In 1927 Professor Waterman of the University of Michigan undertook a special study of Babylonian topography for the purpose of locating the site of Opis (Babylonian Upi, Upa) the older Sumerian Akshak, capital of one of the oldest kingdoms in Mesopotamia. The general location of Opis is well defined by the inscriptions of Nebuchadrezzar at Wadi Brissa and Nahr el-Kelb, who states that for the defence of Babylon he built a wall from Sippar on the Euphrates to ‘ above ’ Opis on the Tigris, a distance of five beru, about twenty miles. Since with the help of this brick-faced earth wall he fashioned great bodies of water ‘ like the sea ’, twenty beru in length (probably in circumference), it is clear that a watercourse formed part of this system of defence. Xenophon mentions Opis as located above the modern Bagdad, but Strabo clearly places it in the district of the later Seleucia, stating2 that the Tigris was navigable as far as Opis and Seleucia.

There has been for a good many years an uneasy sense that all was not well with the theory of the Italian terremare as propounded by the original explorers. Writers of general works have continued to accept and to pass it on, in perfectly good faith, as if it were a coin of full value, worth the same now that it was thirty years ago. But those who had the best opportunities of knowing were aware that there had been a very serious depreciation. It was strongly suspected that, like the dollar, it had sunk to at least 59 per cent of its nominal value; but there seemed to be no one who was at once willing and able to state the exact degree of devaluation. Pigorini’s staunchest followers, of whom the last survivor died a few years ago, began to admit that there was a considerable percentage of loss; while more impartial outsiders wondered whether the terremare coin had not become totally valueless.

In his Editorial Notes for September 1930, the Editor of ANTIQUITY described an exploratory flight over England and Scotland taken by him and Mr H. J. Andrews in June of that year, in the course of which a most remarkable discovery was made. A main objective of the flight was the Roman town of Durobrivae, where the Ermine Street from London to Lincoln and the North crosses the river Nene, now the boundary here between the counties of Huntingdon and Northampton. Extensive, and for their period careful excavations were carried out in this vicinity by E. T. Artis in the twenties of the 19th century, and illustrated in a sumptuous quarto volume of plates; but despite exhaustive summaries of these and all recordable discoveries contributed to the Victoria County History, by Haverfield for the Northamptonshire side in 1902, and by Miss M. V. Taylor for the Huntingdonshire side in 1926, no systematic modern work has been attempted on any part of the site, and an air reconnaissance seemed an ideal way of re-introducing it in 1930 to the attention of archaeologists.

N their recent work, The Open Fields, C. S. and C. S. Orwin devote an appendix to the question of the origin of lynchets, in which they express their difficulties in accepting the current theory that narrow, step-like terraces like those at Bishopstone (Wilts.), for instance, could have been formed as a result of ploughing (PLATE I, facing p. 49). In private correspondence they assure me that these difficulties are widely shared by other agriculturalists, but at the same time they admit that they have no better explanation to offer. They point out that these terraces are found distributed mainly on the chalk of southern England, but also on various other geological formations in the Midlands, west and north, and also in southern Scotland; also that there seem to be many varieties of strip-lynchets, and that possibly one explanation may not apply to all; but while rightly distinguishing between these and the small square plots of the Celtic field-system, they are very much in error in implying that the latter are bounded only by field-banks and not by lynchets (p. 3 19).

‘This map’, the Director General informs us in his Foreword, ‘forms the northern portion of the Map of Britain in the Dark Ages, of which the southern portion was published in 1935’. It represents therefore the completion of a task which must have taken nearly a decade to carry out, from its first inception down to publication. This northern sheet is in fact a map of Early Scotland, showing it as it was roughly between the years A.D. 450 and 850; but in this dim historical dawn exact dates cannot as a rule be discerned. A long historical introduction of 26 pages, and 5 diagrams, serve to amplify and elucidate the map itself; and there is of course the usual index of place-names.

It has often appeared to the writer to be a really remarkable circumstance, during the long and sometimes acrimonious controversies of the nineteenth century concerning the various physical, social, and ‘technical’ phenomena (methods, etc.) characterizing the Saxon settlement of Britain and its more immediate antecedents, that among the various protagonists of the first rank, none seems to have thought it worth while to visit those lands where an essentially similar environment still prevailed, and to see for himself what they might yield. To make such a statement concerning archaeological students of today would certainly be to invite questions in return, which are not easily answered. What was the (physical) environment of early Saxon England; and where shall we find its ‘essentially similar’ counterpart? But at the time of which I speak, such doubts may almost be said to have been non-existent. Whatever opinions were held concerning Roman centuriation, or Teutonic three-field systems, the old ‘traditional’ view of England as ‘a land of forests’, ‘one great wood’, etc., seems hardly to have been questioned. Under such conditions, virtually any forest country occupied by settlers of European birth or descent would serve the required purpose.

The story of the discovery of Mapungubwe, which led to its systematic excavation, makes reading as vivid and exciting as any adventure-fiction of our youth.

The site is one of many precipitous sandstone kopjes which rear their almost perpendicular sides some 200 ft. above a valley-floor tributary to the Limpopo, which lies only a mile distant, at the point where the Shashi river, flowing from Rhodesia, joins forces with it. Messina—archaeologically famous for its pre-European copper mines—lies about 50 miles west, and it overlooks the meeting point of Transvaal, Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesian territory. Fortunately for science, British administration being parsimonious in these matters, the hill lay within the Transvaal border.

Recent articles in Antiquity have drawn attention to the rich sources of material for study in ethnology and archaeology which lie almost untapped in the dwellings of peasant Britain. For Ireland three papers by Åke Campbell1 break new ground in a virgin field and increase the heavy debt which Irish scientific studies owe to Scandinavia; and the interest roused has been fostered by a short statement on the need for enquiry into house-types issued by Colonel R. G. Berry. The Irish Folklore Commission has gathered much information on this and related topics, while a regional survey of the housetypes of north Kerry, clearly inspired by Campbell's work, has lately appeared. The participation of continental workers in this field is further illustrated in the ‘Contributions to the study of the tangible material culture of the Gaoltacht’ published by L. Mühlhausen.

In recent years considerable attention has been devoted to the problems of the Early Iron Age in the British Isles; and, amongst these problems, that of the relationship between the insular and the continental cultures of the period has not become simpler or clearer as the British evidence has accumulated. How far, and in what manner, were the various Iron Age cultures of Britain derived from the continent? How far, and under what conditions, were they due to local initiative in Britain itself? Until questions such as these can be answered approximately, it will remain impossible alike to estimate the real achievement of the later prehistoric civilization of the island and to visualize the full significance of the adjacent civilization of northwestern Europe. The problem is not an easy one. The agricultural and therefore local basis of most of the Iron Age economy of Britain encouraged the strong local differentiation of cultural forms, and this local individuality was enhanced by the fashion in which the major tracts of open and habitable chalk or greensand tended, in ancient times, to be isolated by expanses of dense and often impassable forest. And, similarly, an intrusive element from overseas might easily take root in a particular area of southern or eastern Britain without directly affecting other areas within a relatively short map-distance.

The reasons for selecting the northwest sector for the beginning of the excavations within the circles of Avebury, scheduled to last for at least a decade, by the Morven Institute of Archaeological Research (with the permission and cordial co-operation of H.M. Office of Works) was twofold. First, the conditions of indescribable squalor and neglect prevailing over most of the area of this section surpassed, if comparison is possible, those existing in any other part of the circle; indeed the tangle of rusty pig-wire, the accumulations, to a depth of nearly three feet, of old tins and broken bottles, around two of the standing stones, to say nothing of the refuse-heaps which filled part of the ditch almost flush with its edges, contributed ungenerously towards rendering the once majestic site of Avebury what it has been for centuries, the outstanding archaeological disgrace of Britain. Secondly, the presence of a veritable jungle of trees and undergrowth not only perpetually menaced the safety of this part of the monument, but had already done dama e to the preservation of the all-important features below ground-level.