Twenty years have elapsed since H. C. Beck and the present writer published a preliminary paper on the origin of British faience beads with special reference to those of the segmented variety and, except for the discovery and recognition of many new specimens over much wider areas it may be said that nothing has emerged to alter materially the general conclusions there enunciated that an Egyptian origin was the most likely for a number of the beads and that their dissemination to the British Isles took place during the Eighteenth Dynasty around about 1400 B.C.

At the time of writing we not unnaturally concentrated on British specimens, as European analogues appeared to be conspicuously absent, and confined our attention primarily to morphological characters. We had, however, projected a wider study to embrace faience objects in general and, if possible, to adduce spectrographic evidence as further proof of identity or otherwise. Unfortunately the sudden death of Mr Beck in 1939 and the intervention of the war years greatly retarded progress in this direction. But the rapid recognition of old finds and the accumulation of new ones, mostly in Europe, in post-war years, coupled with a number of spectrographic analyses that have since been carried out with the help of Mr L. C. Thomas, now renders it desirable to review such progress as has been made in this most difficult and complex subject.

The material from the cremation cemetery which was found by Sir T. Zammit in 1915 stratified above the earlier remains in the Tarxien temples raises some of the most fascinating and intricate problems in the whole of Maltese prehistory. Who were these bizarre people, whence did they come to Malta and at what date ? The excavator, basing himself on the ‘Copper Age’ appearance of the culture and the various parallels with early Trojan, Cycladic and Cypriote materials to be observed in it, suggested that their arrival in Malta should be placed somewhere about 2000 B.C. and that they had probably come from the East. Zammit's parallels were, as I hope to show here, basically correct as far as they went, but his chronological inference was invalid because he did not allow sufficient time for the relatively slow cultural movements which brought material of this type from the Eastern to the Central Mediterranean. This was largely due to a failure to trace the intermediate steps in detail, a failure which has not subsequently been made good by any other student. Professor Childe has compared the metal types of the Tarxien Cemetery with Danubian and Sardinian ones, and the two-storied urns with Italian Iron Age types, but admitted that at that time the date of the culture might by reasonably placed anywhere between about 1800 and 800 B.C. The dating question is of great importance, since, if the Tarxien Cemetery can be confidently dated to some period in the second millennium B.C., it provides us with the first known examples of inurned cremation in the Western Mediterranean.

The recent discovery in the reserve collection of the Cyprus Museum of a bronze cut-and-thrust sword of the form well known as Naue Type II provides an opportunity for a fresh consideration of the significance of the appearance of this weapon type in the Eastern Mediterranean during what, in that area, were the closing stages of the Late Bronze Age.

This paper begins with a detailed account of the sword in the Cyprus Museum both on its own account and as an illustration of the class as a whole. Then follows a catalogue, illustrated by the distribution map (fig. 1), of the known examples from the Eastern Mediterranean, in which emphasis is laid as far as possible on the dating evidence for individual examples. Finally, a general summary is attempted of what is known about their origin and some discussion is offered on their general implications.

The weapons from Populonia and Vetulonia have been the subject of an admirable study by Signora Tallochini and I am most grateful for her help when I was working in the Archæological Museum at Florence, where I was afforded every facility for studying the bronzes from these sites.

Tomb 7 at Piano delle Granate, Populonia, an inhumation ‘fossa’ grave contained the bronze dagger (fig. 1, no. 1), a fibula with slightly thickened round bow, a bronze ring, fragments of bronze nails and bronze hooks, and fragmentary remains of the bows and pins of fibulas. There was no pottery. The description and contents of the tomb are published in Notizie degli Scavi, 1917, p.76 and also in A. Minto, Populonia: la Necropoli arcaica, Florence, 1922, p. 64. This tomb was one of a group of ‘fossa graves’ excavated in 1915 and situated close to the seashore on the flat area known as Piano delle Granate. When I visited Populonia in 1953 it was still possible to locate the tholos tombs and the fossa graves, which, with many cremation burials, were found all over this area, in spite of the thickness of the ‘macchia’ often entirely covering the tombs. An examination of the relative position of the chamber tombs and fossa graves certainly confirmed Minto's conclusion based on a study of the contents of the three different kinds of burials, that the cremation, fossa and some of the earliest type of chamber tombs must all have been used contemporaneously. This group of tombs when excavated also yielded the series of stilted fibulas and the fibula ‘a serpegiante’ (fig. 2).

The hoard from Borodino, north-west of the Black Sea, and the cemetery of Seima in central Russia are the best known names in the literature dealing with the Bronze Age of eastern Europe. On the alleged dates of Borodino and Seima the whole structure of the Bronze Age chronology of Russia and even Siberia is built.

Tallgren in his Pontide Préscythique (1926) and in his earlier publications dated the Borodino and Seima finds to the period from 1300–1100 B.C. This date was used by many other archæologists. Tallgren based his views on analogies between Borodino and Koban axes (Tallgren 1926, 140) which actually do not exist. Koban axes are different; they belong to the Koban culture of the early Iron Age in the central Caucasus around the end of the second millennium B.C. The Borodino hoard is definitely earlier than the Koban culture. Another indication of a more or less absolute date of the Borodino hoard is the similarity of the ornamental motifs executed on the Borodino pin with those on the gold buttons from Shaft-Graves Nos. IV and V of Mycenæ. This relationship was already indicated by Spitsyn (1916).

It is generally recognized that the neolithic arts, and prominent among them, the art of making pottery, spread from a Mesopotamian or Syrian centre westwards into Anatolia, the Aegean and so to the Danube: but in the present light of knowledge it is far from easy to demonstrate this process by means of comparisons of the earliest known pottery in each area. In particular the immediate origins of the Greek neolithic wares are obscure; and while they have good parallels in the Balkans, geographical considerations lead one to suppose that the Balkan cultures were derivatives of, rather than ancestral to, cultures of, for example, the North Aegean sea-board. In these circumstances, links between neolithic Macedonia and sites further east are of special interest. In this paper it is hoped to show, through a detailed comparative study of material from Samos, Kalimnos and Chios, that there existed in these East Aegean Islands a culture related to the earliest civilizations of Troy and Thermi (fig. 1), but which also exhibits parallels to Heurtley's ‘Late Neolithic’ material in Macedonia.

The pottery from the lowest levels of Poliokhni in Lemnos almost certainly belongs to the series now to be described. The site, excavated throughout many seasons by the Italians, revealed three or more distinct strata beneath a level corresponding with early Troy I; but there are not many notices of it available and no illustrations or photographs. The recent publication by Brea in these Proceedings gives few details of the relevant levels.