From its early stages, on 16 March 1967, the Department of State Affairs and the Central Army decreed the protection of cultural objects and books, and during the summer, 1971, a large exhibition in Peking featured an immense range of archaeological materials, all uncovered in the past few years (Kung, 1972). Archaeology may be studied as one of the best-documented humanities in contemporary China.

It may seem surprising that, after three-quarters of a century of excavation in Egypt, anyone should still feel it necessary to write an article claiming that ancient Egypt has, after all, left behind stratified town sites of the sort that have been the main source of work for the archaeoIogist in other countries ; and that, furthermore, the life which they represent can be rationally comprehended.

The cross-bar wheel has never been completely legitimized in the history of draught, being alternately declared in direct line of descent or merely collateral. This wheel (PL. IXa and FIG. 7) is characterized by a single diametric bar, thick enough to accommodate the nave, and by two slender ‘cross-bars’ on either side of the nave which traverse the central bar at right angles to it, and the ends of which are mortised into the felloe. There may alternatively be four (or more) shorter cross-bars in similar relation to the central bar, but with their inner ends mortised into it.

During the decade before last the majority of archaeologists stepped aboard the good ship Radiocarbon on a voyage of discovery, some hesitatingly, some with enthusiasm. Once under way the engine room staff were usually too busy to be questioned, for it was a new device having complex technical problems that had to be solved as the ship went along. For the most part the voyagers were content to accept the daily information bulletins; but there were some that questioned whether the peripheral islands could have been reached by the route the navigators claimed and there were some that said the islands seemed to be much further away than they could possibly be. Eventually the engine room staff got its problems sorted out and there was time to talk to the passengers; after lengthy discussions it came to be agreed (by nearly all) that the motion of the ship was more affected by ocean currents than had been assumed, and a way of correcting for this was worked out.

Some 300 years ago, in 1676, the year of Sir John Clerk‘s birth, Roger North, the biographer, visited Hadrian’s Wall. He was disappointed with what he saw: ‘it appeared only as a range or bank of stones all overgrown with grass, not unlike the bank of the Devil’s Ditch at Newmarket, only without any hollow, and nothing near so big’ (Birley, 1961, 9). In 1754, the year before Clerk died, William Stukeley had an audience of the Princess Dowager of Wales at Kew House.

Who are the Bretons and where do they come from? This is a question with not only historical and ethnological implications, but even political ones which sometimes tend to cloud the landscape.

Professor Léon Fleuriot teaches Celtic i n the second University at Rennes (Université de Haute-Bretagne) . He is a specialist in Old Breton (Le vieux Breton : éléments d'une grammaire, Paris, 1964; Dictionnaire des gloses en vieux Breton, Paris, 1964), a language barely known from glosses in Latin manuscripts from the scriptoria of the oldest Breton monasteries, from place-names and surnames in the cartularies of these monasteries. This has made him more interested still in the history and culture of the people speaking Old Breton, and he has revised all the evidence about them. Part I of this article is a version of the introduction to a large work on this subject not yet published.

Dr P.-R. Giot, specialist in Brittany, well known to the readers of Antiquity, is head of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie–Prehistoire–Protohistoire et Quaternuire Armoricains in the first University at Rennes (Université de Rennes) . From the study of the dry bones of the old inhabitants of the country he has got involved in their history and archaeology.

The province (or regione) of Molise is roughly the size of Lincolnshire or Devon, and stretches from the Apennine mountains to the Adriatic coast (FIG. I). In the Roman period Molise was occupied by the Samnite peoples and by related tribes such as the Frentani (Salmon, 1967, 25, map I). The historical tradition describes the Samnites as a rustic and warlike people, whom the Romans subdued only after the long series of savage wars in the last three centuries BC. Despite this historical evidence, however, the lack of previous archaeological research in Molise until the recent past meant that the archaeological record for this period in the province prior to 1974 was essentially confined to two major town sites of the Roman period (Boiano and Sepino), and two Samnite and Roman religious sanctuaries. For the same reason practically nothing was known about earlier prehistoric settlement. In the rest of Italy the evidence for early man built up by survey and excavation usually goes back at least as far as the Middle Palaeolithic, up to some 100,000 years ago. For Molise, however, there were in 1974 only chance finds of prehistoric flint and stone artifacts in local and national museum collections, most with little or no exact information about provenance. Molise was therefore virtually a blank area on the archaeological map of Italy.

During the early post-Pleistocene there flourished right across the middle belt of the African continent a highly distinctive way of life intimately associated with the great rivers, lakes and marshes. This belt–or arc, to be more precise, corresponding roughly with the drought zone of the early 1970s–comprises the southern Sahara and the Sahel from the Atlantic to the Nile and there bends up-river to the East African rift valleys and the equator. Traceable as early as the eighth millennium BC, the zenith of this ‘aquatic civilization’ was achieved in the seventh millennium, being a time when higher rainfall made rivers longer and more permanent and caused lakes to swell and burst their basins (Butzer et al., 1972; Zinderen Bakker, 1972). Around 7000 BC, for instance, fish populations as well as hippos and crocodiles reached the central Saharan highlands, while, to their south, Lake Chad expanded enormously till it overflowed via the Benue and Lower Niger into the Atlantic. In East Africa at the same time the small lakes in the Kenya rift valley rose to combine or to create riverain links over the normal watersheds, while to their north Lake Rudolf reached a height sufficient to help feed the White Nile system.

Dr Szabó, who is on the staff of the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts, is by training a classical archaeologist and art historian. In recent years he has been concerned with a re-evaluation of eastern Celtic art and is one of the editors of the great new Corpus of Celtic Material in Hungary being prepared under the auspices of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The text of Dr Szabó's paper was first delivered to the Vth International Celtic Congress held in Penzance in April 1975.

This is an account of the severed heads on the Auld Wives' Lifts, Craigmaddie Muir, Scotland, by the Professor of Archaeology, University of Glasgow. The Auld Wives' Lifts is an object of interest and debate for geology, antiquarianism, folklore, vernacular art and, perhaps, Celtic iconography, and we are glad to give it publicity.

A research campaign into the scarcely known history and prehistoric origins of Scottish West Highland and Island settlement, has located an area of ‘fossil’ landscape at Coileagan an Udail (the Udal), N. Uist. The completion of a first stage of 14 years excavation (155 weeks) has provided detailed evidence of continuous occupation from the Iron Age to the eighteenth century AD. Sampling has shown positive indications of a similar picture back through much of prehistory at least as far as the Beaker period and is the basis for the proposed second stage of excavations. This remarkably long (by European standards) sequence of deposition has had its coherence confirmed by a first series of radiocarbon dates. The calibration of these dates and their relationship to crucial artifacts is considered. This article is by Iain Crawford, who has just completed two years as Senior Visiting Research Fellow at The Queen's University of Belfast, and Dr Roy Switsur, Head of the Radiocarbon Dating Research Laboratory University of Cambridge.

Less than ten years have passed since the first discovery in Saudi Arabia of prehistoric pottery superficially identical with that known from the earliest farming settlements in Sumer 6-700 km to the north. Some 40 sites have now been identified in the Eastern Province. More recently comparable pottery has been found at sites in nearby Qatar and Bahrain. These discoveries have provoked much speculation about the nature of the contact between Sumer and Arabia at this early period (on calibrated radiocarbon determinations by the late sixth millennium BC), and indeed on the origins of the people who created the important and distinctive prehistoric culture characterized by this pottery and known to archaeologists as ‘Ubaid.