Some years ago the present writer had occasion, at a social gathering, to mention the subject of place-name study, one of the foremost exponents of which happened to be one of the party. His remark was met with a blank stare, followed by the question ‘What is place-name study’? Such illiteracy has deep roots in the English cultural tradition which owes more to the dilettante than to the professor. The understanding of place-names demands some knowledge of the early languages spoken in this country (Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon—;or, as it is now called, old English); and that is acquired in universities rather than in country houses and parsonages. But it also demands a familiarity with topography such as can best be acquired by a native who is permanently resident and knows the lie of the land at first hand. The best results are obtained from a combination of both, of book-learning enlivened by field-work.

The author of this brilliant and monumental work is a Swedish archaeologist, whose name will be well known to those who have followed with the greatest interest his outstanding, and, from both the archaeological and historical point of view, so fruitful and important excavations in Tonkin and North Annam between 1934 and 1939. The results have appeared, from time to time, in Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient, Cahiers de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient, and the Illustrated London News. Professor Janse's work was carried out under the auspices of the École Française d'Extrême-Orient, Hanoi, the Museums of Paris and of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. This fine book contains 113 pages in the text and 169 beautiful plates, showing a great number of the objects found, besides several clear and instructive plans of the most characteristic of the brick-built tombs excavated. There are also 56 figures in the text.

A hundred years ago, when Paxton's Crystal Palace went up among the elms of Hyde Park, it would never have entered the mind even of the Prince Consort that it should contain a section devoted to British Antiquity. The Great Exhibition was a glorification of the Present, of Progress, and its most conspicuous salute to the past took the form of a proliferation of Gothic ornament, and Pugin's gorgeous Medieval Court. The 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition on the South Bank will include a pavilion illustrating the Origin of the British People with material drawn almost entirely from the discoveries of British archaeology made since 1851. I do not think that this can be regarded as a tribute to the progress of our subject in any simple sense, rather it is a result of the development of the historical consciousness so characteristic of our time, and of which this progress itself forms a part. However, without further metaphysic, it remains a fact that one of the two official lines of entry into the South Bank Exhibition will be through a pavilion where many hundreds of thousands of people will find it difficult not to give at least a passing glance at a display of British prehistory.

It is well known that there are numerous ancient sites and buildings in this country whose nomenclature brings (or brought) them into hypothetical association with the Jews. It will be best, therefore, to begin this enquiry by drawing up a provisional list:

These three books between them nearly cover the whole effective range of British archaeology, from the gropings and fumblings of medieval monks to the era of pollen analysis and radio-carbon. There is a gap of nearly a century, however, between the death of Stukeley in 1765 and the beginning of Dr Daniel's hundred years. That is the unfortunate but inevitable result of adopting the rigid yard-stick of a century for measuring what in fact is the growth of living knowledge.

In his recent fine appraisal of the time-honoured ‘Pictish Question’ the late Professor H. M. Chadwick lends his powerful support to the theory that the first Celtic language to be spoken in Scotland, as elsewhere in Britain, was of the ‘Q’ variety. He regards the Cruithnigh (distinct in this connection from the ‘Picts’) as the introducers, in the Bronze Age, of this insular Celtic tongue which—he considers—was never, either in Scotland north or south of the Forth-Clyde isthmus, entirely supplanted by the modified Continental—or ‘P’—Celtic of the subsequent Iron Age intruders. It is proposed, for present purposes, to accept this primary contention of Professor Chadwick without cavil. But, on a minor point, I think we are entitled to suggest that the evidence afforded by the brochs, by the forts constructed by means of the ‘murus gallicus’, and by the large hill-top oppida, all of which can with fair confidence be attributed to the Iron Age, is sufficiently strong to render it likely that, about the beginning of the present era, the descendants of the Bronze Age natives of southern Scotland preserved a separate ethnic identity only in the hilly interior of their country. For this reason it is proposed to limit the claim to aboriginal status south of the isthmus to Ptolemy's ‘Selgovae’, who appear to have inhabited the centre of the Southern Uplands. Celtic scholars seem unusually agreed that this name is to be referred to the early Celtic vocable which was later represented by the Old Irish ‘selg’, ‘hunt’. A designation such as ‘They-who-hunt’ was probably a sobriquet, bestowed on a primitive pastoral people by more agriculturally-minded outsiders, and is hardly likely to have been the tribal-name by which these people knew themselves. To that point we will return later. But, since the sobriquet is not clearly attested after the time of Ptolemy, perhaps we may assume that it passed out of use, as such names are inclined to do. If so, was it replaced by another ? It is in that light that it is desired to consider the question of the Atecotti. Who were they?

The Viking raids on Western Europe are well-known from written, historical records. It has been suggested, however, that if those sources had not existed, we should have been obliged to reconstruct the history of the Vikings on a foundation of purely archaeological evidence. Typically Scandinavian graves on Western European territory bear witness to visits by Scandinavian people; and numerous finds of Scandinavian weapons also give some indication of the purpose of the visits.

This really monumental book reviews the material evidence accumulated—in more than two generations—for the periods within which the Homeric Poems came into being, and applies this evidence to discover the circumstances in which they achieved their actual shape. Outlines of this enquiry were proclaimed by Schliemann's excavations at Hissarlik (his site for Troy), Mycenae, and Tiryns; a remoter background by Sir Arthur Evans' work at Knossos; but detail has come from many hands, and in many fields of research—literary and even linguistic study reacting to archaeological, and propounding fresh problems to excavators. Two world wars have interrupted field-work and retarded publication. Miss Lorimer's own preface bears two dates (1946 and 1949), and she has to admit difficulties in obtaining important books, while some recent work is not noticed. In more than sixty years the leading figures in Homeric studies have changed; but one feels the abiding influence of Helbig and Dörpfeld in archaeology, and of Monro and Leaf in scholarship.

Professor Stuart Piggott ends his admirable study of William Stukeley with these words: ‘It was a Druidic dream-world which has left an oddly tangible relic today in the Welsh Eisteddfod with its Gorsedd Circle, invented by Iolo Morganwg in response to romantic Welsh patriotism a century or so ago, but in the end to be derived from Stukeley …’. When I pointed out to Professor Piggott that, in this form, his statement was not strictly accurate, he suggested that a brief note on the Welsh Eisteddfod and Gorsedd would prove of value.

It has usually been assumed that the collecting of surface material from the rich sites of Western Asia brought a harvest of knowledge at the expense of little archaeological skill; that while excavation, potentially destructive of evidence, required strict control, surface collecting was so harmless that it might be pursued indiscriminately. Recent survey work in Baluchistan has convinced the writer of the dangers of this view. This note is offered as a preliminary consideration of the problems involved in surface collecting, and the writer will be grateful for further suggestions from others more experienced than himself.

In his comprehensive study of the Eastern Libyans, published in 1914, Oric Bates devoted several pages to the discussion of certain forts, seen in south-west Cyrenaica by 19th-century travellers, the architecture of which seemed to indicate a native Libyan origin, entirely free from Greek or Roman influence. After repeating the descriptions given by these travellers, and reconstructing plans and sections of two of the forts from the recorded measurements (always a perilous undertaking), Bates concluded that these structures, typified by Gasr el-Heneia near Agedabia, and by several examples near Ghemines, belonged to the ninth or eighth century B.C., ‘the great era of polygonal masonry’.

Teeth are the most indestructible of all organic structures. Even in life 98 percent of their enamel is hard mineral matter and this dental durability has resulted in many extinct animals being known only by the fossil forms of their teeth. That is why the vocabulary of the vertebrate palaeontologist abounds in the names of species and orders ending in the Greek root ‘odont’.