Ten years have now elapsed since the death of V. Gordon Childe, whose great achievement it was to relate the many disparate elements of European prehistory into a single coherent whole. These ten years have seen not only the sustained application of radiocarbon dating to the south-east European Neolithic (Quitta, 1967; Kohl and Quitta, 1966), but the publication of important stratigraphic sequences, especially that of the great tell at Karanovo in Bulgaria (Georgiev, 1961). Both these advances put in question one of the essential elements in Childe's structure for the chronology of Europe: the chronological equation between Troy I and the Vinča culture of Jugoslavia (Childe, 1929, 32; 1927; 1939).

This is the cornerstone for the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age of much of Europe, and to remove it would cause widespread changes both in chronology and culture history.

The crucial importance of this point has been well expressed by Professor Clark (1938): ‘Thanks to the synchronisms established between Troy and Iberia and the western Mediterranean on the one hand, and central and northern Europe on the other, any important alterations in the absolute dating of the successive “cities” is bound to affect the dating of every culture in Europe of the period, much in the same way as fluctuations in the price of certain key commodities are felt in the exchanges of the whole world’. Today, of course, it is not so much the absolute dating of Troy which is in question, but the synchronisms with Europe: the effect, however, is the same.

The material discussed in this paper was obtained during 1966 from the region to the west of Lake Baringo. Excavations were conducted in two areas about a mile apart, on either side of the Kapthurin River. The positions of these excavations are to be found on the 1: 50,000 Survey of Kenya map, Sheet 90/4 of Series Y731, Edition I-D.O.S. The first is located at ZR 314/637 and the second at ZR 316/621. Fig. 1 is based on a small section of Sheets 30/4 and 31/3 and is reproduced by permission of the Director of Surveys, Nairobi. A hominid mandible and a living site were discovered in the first area whilst in the second a factory site was found. These sites lie in the Kapthurin Beds of the eastern area of the Kamasian Hills. The beds are possibly upper Middle Pleistocene and are divided from the underlying Chemeron beds which are of Plio/Pleistocene age.

The geology of the area was first described by J. W. Gregory (1921). It was subsequently studied and re-assessed by V. E. Fuchs (1939 and 1950) and by McCall, Baker and Walsh (1967). The most recent study has been made by Mr J. E. Martyn of Bedford College, London, who was engaged in geological mapping of the area west of Lake Baringo in 1966 and 1967. A report on the Kapthurin Beds by J. E. Martyn follows this introduction.

During the course of mapping, J. E. Martyn and his assistants found a number of fossils in the Chemeron beds. He showed these to Mr Jonathan Leakey who noticed an incomplete hominid temporal bone amongst them.

Prehistorians concerned with the Pleistocene have traditionally defined their cultural units (‘industries’) mainly by the types of stone artefacts they contain. One of the best known of these units is the Mousterian, authoritatively defined by Francois Bordes (1953, 458) as ‘… an industry of flakes, comprising a variable proportion of side-scrapers, points, denticulate tools, and also bifaces. Technically, the flakes may or may not be of Levallois débitage and may or may not have faceted butts, Levallois débitage and butt-faceting having no necessary relation to one another’. The Mousterian is generally assumed to have its roots in an earlier group of industries known as the Acheulean. It is difficult to determine when the Mousterian emerged as a distinct entity both because differentiation from the Acheulean occurred only gradually and because our geochronological controls are imperfect. Certainly, however, the Mousterian was in existence by the beginning of the Last ( = ‘Würm’) Glacial Period, that is, no later than 65,000–70,000 years ago (Table I). In the earlier part of this Glacial, it was distributed from the Iberian Peninsula on the west to Uzbekistan (and perhaps beyond) on the east, and from the British Isles on the north to the Mediterranean littoral of Africa on the south. Sometime between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago (the exact time perhaps depending upon the place), the Mousterian was rather abruptly replaced over most, if not all of this range. The demise of the Mousterian is of especial interest because there is considerable evidence to suggest that it was intimately connected with the disappearance of Neandertal Man (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and the subsequent spread of modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens).

At the beginning of the 2nd millennium B.C. there became established in Britain the tradition of constructing ceremonial circles of earth, stone or timber. However, circular enclosures were being built much earlier in the 3rd millennium, which on account of their interrupted ditches have been called causewayed camps. These enclosures are unlikely to have been fortified village sites or cattle pounds as was originally suggested, but the pottery evidence from Windmill Hill and Robin Hood's Ball, to mention only two sites (Smith, 1965; Thomas, 1964), points to visits by groups of people coming from other regions. It has been suggested, therefore, that these camps may have served as centres or rally points for a fairly wide area where tribal ceremonies could be performed (Smith, 1965, 17–21). At Windmill Hill in particular, the abundance of pottery, grain-rubbers and querns and the remains of slaughtered animals testify to the consumption of food on a large scale and therefore possibly to communal feasts.

If this interpretation be correct then one could suggest that the ceremonial circle tradition of the 2nd millennium derived ultimately from these earthworks. Both are essentially a British phenomenon, although the causewayed camps can be compared with causewayed ditched enclosures in the Michelsberg culture, and appear to represent indigenous traditions with no external influences. However, although the quantity of animal bones and domestic refuse from Durrington Walls and Gorsey Bigbury in the Mendips confirms the practice of feasting in connection with ceremonial circles, these sites are virtually unique in the quantity of human debris they have produced.

Evidence relating to the ‘Mousterian’ period in the Périgord and adjacent areas of south-west France has increased strikingly—both in quantity and quality—during the past two decades (note 1, p. 166). New sites have been excavated (and old sites re-excavated) with the aid of much more refined techniques for separating the different strata and recording the finds than those employed hitherto; faunal remains have been subjected to closer and more systematic examination (Bouchud, 1966; Bordes and Prat, 1965); and the application of detailed palynological and sedimentological analyses has provided a relatively clear and firmly-established picture of the climatic and ecological conditions under which the Mousterian communities lived (Bordes et al., 1966; Bonifay, 1964; Laville, 1964a, etc.).

Perhaps the most impressive advances, however, have been made in studies of the Mousterian industries themselves. Extensive application of the quantitative techniques of analyses devised by Professor F. Bordes and M. Bourgon (1951b) has permitted for the first time an objective appraisal of the full range of typological and technical variability which the Mousterian assemblages of this region embrace. On the basis of these analyses it has been possible to divide the industries into a number of relatively well-defined taxonomic groups (Bordes, 1953, 1957b, 1961a, 1968, 98–105 etc.). Although based initially on a very small body of data (Bordes and Bourgon, 1951b; Bordes, 1953), subsequent analysis of a much larger number of industries has provided strong support for at least the major features of this taxonomic scheme (Mellars, 1967, 97–145).

Considerable attention has recently been paid to the start of the Iron Age in East and Central Africa. One of the most interesting problems concerning this period is that of the relationship of the Early Iron Age farming people to the hunter-gatherers of the Late Stone Age whom they eventually displaced. Very few archaeological sites are known, and none have yet been published, which illustrate the Late Stone Age/Iron Age transition in Central Africa, and discussions of this and related problems have so far been largely based on conjecture. Evidence concerning this important transition was recently unearthed at Nakapapula rockshelter in the Serenje District of central Zambia. Here a long and relatively homogeneous Late Stone Age sequence of Nachikufan type was seen to continue into the 2nd millennium A.D., that is, well after the first appearance of Early Iron Age pottery at this site and elsewhere in Zambia. Nakapapula has also yielded the first archaeological evidence for the date of schematic rock art in Central Africa and confirmed its contemporaneity with the Early Iron Age.

A part from its successes in the Somerset Levels, environmental archaeology has made little headway in studies of the South-west of England. On the uplands this is partially due to the lack of preservation of bone and most other organic remains in the acid soils now present. Again, in the region generally there has been little deposition in basins of the muds, marls and peats accumulated during the Post-glacial that are so valuable for reconstructing the botanical environment and the effects of early man on soils and vegetation; this is largely a consequence of the peninsula's escape from Pleistocene glaciation. Further, the published material on archaeology has until lately been so scattered that it has been difficult to compile a coherent outline of the settlement and economy of the region in pre-Roman times, a situation only recently remedied by the publication of Lady Aileen Fox's book South West England, providing a personal synthesis of the prehistory of that area.

The ancient field system on Horridge Common, Ilsington, on the southern slopes of Dartmoor (fig. 1) has been known to scholars since 1954 but has never been studied in detail. In 1964 the owner of the adjoining Bagtor wood felled some timber and in order to remove it, had a broad track bulldozed from the Rippon Tor rifle range north-eastwards along the hill-side and across the field system, despite the fact that this was a scheduled ancient monument. In September 1965 Mr W. J. Hopkins, a ‘small-scale reviser’ of the Ordnance Survey, plotted the new track and noticed the palstave in the loose soil which had been churned up recently. The implement was eventually sent to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum at Exeter, where I saw it; in May 1966, Mr Hopkins kindly visited the site with me and marked the exact position of the discovery (fig. 2). It was obvious that the palstave was not the usual south-western type and that its discovery within a Dartmoor field system was of particular interest; accordingly Mr Dennis Britton was asked to describe it and with the assistance of Mr D. Walling a survey was undertaken of the relevant group of huts and fields adjoining (fig. 2).

Petrological and chemical analyses of stone, bronze and iron implements are playing an increasingly important role in the study of prehistoric economies. Their contributions, long familiar to students of European prehistory, were recently discussed in a paper which also reviewed the evidence from Polynesia, Melanesia and Australia (Clark, 1965). Apart from some studies limited to stone artefacts from individual archaeological sites, these techniques have not previously been applied to material from Australian prehistory (Gutsche in McBryde, 1966; Branagan and Megaw, 1969). In this brief communication we present some of the results of a petrological analysis of ground-edge artefacts from north-eastern New South Wales.

The widespread dispersal of stone for axe-making based on organized exploitation of definite quarry sites is well documented in the historical and anthropological literature for eastern Australia at the time of European settlement. Unfortunately few of these historical records are sufficiently detailed, so even for the recent past as well as for prehistory, techniques of petrological analysis may make vital contributions to our knowledge both of quarry sites in eastern Australia and of the distribution of their products. Our preliminary discussion here is based on an investigation of some 200 axes mainly taken from the archaeological collections in the History Department of the University of New England and various local museum and private collections, but also including axes from northern New South Wales in the Australian collections of the British Museum, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Anthropological Museum of Aberdeen University.

There is a considerable literature concerning the prehistory and palaeontology of cattle, both at the infra- and inter-species levels. In spite of the wealth of published material, however, deficiencies remain. The majority of the publications concern small areas of study, and few general syntheses are available; the few syntheses which do exist, such as those of Reed (1961) and Zeuner (1963) do not do justice to the information at present available. Most of the detailed work is concentrated in North-West Europe, and developments in many fields, particularly those of evolutionary genetics and economic prehistory, have rendered obsolete many of the premises underlying published hypotheses. This is true for nearly all discussions of animals in their relationships with prehistoric man, but a general reassessment of the situation is available (Higgs and Jarman, 1969) while Payne (1969) has treated the sheep-goat group in particular. The work concerning cattle may conveniently be divided into two overlapping groups. First there are those studies which are primarily concerned with palaeontological considerations, with the description of specimens from a taxonomic and ecological point of view. The second group comprises investigations into the relationship between man and cattle and because of the prevailing climate of thought has concentrated overwhelmingly on the domestication of cattle and their subsequent exploitation. Thus the ‘Man and Cattle’ Symposium (Mourant and Zeuner, 1963) contains papers concerned with the history of the relationship from the Neolithic to the present day. Mesolithic and Pleistocene cattle are not discussed in any detail, and are only mentioned as a standard of comparison by which changes may be recognized. This assessment of the relative potential importance of the evidence is the product of the preferred hypothesis of the time, and before discussing the evidence offered for the domestication of cattle and their later history, it is important to understand the formative influence of the theoretical framework underlying the data.

The currently accepted divisions of the south Italian Neolithic are based on typological studies of ceramic styles, interpreted with the aid of stratigraphical information derived from a few key excavations. On the basis of this material a number of authorities have divided the Neolithic into a series of chronological phases. It is my belief that the evidence for constructing this neat relative chronological framework does not in fact exist and that the scheme generally favoured today is oversimplified and in parts inaccurate. In this paper I shall first summarize three important typological studies of south Italian Neolithic pottery: R. B. K. Stevenson's pioneer study of museum material, mainly from the Materano, published in 1947 (Stevenson, 1947); L. Bernabò Brea's scheme, based primarily on the stratigraphical sequence obtained from his excavations on the island of Lipari, published in various forms and admirably summarized in a paper presented to the Primo Convegno di Studi sulla Magna Grecia in 1961 (Bernabò Brea, 1962) and, finally, R. Peroni's recent study of the Apulian material (Peroni, 1967). The second part of my paper will consist of a critical examination of these three studies and the final section will be devoted to a description of the known Neolithic wares, with an assessment of their relationships and relative chronological positions.

When Europeans entered the New Guinea Highlands in the 1930s, they discovered peoples using two main kinds of stone implements—polished axes and simple flake tools. The prominence of the axe has been well documented (S. Buhner, 1964; R. and S. Bulmer, 1964; Salisbury, 1962; Tischner, 1939; Vial, 1940 et al.). Crucial to subsistence, it was also used widely in exchanges and payments of all kinds and had a value as a ceremonial object. This seems to have been the case throughout the Highlands. Nevertheless, there were probably variations in the precise range of uses to which the axe was put, and consequently in its ‘value’. This comment is prompted by a consideration of two societies—Hagen in the Western Highlands and Wiru in the Southern Highlands Districts—whose traditional evaluations of the stone axe seem to have had differing emphases. In the past the axe was probably less important as a ceremonial object to the Wiru than it was to the Hageners, and its use as a tool more limited. The situation seems to have been correspondingly reversed in the case of the flake tool, however, which had generally more importance in Wiru.

The analysis of Early Bronze Age metal objects in Europe has been the concern of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Metallurgie at Stuttgart for a number of years. In 1960 the first major results of this ambitious programme were presented in a volume generally described as SAM 1, or Studien zu den Anfängen der Metallurgie (Junghans, Sangmeister and Schröder, 1960). Using the trace elements arsenic (As), antimony (Sb), silver (Ag), Nickel (Ni) and Bismuth (Bi), SAM 1 described the content and distribution of 12 European metal groups, each devised on the basis of the varying concentrations of these trace elements in Bronze Age metal. This programme was the first to attempt to examine metallurgy in this way for the whole of Europe. A number of regionally restricted studies had already been carried out before the appearance of SAM 1; the Irish, and some British, material had been previously examined by Coghlan and Case (1957) and by Britton (1961). In 1964 a major review of the Stuttgart production appeared, in which the method of combining the elements into groups was criticized on archaeological grounds (Butler and van der Waals, 1964). Subsequently a new approach was devised by Waterbolk; in this, the Stuttgart method of attempting to find clusters from a gigantic range of analyses, each one treated exactly as another, was abandoned, and replaced by a more archaeological approach in which typology and association were used (Waterbolk and Butler, 1965). The significance of the groups produced by this method are only now being assessed.