The reopening of the gravel pit at Highlands Farm, Henley (742813) in the ancient channel of the Thames between Caversham and Henley in 1955 has afforded an opportunity for studying the Palaeolithic contents of the gravel in detail. A short report was presented to the Society in 1956 after some initial observations, the most important of which was that the majority of the flint implements found were of Clactonian type (Wymer, 1956). In the five years since several hundred hand-axes and cores and many thousands of flakes have been recorded from this pit, many of them in situ, collected in the preparation of witness sections. The Clactonian has still been found to be the most abundant flint industry, but several types of hand-axes have occurred, some very highly finished and seemingly at variance with the early date assigned to the ancient channel on geological grounds.

The collection of material in situ has shown conclusively that all the types of flint artifacts found at Highlands occur at all levels; nowhere is one particular type stratified in relationship to another. It is only by comparing the finds with those made at other sites in the Thames Valley that justification can be found for claiming that more than one industry is represented. The gravel filling of the ancient channel resembles the majority of Lower Palaeolithic sites in the Thames Valley, and elsewhere in Britain: several flint industries are jumbled indiscriminately together. Many tens of thousands of years may divide the individual artifacts within the gravel, but there is no stratigraphical evidence to show it.

In March 1960 Mrs D. R. Tweedie discovered a painted rock shelter at 8,000 feet in the forests of Mt Elgon, about 15 miles west-north-west of Kitale, Kenya. The site is of particular interest because it is the first recorded instance of representational rock art in Kenya with any claim to antiquity.

The writer visited the site during September 1960 to copy the paintings. Tracings were made on cellophane stuck to the rock with sellotape. Glass ink was used as suggested by Dr L. S. B. Leakey, but in the more awkward copying positions a chinagraph pencil gave accurate lines more easily. With a warm pencil no pressure on the rock was needed to produce an outline. A photographic record was also made on colour film with flashbulbs.

The paintings have been preserved from weathering by a deep, dry overhang, and trees growing immediately in front of the shelter. They are also preserved from vandalism by the extreme difficulty of finding the site without guidance. Most of the paintings form a frieze at the left-hand side of the shelter, which is the best protected region.

The acquisition of domestic animals was an epoch-making event in cultural evolution. When did man arrive at such a cultural standard that he was able to live in fairly peaceful coexistence with wild animals, and start the process of taming which finally produced genuine tame or domestic animals? It appears that for hundreds of thousands of years man lived as food-gatherer, hunter or fisherman without domestic animals of any kind. At least the presence of domestic animals was not shown in any of the many palaeolithic settlements known today, nor from the palaeolithic cave-drawings. Only from the Mesolithic is there the first certain, but weak evidence of any domestic animal and the finds show that the dog was among the first animals to be domesticated and attached to human settlements.

Among the oldest and best-known skeletal material of the domestic dog are the Danish finds from the Maglemosian settlements from the bogs at Mullerup, Svaerdborg, Holmegaard, Lundby and Aamosen near Halleby river, all in Zealand. Very few dog bones were found, although tens of thousands of bones have been excavated from these settlements. The dog bones, like those of other animals used for food, were very fragmentary, and several showed marks where they had been cut.

The Maglemosian settlements date from the Boreal period, pollen zones V and VI, i.e. they go back to the time when Denmark was covered with vast pine forests and was part of the European continent.

Fieldwork in Australian prehistory began in the opening year of Australia's history; the first excavation was directed by the Colonial Governor. In an official despatch dated 15 May 1788, less than five months after the landing at Sydney Cove, Governor Arthur Phillip recorded the results of his excavation.

Phillip's early despatches were ‘compiled’ for publication by J. Stockdale. The influence of 18th-century English Antiquarianism is evident in the ‘rude’ remains in Stockdale's revised version, and his comment that ‘Phillip caused some of these barrows to be opened.’

Despite this auspicious excursion into aboriginal prehistory, Australia remains the dark continent of prehistory even after the passage of 170 years: it will be many years before the publication of a Pelican Archaeology of Australia becomes a practicable possibility. This contribution is intended as a preliminary sketch of present problems and a résumé of existing evidence. If it were restricted to a study of archaeological stratigraphy, it would be little more than a brief note; as its scope is broader, limitations of time and space impose a selective approach to the literature.

The true character of the site described in this paper was first suggested by Mr A. H. A. Hogg, after a visit paid in the course of fieldwork for the Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments in Wales. Examination of photographic prints of the national air cover had revealed a line of three approximately circular hollows on a gently sloping hillside: these were at first thought to be the remains of round huts whose ruined walls were hidden by the vigorous growth of dwarf gorse covering almost the whole of this part of Mynydd Rhiw. Mr Hogg's visit happened to coincide with a periodical burning off of the gorse which made the banks of the ‘huts’ plainly visible (pl. VII, a). The banks were seen to be of earth and small stones; and the latter were observed to be, not the coarse-grained igneous variety represented on the surrounding hillside in general, but a fine-grained flinty rock bearing abundant signs of artificial working. Closer examination showed that this represented the debris of stone axe manufacture.

The source of the axe material was not immediately apparent. Search of the whole hilltop for outcrops met with no success, but other occurrences of this, or similar, stone were noted as small boulders or fragments. It was at first concluded that some erratic boulders of fine-grained rocks had been brought from Snowdonia, or farther away, by glaciation, and that a particularly large one had been completely broken up and worked out on or near the site of these huts.

The object of this paper is to compare the fauna from sites on the Mediterranean coast having a similar physiography at the present day and which may have responded to climatic change in a similar way during the Pleistocene.

Carbon 14 dating has shown a relatively short time span for the Late Pleistocene, and it is no longer possible to think of the correlation of cave deposits on a geological time scale. A thousand years or less is of some importance. It is possible and indeed probable that faunas and cave sediments may have been at the same point of time quite different in caves on the shore of the Mediterranean from, say, inland caves at 1,000 or 2,000 feet above sea level, such as those of the Judean Desert.

In a study of the faunal changes in the Mediterranean area, Higgs (1961) has suggested that the remains from the cave of Mugharet es-Skhūl may be as much as 10,000 years later than those from the levels yielding human remains in the cave of Mugharet et-Tabūn. If this indeed proves to be the case, then a previously controversial problem will to a great extent be eradicated. It is common knowledge that the skulls from these two caves display a remarkable degree of variability ranging from a typical ‘Classic’ Neanderthal type (Tabūn I) to a specimen (Skhūl V) morphologically very similar to certain Upper Palaeolithic skeletons (McCown and Keith, 1939). Three quite different explanations have been given for this, two of which take the Mount Carmel people as approximately contemporaneous:

(1) The Mount Carmel people represent a single taxonomic group with a high degree of variability (McCown and Keith, 1939; Howell, 1951; Le Gros Clark, 1958).

(2) They are hybrids resulting from the intermixture of H. neandertalensis and H. sapiens (Hooton, 1947; Thoma, 1958; Skerlj, 1960; Weckler, 1954).

(3) A final possibility, least considered of all, is that the et-Tabūn and es-Skhūl individuals may correspond to different populations, not necessarily contemporaneous, and which may have lived hundreds or thousands of years apart (Stewart, 1951).

The Long Mortuary Enclosure on Normanton Down was excavated by the writer on behalf of the Ministry of Works throughout October, 1959. Originally a rectangular-ditched enclosure with internal banks, the banks had been completely ploughed out and the surface indications were so slight as to be visible only at certain times.

The National Grid reference is SU 115411. The Enclosure is situated on the Upper Chalk of the Salisbury Plain on a gradual southern slope, at an average height of 320 feet above sea level.

A recent stimulating paper on radiocarbon dating has drawn attention to the variety and richness of Irish Neolithic material-culture and to the great span of years it appears to cover, and thus to the possibility of arranging it in a convincing sequence. In order to achieve this by archaeological method, the material must be classified and the classes regionally determined; but compared with the care which has been given to classifying megalithic monuments and seeking their distributions, little detailed attention has so far been given to the pottery which they are generally found to contain.

There are at the moment several indications that a re-assessment of the problems of the neolithic in Britain and Ireland is required. Since the virtual discovery of the primary neolithic some thirty years ago, so vast has the field become that it is no longer possible for an individual to be familiar with all the material and it is inevitable that each will tend to see the whole from the viewpoint of his own special interest and region. In these circumstances, during the course of any re-assessment, workers on various aspects are especially liable to find themselves at cross-purposes. Moreover, in the developments which followed the brilliant pioneer syntheses many ideas have become traditional and tend to be accepted as axiomatic. The alteration or abandonment of such ideas may prove difficult and more difficult still may be the emendation or rejection of conclusions based on them.

Ireland lies to the west of Britain. To review the whole scene in any detail from a standpoint in Ireland would involve discussing at second-hand too much of the material on which current views are based and such is not the intention. These notes are designed merely to comment on some general issues which have been and may well in the future be sources of difficulty and misunderstanding, and in particular to deal with the Irish court cairns which have been the subject of recent discussion. It is scarcely to be hoped that they will obviate controversy, but they may help a little towards the mutual understanding of differences.

For many years down to 1953, our knowledge of Maltese prehistory could be summed up succinctly if rather unkindly in the phrase—‘Neolithic 3,000 B.C., Bronze Age 2,000, Punic 1,000.’ In that year, J. D. Evans's researches were published in these Proceedings. These at last provided a framework for his Period I, no longer called ‘Neolithic’ because the overlap of its later phases with metal-using cultures in nearby Sicily made it unlikely that metal was quite unknown. It was assigned a duration from the mid-second to mid-first millennium B.C. The absolute chronology will need revision in the light of the C-14 dates not then available and the correlations with the Sicilian development have met with some criticism. In any case, the isolation of the different phases was an enormous advance on which all further work in Malta will have to be based, even if, as at the time of writing begins to seem likely, certain amendments to the sequence become necessary. The later prehistoric Period II, lasting down to the 9th century when the Phoenician settlement opened Period III, was described in much less detail.

Enormous quantities of material of the first period, megalithic buildings as well as pottery and small finds, were available for study: the material remains of Period II were much more scanty, there being in effect at that time only a single site known of each of its three phases, which were correspondingly named after the Tarxien Cemetery, Borġ in-Nadur and Baħrija. In 1956, Evans published a more detailed study of the first of these phases bringing forward evidence for attributing to it the local dolmens. Phases II B and C were not ready for such treatment as the only excavations were at Borġ in-Nadur in 1881 (a sketch plan found in a Valletta photographer's shop twenty years later being the only record) and 1921-7 (disturbed levels overlying a Period I temple); and at Baħrija in 1909 (three days' work). These two phases therefore remained the most urgent problem in the prehistory of Malta. Accordingly, further excavation was undertaken on their type sites by the Museum Department of the Maltese Government in the spring and autumn of 1959.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the development of the Collared vessel from the Peterborough ceramic tradition and assess the contributions made by other non-Peterborough traditions; to define a series of vessels within the Collared Urn tradition which carry demonstrably early traits of only limited duration; and to suggest the limiting conditions within which this controlled typological analysis may be expected to apply. Since divergence of opinion exists in the literature as to terminology, the terms used in this paper can be briefly summarized.

For the sake of clarity it seems important to distinguish between descriptive terms, defining pottery traditions and functional, defining the uses to which vessels were put. In the past, the vessels which will be discussed below have been described variously as ‘Collared’, ‘Overhanging-rim’ and ‘Crowned’. In the following text the term ‘Collared’ has been retained for the whole tradition, and no distinction has been made between ‘Collared’ and ‘Overhanging-rim’.

The daggers of the Early Iron Age in Britain are remarkable technical achievements, among them some of the earliest iron implements to be made in Britain. They deserve detailed study particularly for the light they throw on the prehistory of its earliest phase, the Iron Age ‘A’. The earlier daggers may be classified quite straightforwardly according to their analogies among the continental daggers, six with the Hallstatt-D and eighteen with the La Tène I, thus giving a dating scheme, from the 6th century to the later 4th century B.C. All these come from southern England, and form a compact group mostly from the Thames in its reaches for about 8 miles west of London.