It is with great diffidence that I venture to make a few criticisms upon certain aspects of Mr R. G. Collingwood's most suggestive paper in the September number of ANTIQUITY on 'Town and Country in Roman Britain'. He is an expert, I am an amateur; he has probably forgotten more about Roman Britain than I ever knew; but the points that I desire to discuss are matters of general inference rather than of expert knowledge.

In the first of these papersX dealing with certain problems in the history and archaeology of Ancient America an account was given of the Maya Old Empire and the possible causes which lead to its collapse in the fourth or sixth centuries A.D. The whole tract of Xibalba was probably deserted, its inhabitants scattered, and the alien theocracy which had inspired a great semi-civilization destroyed.

The traveller from London to Portsmouth by road, as he leaves Petersfield (fifty miles from his starting point and twenty from his objective) sees before him, above the copses and hopfields, a great green hill like the overturned hull of some gigantic ship. Looking southwards, he sees to the east the line of the Sussex Downs and to the west the less definite Hampshire ridge, and between them this majestic hill-Butser. Approaching nearer, the spurs which run out from the main mass show clearly the sunken tracks that wind up to the high level plateau above; and through the deep road-cutting across the col connecting Butser with Wardown on the east, a green land of ridges and hollows, of downs studded with juniper and thorn and of coombes with their sides covered with yew and whitebeam is entered. A yard from the road and there is untouched downland where one may walk all day and see no one but the occasional desecrating workman who strips Butser of its turf so that the suburbs of Southsea may have tennis courts.

The first Indian Palaeolithic stone implement was found more than 60 years ago in a ballast pit at Pallavaram, a little to the west of the Madras-Trichinopoly road. Since then a large number of stone tools belonging to various prehistoric cultures have been discovered by several keen archaeologists, among whom Bruce Foote deserves special mention.

During the last fifteen years or so, however, little has been published from the southeast of the Peninsula, archaeological attention having been more specially focussed on the unsuspected Sumerian-like discoveries in the north. Nevertheless, both in Southeast India and in Africa, fresh information has been collected which is very important for the elucidation of the origins and movements of prehistoric cultures.

On the suggestion of Rev. L. P. Murray, and influenced by the discoveries made at Stonehenge and elsewhere by 0 means of air-photography , the Ancient Monuments Advisory Committee for Northern Ireland, at a meeting held 27 April 1927, agreed to pursue similar investigations in the Province. The Ministry of Finance, which in regard to Ancient Monuments corresponds to H.M. Office of Works in England, gave its support and asked the Air Ministry for its cooperation. This was readily accorded, and 502 Ulster (Bombing) Squadron of the Royal Air Force stationed at Aldergrove, co. Antrim, was instructed to give assistance, so far as was consistent with its ordinary duties. Valuable help was given by Wing Commander A. Claud Wright and the Squadron under his command, and the results have been decidedly interesting.

But, after all, one guess is as bad as another. Mr Collingwood guesses half a million. Mr Randall guesses . . . but on re-reading Mr Randall I find that he doesn't guess at all. He passes lightly from persuasion to persuasion and ends with x. Indeed, he loses interest in the statistical problem and concerns himself mainly with the Higher griculture or, as he would phrase it, the Agriculture of the Uplands. He bravely ends, however, with Twelve Points which he gracefully provides as 'a target for counter-attack'.

If the possessor of a set of Archaeologia will open volume 25, for 1834, he will find over 40 pages, with many admirably drawn plans and plates, explaining some of the chief megalithic structures in England and Brittany as Dracontia, or temples of serpent-worship, a name and attribution which had originated with Stukeley a century earlier. This is but one example of the fantasies of the antiquaries of those times. We should, however, be slow to ridicule those old inquirers; they lacked our nova organa of excavation and comparison, the eyes and brain of modern archaeological science; though it is difficult to understand why they abandoned in these studies the sounder reasoning which served them in every-day affairs.

The readers of ANTIQUITY were, from the first, correctly informed about Glozel. But, having exposed the fraud, the Editor decided to ignore the torrent of polemics which ensued. His attitude was a wise one, for a forgery can only be scotched in its own country.

Why then revert now to the subject? Are there not good reasons for saying no more about it? One might urge, for instance, that the affair was now at an end: that it was an absurd hoax which now has been recognized as such by practically all prehistorians; that there remain only a few obstinate dupes who refuse to admit their original mistake; and that in the heat of controversy, inexpert people have become involved and have taken the affair out of the domain of science: so that it has now ceased to be of interest to serious students—it is no longer Science.

The excavations at Minet el Beida and Ras Shamra, begun in 1929 and continued in 1930,were undertaken at the suggestion of M. Rene Dussaud, Member of the Institute and Conservator at the Louvre. The natural harbour of Minet el Beida (the White Bayy lies facing Cyprus; and it was this fact which gave M. Dussaud the idea of a Mycenaean colony from Cyprus importing thither the copper which had to be disembarked for transport to the interior and to Mesopotamia. This theory was supported by the fact that 1000 metres from the bay is a huge tell (mound), called by the natives Ras Shamra (Cape Samphire), which might well hide the ruins of this assumed sea-port.

A Great antiquity has been claimed for dew-ponds, or rather for those ponds which have passed as such. They are found on the higher parts of the chalk downs of Southern England, and sometimes indeed on their very summits. They first came to be noticed by reason of the fact that in dry weather, when by all reasoning from their exposed position they ought quickly to dry up, they are the very ponds that still carry water, whereas other ponds on the lands below, which are fed by runnels and other drainage, are the earliest to suffer from drought. This is a very real distinction, for the old dewponds, to call them by their better-known name, have no drainage beyond the collecting area of their own banks. That observant student of natural history, Gilbert White, was almost the earliest writer to call attention (in the middle of the eighteenth century) to the ponds on the common above Selborne, which, although used for the watering of innumerable cattle and sheep, had never been known in his time to fail. His attempted explanation need not trouble us here, but it is noteworthy that he did not call them by the name of dew-ponds, and this name did not appear until well on into the nineteenth century. Pseudoscientific people gave this name to something which they could not explain and so the mysterious dew-pond was christened. They still give it the same name, although those living in their immediate neighbourhood still know them as mist-ponds or fog-ponds. The worst of it is that the mystery of the dew-ponds is constantly cropping up in print, and it really seems as if the general public does not want to know the truth of the matter. Mystery always appeals to them and I fear that editors do not always desire to deprive their readers of its fascination.

With the publication of Sir Hanbury Brown’s Fayoum and Lake Moeris in 1892, it was widely believed that the problem of the situation and extent of the Lake Moeris of antiquity had been finally solved. Sir Hanbury Brown pointed out that the shore-lines of an ancient lake could be traced in the Faiyum at a level of about 22 metres above sea; he concluded that this lake, which must have covered almost the whole of what is now the Faiyum province of Egypt, was the ancient Lake Moeris, and that the remarkable gravelly ridge known as the ‘Idwa Bank was the remains of an artificial embankment which had served to reclaim from the lake a comparatively small area around the present town of Medinet-el-Faiyum. Sir Hanbury Brown’s views received ready acceptance, because whilst satisfying all the modern levelling and other observations which had up to that time been made, they were also in tolerable accord with the account of Lake Moeris given by Herodotus and copied by subsequent classical writers.

It has always been part of the programme of ANTIQUITY to insist on the value of air-photography as an archaeological method; and records of discoveries made by its use have often appeared in the pages of this journal. Here is another such record; the first, I think, in which air-photography has led to the discovery and excavation of an altogether unknown Roman site.