The British hill-fort in these days needs no introduction. Everybody, certainly every reader of ANTIQUITY, is familiar with the ancient earthworks that crown the blunt spurs and whale-backed ridges of the chalk downs, and the grimmer ramparts of stone that take their place as one penetrates the lands of sharper contours and more obstinate rock that lie to the west and north.

A Series of Egyptian objects found in foreign lands has been used to date archaeological groups in those lands, especially for periods the dating of which was unknown. In connexion with a study of Egyptian stone vessels I have taken occasion to examine the material reported from other lands, and it appears to me that some of the material used by scholars can be more accurately dated.

The ruins of ancient Susa, prior to the Achaemenid period (sixth century B.c.), are shaped like a square, each side of which is 700 metres long. The angles face the cardinal points. The southern angle is however prolonged by an external mound, which M. Dieulafoy has called the ‘the Dungeon’.

The acropolis of Susa occupies the main portion of the northwestern side and we are continuing there the systematic exploration inaugurated by M. de Morgan. This year we widened and lengthened a trench which last season had reached the natural soil, and here we found a big ditch dug in the middle Elamite period. It was 8 metres wide, and 6.25 metres deep; we excavated 10.25 metres of its length without reaching its other end. The sides were covered by raw (sundried) bricks, which in some places were protected by thick walls of kilnfired bricks. Some of these burnt bricks have cuneiform inscriptions recording the dedication of Elamite temples. In the silting of this ditch we found fragments of arragonite vases, often inscribed with the names of the Achaemenid sovereigns Xerxes and Artaxerxes, and fragments of horns and ears of the stone protomas of the bulls forming the capitals of the columns of the Apadana. It seems that this ditch was originally a tank of water, belonging to the Elamite temples of the God Shushinak and of the Goddess Nin-Har-Shag. Water was brought into the tank by means of an aqueduct. The ditch was filled up gradually during the post-Achaemenid periods (Parthian and Sassanid). The fact that the ground surrounding the ditch corresponded to levels anterior to the third millennium B.c., was very perplexing until the real nature of the ditch was fully ascertained. However, during the course of clearing the remains we found a fragment of the pedestal of a Sumerian statue,chiselled out of a blue stone. Judging from its style it can be dated to the period of Agade, 2700 B.C.

During my leave to England in the spring of 1930, I revisited Iraq to acquaint myself further with the objects on view in the Baghdad Museum. As a result of excavations since I left that country the museum had acquired a large increase of material that I was not familiar with before, and I am now able to add to the links between the cultures of the Indus Valley and of Sumer which I have already pointed out in Mohenjo-dam and the Indus CiviZization,' to be published almost immediately.

On plate 146,fig. 43, of that book there is reproduced a red carnelian bead, bearing a somewhat elaborate design in white, that was found in the uppermost levels of the vs area. Several almost exactly similar beads found by Woolley in the early graves at Ur are now in the Baghdad Museum. The slight difference between the two designs, in that there are concentric circles on this first found Indian bead of the type in place of the single circles on the specimens from Ur, is negligible in face of the general similarity ; and especially in view of the fact that another of these beads has since been discovered at Mohenjo-daro with single circles, so that the design is identical with that on the beads from Ur (fig. 2).

About one-third of this book consists of a general introduction to the study of Roman Gaul; the rest is concerned with the Roman fortifications of the province; and all was to have been produced by Déchelette himself, but, after his untimely death in battle, it passed to Albert Grenier, Professeur d’Antiquités nationales et rhenanes à la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg. The choice is significant, for this is the first general publication by a French specialist on a Gaul which includes the Germanies, and it was therefore not beyond hope that pride and emulation would inspire an achievement equal to those of Espérandieu and Gsell, not to mention the German treatments which had already preceded it. But, from the start, cheapness has blighted the presentation, with that surety of touch in which Parisian publishers excel; and the editors have not chosen an author with those abilities in vulgarization which make French treatments, at their best, so very stimulating. The few scintillating remarks which brighten these pages are usually false lights, while the treatment as a whole lacks both the broad basis derived from a knowledge of general works, and the detailed acquaintance with the monuments and their analogies which is indispensable in a treatise upon fortification. It is amazing that anyone should now write upon Roman Gaul and omit from his bibliography Mommsen, Egger, Dragendorff, Folzer, Leitzmann, Loeschcke, Krencker, Kruger, Knorr, Mélida, Macdonald, ParvPn, Promis, Rostovtseff, Schulten and Schramm. The memory of Déchelette deserved better than this regnum Galliarurn in scholarship.

During the last two years the newspapers have more than once announced with a flourish of headlines that undoubted evidences of the Great Flood had been discovered in Mesopotamia.

The average reader felt quite excited. Noah’s Ark had been his earliest Sunday toy, and he had always felt vaguely aggrieved in later years on being told that nowadays learned people considered the Story of the Flood to be merely a myth. Consequently a good many readers eagerly read the articles, which held out a promise of restoring a cherished tale of childhood, only to find themselves involved in technical details of excavations in buried cities belonging to remote civilizations with unpronounceable names of which they had never heard.

The Roman Fort of Borcovicium at Housesteads in Northumberland should need no introduction to anyone interested in archaeology. During the last year it has been brought into great prominence by being presented to the Nation by Mr John Maurice Clayton, and through its close proximity to the portion of Hadrian’s Wall recently threatened by quarrying operations.

The fort at Housesteads was one of the earliest to be examined by British antiquaries, but although it has received so much attention its environs have been almost entirely disregarded. On both sides of the Military Way leading out of the west gateway was an extensive civil settlement, and traces of buildings can be seen on the south side of the fort. The hillside sloping to the southward is covered with the remains of early cultivations. These have generally been accepted as of Romano-British age. There are, however, two distinct systems of early cultivation. To the southwest of the fort there is a series of terraces running along the hillside, but on the southeast of the fort there are lynchets running north and south at regular interva up and down the hillside. From the hill to the south of Housesteads it can be clearly seen that where there is terrace cultivation it has been superimposed on the earlier system of lynchets, and this is also shown in air photographs.

Every archaeologist has at one time or another no doubt idly toyed with the attractive, if utterly impractical, idea of travelling backwards in time, and has seen himself, arrived within his ' period ', solving many problems by merely looking around him. Students of earthworks would give much to have been present at the building of a hillfort, for even if conversation with the builders were impossible, a great deal might be learned by watching the work in progress. We today, dealing with hillforts completed some two thousand years ago, find it difficult even after excavation to visualize the exact methods of construction of these defences.

There is however one example of a hillfort which is in that same unfinished state as our time-traveller might find were he on the Wessex Downs in the first few centuries B.C. True that he (lucky man !) would find the ditches newly dug and the rampart fresh piled chalk, while we today see them grass-grown and denuded; but never- theless these earthworks on Ladle Hill do help us to understand how they made those great green ramparts to protect their villages.

These brief notes, written shortly after our return from a first season’s work on the prehistory and geology of the Kharga Oasis under the aegis of the Royal Anthropological Institute, are no more than a background for the illustrations (figs. I-II), due to our good fortune in being the first expedition in Egypt to have the use, for a whole fortnight, of an aeroplane placed without restriction for scientific service in field-work.