The author of this brilliant and monumental work is a Swedish archaeologist, whose name will be well known to those who have followed with the greatest interest his outstanding, and, from both the archaeological and historical point of view, so fruitful and important excavations in Tonkin and North Annam between 1934 and 1939. The results have appeared, from time to time, in Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient, Cahiers de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient, and the Illustrated London News. Professor Janse's work was carried out under the auspices of the École Française d'Extrême-Orient, Hanoi, the Museums of Paris and of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. This fine book contains 113 pages in the text and 169 beautiful plates, showing a great number of the objects found, besides several clear and instructive plans of the most characteristic of the brick-built tombs excavated. There are also 56 figures in the text.

In his recent fine appraisal of the time-honoured ‘Pictish Question’ the late Professor H. M. Chadwick lends his powerful support to the theory that the first Celtic language to be spoken in Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain, was of the ‘Q’ variety. He regards the Cruithnigh (distinct in this connection from the ‘Picts’) as the introducers, in the Bronze Age, of this insular Celtic tongue which—he considers—was never, either in Scotland north or south of the Forth-Clyde isthmus, entirely supplanted by the modified Continental—or ‘P’—Celtic of the subsequent Iron Age intruders. It is proposed, for present purposes, to accept this primary contention of Professor Chadwick without cavil. But, on a minor point, I think we are entitled to suggest that the evidence afforded by the brochs, by the forts constructed by means of the ‘murus gallicus’, and by the large hill-top oppida, all of which can with fair confidence be attributed to the Iron Age, is sufficiently strong to render it likely that, about the beginning of the present era, the descendants of the Bronze Age natives of southern Scotland preserved a separate ethnic identity only in the hilly interior of their country. For this reason it is proposed to limit the claim to aboriginal status south of the isthmus to Ptolemy's ‘Selgovae’, who appear to have inhabited the centre of the Southern Uplands. Celtic scholars seem unusually agreed that this name is to be referred to the early Celtic vocable which was later represented by the Old Irish ‘selg’, ‘hunt’. A designation such as ‘They-who-hunt’ was probably a sobriquet, bestowed on a primitive pastoral people by more agriculturally-minded outsiders, and is hardly likely to have been the tribal-name by which these people knew themselves. To that point we will return later. But, since the sobriquet is not clearly attested after the time of Ptolemy, perhaps we may assume that it passed out of use, as such names are inclined to do. If so, was it replaced by another ? It is in that light that it is desired to consider the question of the Atecotti. Who were they?

The Viking raids on Western Europe are well-known from written, historical records. It has been suggested, however, that if those sources had not existed, we should have been obliged to reconstruct the history of the Vikings on a foundation of purely archaeological evidence. Typically Scandinavian graves on Western European territory bear witness to visits by Scandinavian people; and numerous finds of Scandinavian weapons also give some indication of the purpose of the visits.

In his comprehensive study of the Eastern Libyans, published in 1914, Oric Bates devoted several pages to the discussion of certain forts, seen in south-west Cyrenaica by 19th-century travellers, the architecture of which seemed to indicate a native Libyan origin, entirely free from Greek or Roman influence. After repeating the descriptions given by these travellers, and reconstructing plans and sections of two of the forts from the recorded measurements (always a perilous undertaking), Bates concluded that these structures, typified by Gasr el-Heneia near Agedabia, and by several examples near Ghemines, belonged to the ninth or eighth century B.C., ‘the great era of polygonal masonry’.

Antiquity has recently received some information* of great value in connexion with radiocarbon dating from the advisory committee on the subject set up by the American Anthropological Association and the Geological Society of America. It consists of an historical foreword, a corrected list of dates, a number of reports on specific problems, a summary and a bibliography, partly in typescript and partly on microfilm. The list differs little from the printed one which was distributed to a number of interested people in September 1950, though it contains a few additions and corrections, and the real importance of the material now received lies in the reports and the summary.