In 1932 Professor Christopher Hawkes, in collaboration with the late Sir Thomas Kendrick, produced Archaeology in England and Wales 1914-1931, a book for many years the standard and much-loved textbook for all students of ancient Britain. Here, more than half a century later he reviews Archaeology in Britain since 1945,* edited by Ian Longworth and John Cherry, published by the British Museum in conjunction with, and as a supplement to, its current exhibition, ‘Archaeology in Britain: New Views of the Past’ (Editorial, p. 169).

Desmond Clark, who has just retired from his Chair at the University of California at Berkeley, and in whose honour a special congress on African prehistory was held in his own department a few months ago, here looks back at his life in archaeology and at archaeology in his lifetime. It is the tenth and last in our series. All ten articles are being republished by Thames and Hudson.

Professor Stuart Piggott published his British prehistory in the Home University Library in 1949, and his Neolithic cultures of the British Isles five years later. Now a third of a century later he reviews five new books dealing with pre-Roman Britain, with special reference to early Celtic art (listed below). His comments on the 1921 and 1939 finds from Grimes Graves are intriguing.

We asked Professor Anthony Snodgrass, Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Cambridge, and adviser on such matters for this journal, to review for us seven books* in his field which have been published in the last few months. He has chosen as the title for his review article, ‘A salon science?’, which he now explains.

In 1946 two skeletons were found during peat-digging in Bolkilde bog in the north of the Danish island of Als. They have now been dated to the middle of the fourth millennium BC and are interpreted as ritual offerings of a fertility cult which went through from the early Neolithic to the time of Frej and Freja. All three authors are in the University of Copenhagen: Pia Bennike is a research fellow in the Anthropological Laboratory, Klaus Ebbesen a senior lecturer, and Lise Bender Jørgensen Carlsberg research fellow, in the Institute of Prehistoric Archaeology.

Nearly two thousand archaeologists gathered in Denver in May 1985 to celebrate the first half-century of the Society for American Archaeology. We asked Professor Brian Fagan of the University of California, Santa Barbara, to report on this remarkable assembly and to review the book* published to celebrate the Society's jubilee. We add our congratulations to his, and wish the Society all success in its next fifty years.