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.

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.

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.