The Iron Age settlement on Micklemoor Hill, West Harling, (Nat. Grid 62/975857) was discovered by Mr H. Apling while prospecting for Bronze Age cooking-places on the course of the river above Thetford during 1932. The site is a prominent hill of glacial gravel approximately 300 yards long and 150 yards wide, rising some 20 feet above the level of the surrounding marsh and rough grazing pasture and bounded to the north at a distance of between 200 and 600 feet by the river Thet. Its most prominent feature at the present day is a mound covering a brick-lined ice-house of 19th century construction and surrounded by a group of conifers. The prehistoric features discovered by Apling comprised two enclosures, an ‘Eastern Camp’ (our Site II), consisting of a low broad bank with external ditch and well defined opening on the west, and a larger ‘Western Camp’ (our Site III) of which only slight traces of a ditch were visible.

The excavations carried out by Apling in 1932 were mainly directed to the eastern enclosure: in addition to a number of trial holes he dug two-foot trenches across the site from two directions. No pottery was found in the interior, but the ditch which he located outside the bank yielded pottery, bones and flints. Accordingly a length of some 20 yards of the ditch-filling was removed on the eastern side and from this a really substantial quantity of material was obtained.

The present paper is based on a new study of the material from all the prehistoric sites so far excavated in the Maltese Islands. This was made in the course of preparing for publication a Corpus of all the known monuments and material of the islands (for the Royal University of Malta). The results achieved, especially those gained by the intensive study of the pottery (much of it hitherto unpublished), seemed to justify more rapid publication than could be expected for the Corpus itself, and I have to thank the Archaeological Survey Advisory Committee of the Royal University of Malta for very kindly granting me permission to publish this preliminary report on the advances made so far. At the same time I should like to record my best thanks to the Director of the Valletta Museum, Dr J. G. Baldacchino, and his Assistant, Mr C. G. Zammit, for their wholehearted co-operation in granting me every facility for the pursuit of my studies, and for the help which they have given in innumerable ways in forwarding the work of the Survey. Lastly, it is a pleasure to thank Prof. L. Bernabò Brea for his great kindness during a week spent with him in Syracuse and Lipari, and for much help from his unique knowledge of Sicilian archaeology.

The idea that the Beaker ware found over a large part of western and central Europe was Spanish in origin was made popular by the writings of Alberto del Castillo and Bosch Gimpera some thirty years ago. Although others have argued that the greater density of Beaker finds in central Europe makes that region a more likely homeland for the pottery, the Spanish theory is still the more generally accepted. Its implications for European prehistory are obvious: for if Beaker ware evolved from local Spanish traditions, then it is events in Spain which determine the terminus post quern for its appearance in Europe. Moreover, Castillo and Bosch Gimpera propose even more precise starting-points for different varieties of Beaker ware in Europe, since in the Peninsula they interpret different styles as stages in the development of the pottery, and therefore regard them as necessarily consecutive. At the same time if, as Castillo maintained, Beaker ware represents an evolution of early Spanish pottery, then its inventors, as descendants of the original neolithic population, might well be distinct from the later metal-using peoples in the Peninsula, among whom the pottery is found. It would therefore be plausible to suggest that Beaker ware was diffused in the Peninsula by the movements of a separate (basically neolithic) group; and the existence of such a group south of the Pyrenees would strengthen the hypothesis that in Europe also the pottery was spread by the migrations of a separate ‘People.’

Two contributions of unusual value for our knowledge of the comb- and pit-marked pottery culture of North-eastern Europe have recently appeared in vols. 20 and 29 of the series Materialy i Issledovaniia po Arkheologii SSSR (Materials and Investigations on Archaeology of the USSR), published in Moscow in 1951 and 1952 by Akademiia Nauk SSSR. The English titles of the two volumes are:

(1) The Neolithic and Early Metal Age Sites in the Northern Part of the European USSR (1951, 173 pp., 82 illustrations), edited by M. E. Foss, which includes studies on ‘The Pile-dwelling Site on the Modlona River and other Sites in the Charozer Region of the Vologda District’ by A. J. Briusov, ‘The Neolithic and Early Metal Age Sites on the Northern Coast of Lake Onega’ by N. N. Gurina and ‘The Neolithic Sites on the Northern Coasts of the Kola Peninsula’ by N. N. Gurina.

(2) The Earliest History of the Northern Part of the European USSR (1952. 280 pp., 121 illustrations), by M. E. Foss, edited by A. J. Briusov.

The former publication, which includes a detailed report by Briusov on the sites in the Vologda region, dated by stratigraphic evidence and pollen analysis, and the well presented studies by Gurina on the culture in the Lake Onega region and on the Kola Peninsula in the extreme north, is both a prelude and a supplement to the latter which embraces the entire northern part of the USSR.