Of all the monuments of remote antiquity in the British Isles none are more impressive, both by reason of their size and of the purposes which they served, than the structures of which Stonehenge, Avebury and Woodhenge are the most famous examples. In this paper it is my purpose first of all to record the investigation of a new monument of the ‘henge’ class—to use the convenient term adopted by Mr Kendrick—situated in the parish of Arminghall immediately south of the city of Norwich, and, secondly, to consider its date, purpose, affinities, and origin in relation to material published from other sites.

The object of the present communication is to demonstrate the relationships which, in the light of present knowledge, appear to exist between the various Pleistocene and Holocene deposits in the Lower and Middle Thames Valley. For this purpose two cross-sections of the valley have been drawn indicating the relative positions of the deposits which occur at various localities as though they were all present in two localities, one in the Lower, and one in the Middle Thames.

As many of the more important deposits in the Lower Thames are represented to the north and south of the river in the Dartford area, we have drawn the one section as if our ideal locality occurred in that neighbourhood. In this section, therefore, the relative altitudes of the various beds above and below present river level are those which are found in that part of the Thames basin. In tributary valleys, or in other parts of the main valley these altitudes are not of course necessarily maintained. In cases where deposits belonging to a particular stage have not been preserved in the Dartford area, but occur in a neighbouring part of the valley, or in a tributary valley, their position in the composite section has been roughly gauged by a process of extrapolation. Similarly when dealing with the Middle Thames, we have drawn our ideal section as though all the deposits occurred in one section of the valley in the neighbourhood of Iver.

The culture of the Neolithic Age in Britain established itself particularly firmly in the chalk districts which have their centre in, and radiate from, Salisbury Plain, as is shown by the distribution of some of the most characteristic monuments of the culture, the Long Barrows. Here the open or thinly wooded downland offered every advantage for the pasture of flocks and herds and for early experiments in agriculture, while flint, essential for the tools and weapons of the time, was readily obtainable.

One extension of the chalk, running south-west from Salisbury, forms the great ridge of the Dorset downs. This ridge falls abruptly on its northern side, but to the south it slopes more gently, and is furrowed by a number of pleasant valleys, which eventually find their way to the sea either at Christchurch or Poole Harbours.

At Blandford, the ridge is cleft by the narrow valley of the River Stour, and the whole area between Salisbury and Blandford lies within the ancient bounds of Cranborne Chase.

On this part of the ridge, which rises to 911 feet at Win Green, is an important concentration of Long Barrows. They number 32, and all except four of them are on the southern slopes, roughly between the 400 and 200 feet contours. They are frequently, but not always, situated on the summit of the spurs of the main ridge which separate one side valley from another.

The impact of a new technique upon a branch of science continues to be felt long after the first shock. Air-photography revolutionized the study of prehistoric fields and the excavation of individual sites, such as Caistor-by-Norwich, Woodhenge Arminghall, and the Ditchley Roman villa. It will, in the near future, revolutionize the study of distributions, itself quite a new subject. In my book Man and his Past (Oxford, 1921, pp. 128–153). I pointed out that the distribution-pattern of ‘loose finds,’ such as beakers and flat bronze axes, was free from the defect inherent in the distribution-pattern of objects fixed in the soil, such as megaliths, which may be removed by agricultural operations. ‘Camps’ and barrows are subject to the same limitations as indicators of population-areas; they may be destroyed by agriculture—prehistoric, mediaeval and modern; and there are many instances where such destruction is known to have occurred. They can both, however, be recovered by air-photography, which thereby rectifies the distortion of the distribution-map based solely on ground-work.

This paper summarises the results of the first attempt at systematic study of the megalithic monuments of Wales. Time after time, in the pages of Archaeologia Cambrensis and other journals will be found scattered papers in which the same familiar tombs present themselves; they have formed very inadequate foundations upon which to build, and none of their writers has attempted to place matters upon the only really sound basis, which is that of the study of each and every individual site in the field.

This omission is the more unfortunate because so much destruction has taken place in the last fifty years, and inevitably it has been the less well-known sites which have suffered most. No less inevitably the feeling of gratitude to earlier workers for what they have recorded—frequently under some difficulty—is tempered with one of regret for their failure to cover a wider field, and to replace passing references with plans, sketches, or even a few lines of more detailed description, which would have enabled us to obtain a better picture of the monuments as a whole than is now the case.

To be the President of the Prehistoric Society is an honour that has a particular personal appeal to me. When the Society was founded in 1908, with a title that identified it with East Anglia, I was resident in Ipswich, the very place that was to become the Mecca of students of the Old Stone Age. My pride in being an early adherent of the Society is tinged with regret that I was not one of the small group of founder-members. Only one circumstance prevented me from so participating, and that was my impression that my close attachment to geology was not an appropriate qualification for membership. This is in itself a significant sidelight on the gap that then lay between the study of later geological history—the Pliocene and Pleistocene (in which I was especially interested)—and investigations relating to the traces of Early Man.

In the quarter of a century that has elapsed since the founding of the Society, the gap between the two lines of approach has closed in a remarkable manner: geologists and archæologists now work side by side, and the effects of even the warmest arguments are merely transitory. The story of this interweaving of the sciences is now familiar to us all, and reference to some of the earlier phases of the rapprochement need only be incidental.

The submerged forest or peat bed on the Durham coast situated between Hartlepool and West Hartlepool and extending along the shore southwards towards Seaton Carew and northwards beneath the sand dunes has been known for many years. The main portion of it occupies a depression between two outcrops of Magnesian Limestone, the easterly one forming the isolated mass of rock on which the old town of Hartlepool is built and the westerly one being the edge of the main outcrop of the same rock on which West Hartlepool stands. To the south the Triassic red sandstone which is faulted down beneath a covering of boulder clay appears on the shore at Longscar Rock and Seaton Carew.

Sometime after the last retreat of the ice in the Quaternary ice age, the Scandinavian peninsula was separated on the south from the north German plain and Denmark. Later, England was cut off by the Channel from the continental land mass. An estimation of the times at which these two events happened is interesting to archaeologists, botanists and zoologists alike, because the communities with which they are concerned are affected by the barrier of an intervening arm of the sea.

So far most of the evidence about the times of separation comes from botanical and archaeological sources, from pollen analysis and the investigation of cultural sites. In this paper the distribution and physiology of certain freshwater animals are used to provide argument that the separation of Scandinavia and of England could only have taken place at times of particular climatic conditions. The climatic definition of the times of separation makes it possible to fit them in to the absolute geochronological scale which has been established by Scandinavian workers.

Collectors of prehistoric antiquities have long regarded the foreshore of long stretches of the Essex Coast between the rivers Stour and Blackwater as a prolific hunting ground, and many notable collections, consisting mainly of flints, have been obtained from this area. It is not the purpose of this paper to record these discoveries in detail, but rather to discuss the circumstances under which the antiquities are found, to summarise the main facts relating to the age of the old land-surface now submerged below the sea at high tide, and in conclusion to relate the facts observed on the Essex Coast to the stratigraphy established for the post-glacial deposits of the Fenland basin.

The authors of these notes acknowledge the ready co-operation of the numerous excavators who have contributed information concerning their work carried out during the present year.