It is twenty years since Dr Alex. Curle published his conclusions on the problem of the brochs and it does not diminish our regard for the great services which he has given to the study of the Scottish Iron Age that his article did not end the discussion. About the same time Dr Watson and Professor Brögger expressed their views, and the Scottish Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments summarised the results of their survey, a summary which they have brought up to date in their recently published volumes. In the intervening years Professor Gordon Childe has made important contributions, and one valuable broch excavation has been reported. And yet it cannot be said that the central difficulty has been resolved.

Palaeolithic artifacts were recorded from a terrace on the Great Ouse, near St. Neots, Huntingdonshire, in 1927, the chief source being a group of pits dug in what was formerly part of Paxton Park, on the left bank of the river in the parish of Little Paxton. Mr Tebbutt has since recovered many more artifacts from this site. Taken together, the material constitutes a working industry, which will be described in this paper.

A twelve-foot section, fig. 1, shows a basal layer (1) of boulders and large pebbles resting upon undisturbed Oxford Clay. One boulder of limestone measured two feet in length, and many other erratics showed the derivation of this layer from drift deposits of a preceding glacial stage. Bones and teeth of Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros antiquitatis, Rangifer tarandus, and Equus caballus were found here. This basal bed is not a solifluxion level in place, though it may represent a solifluxion layer which has been re-washed and sorted. Certainly the Oxford Clay has not been caught up into it, and the elements are uniformly water-laid, passing up, without break, into nine feet of compact, well-bedded, fluviatile gravels.

The first report of the Sub-Committee of the South-Western Group of Museums and Art Galleries on the petrological identification of stone axes was published in the Proceedings for 1941, vol. VII, 50–72. Appreciative comments concerning it were published in Museums Journal, vol. 42, 34, and Nature, 1942, 149, 275.

Membership of the Sub-Committee remains unchanged apart from the withdrawal of Dr R. Churchill Blackie and the addition of Mrs D. P. Dobson, LITT.D., M.A., F.S.A. (1945), Messrs C. K. Croft Andrew, F.S.A. and A. G. Madan, and Dr J. F. S. Stone (Honorary Secretary from 1946).

The activities of the Sub-Committee were naturally greatly restricted during the war, but a few axes were submitted and, although procedure was protracted, eventually examined.

Recently the Council for British Archaeology has received a report concerning cooperation of petrologists and archaeologists urging that the identification of stone axes should be raised from the regional to national level. The existing museum federations seemed admirably suited for implementing this policy and their co-operation has accordingly been secured. In future, therefore, the petrological activities of the South-Western Group will be strictly regional instead of embracing the whole of Britain.

The moment for this change seemed an appropriate one for the Sub-Committee to publish a second report briefly summarizing their work and also bringing to a close the first decade of its labours.

Once again thanks are extended to those private owners and trustees of public institutions who have willingly allowed the material in their possession or charge to be sectioned and so made these results possible. The Committee is again deepjy indebted to Mr E. D. Evens whose enthusiasm for, and interest in, the work has never waned and to whose meticulous examination of each thin section they owe much.

Military service during the 1942–43 campaign in Libya provided an opportunity for myself and a few friends to make a preliminary reconnaissance of stone age remains along the 1200 miles of coast between Alexandria and Tripoli. Under the circumstances many of our observations were necessarily of a very incomplete and cursory nature. I have nevertheless thought it worth while presenting them as a whole, since they do at least provide a first estimate of the culture-sequence in this interesting and little-studied area. One cave and a few vaguely described, or very scanty, surface finds appear to make up the sum total of previously published discoveries.

South-east Italy, from the spur to the heel of Italy's boot, forms a natural geographic and cultural unit, separated from the Balkans by the Adriatic yet joined to them by the same sea. It is an area of plain and plateau bounded to the west and north by the Apennines, which come down to the sea at the Gulf of Taranto and again north of the Gargano peninsula.

Considerably more material for the study of the neolithic cultures in this area has been found since T. E. Peet drew attention to their interest nearly forty years ago (II). Yet while the main kinds of pottery are recognised, positive evidence for their succession is still scarce. This is chiefly due to the lack of fully stratigraphic digging, as well as to a tendency to regard the objects found on any single site as ipso facto contemporary with one another or at least as due to a continuous occupation. Some confusion is probably also caused by the number of separate stations all usually called ‘Matera.’ Even so the main phases are now distinguishable, and the chief differences of opinion are regarding the extent to which the characteristic range of pottery of each of these, with all that that implies, continued alongside of the innovations.

The following account based on war-time reading, and brief visits to Matera museum and a number of sites, will stress the view that there was fairly complete replacement: in this and the resulting division into three distinct periods, tentatively indicated by Rellini in 1929 (14c), it goes beyond the views of most Italian archaeologists, as well as previous English resumes. In particular Laviosa-Zambotti in her recent important study of Italian cultures and their relations with Central Europe and the Balkans (8b), while admitting that the various wares are due to a series of influences from outside, concludes that they are truly associated and therefore largely synchronous. This may be due in part to her leaning toward ‘short’ chronologies elsewhere. However, particularly in view of J. S. P. Bradford's remarkable crop-site discoveries (2), it seems worthwhile to set out the existing evidence for a more elaborate scheme, to be tested by future excavations.

This paper deals with the production of long blades of obsidian and flint and with the techniques employed in the production of short blades in Mesolithic and Neolithic industries. Owing to the exigencies of war and the inaccessibility of material the range and the treatment of the subject have necessarily been restricted. Nevertheless the existence of identical techniques in England, Scotland, France, Denmark, Hungary, the Mediterranean, India, America and S.W. Australia, may not be without interest.

The discovery of part of a large ‘sewn’ boat on the banks of the Humber at North Ferriby, East Yorkshire, in 1937, was announced just before the late war. Exploration which revealed many of the outstanding details of construction as well as the limits of the find, was carried out during 1938 and 1939, with a view to full excavation and, if possible, salvage in 1940. This prospect naturally disappeared on the outbreak of war, leaving us in some anxiety whether the boat would survive destruction by the waters of the river. The danger induced us to remove at intervals just before and during the war three sections from the lower end which would otherwise have been lost. Of these sections about half the pieces were stored in the Municipal Museum at Hull where they were destroyed when that building was set on fire by incendiary bombs and burnt down in 1942. The rest were kept at North Ferriby and, although shrunken and cracked for want of treatment, at least survive. In spite of our attentions a considerable amount of the remaining part of the boat was carried away.

When, in 1935, Dr Grahame Clark rediscovered the unpublished finds from a site at Glencrutchery, near Douglas in the Isle of Man, he at once realised that he had come upon the relics of a culture that was new to British archaeology. Its age and affinities were quite unknown, and in his most useful pioneer study (Clark, 1935, pp. 85–91) of the material, Dr Clark suggested that it should be assigned to a period which he called the ‘Ultimate Bronze Age’ of the Island, perhaps contemporary with the Iron Age in Britain.

Investigation of material from other Manx sites subsequently made a much earlier dating seem likely, and this impression was confirmed in 1943 by the discovery of a richly-furnished dwelling site at Ronaldsway. Thanks to this chance discovery it is now apparent that we have to deal with a new facet of Neolithic civilisation in these Islands. So far it is known to us only in the Isle of Man.

The excavation of a Viking mound in the north of the Isle of Man during October and November, 1946, led to the discovery of older remains beneath and around the mound. The site was in the yard of the disused farmstead of Ballateare (formerly called Killane) in the parish of Jurby.

It lies on a slight rise some 50 feet above sea level half a mile distant from the sea, which is now eroding this region of the west coast at an estimated rate of one yard per year. To the south the ground slopes down to the Killane river which runs a quarter of a mile away in a broad marshy valley. To the north and east the ground is flat, and from the site there is a wide view over the sea, the distant mountains to the south, and the plain to the north. In this district the light sandy soils alternating with more clayey soil are good for agriculture. The sub-soil in the farmyard is a fine yellow diluvial sand with some bands of coarser gravel. The ground around the mound had been much disturbed by agricultural activities, and for a long time the yard had been used for storing potatoes in clamps: only superstition had preserved the mound undisturbed.

Although Switzerland and its population had the good fortune to be spared from the second as from the first world war, it was not possible to continue archaeological research from 1939–1945 on a peace-time footing. The mobilisation of the people for guarding the frontiers, the closing of the foreign markets and the drive for greater production absorbed so many men and women, that cultural pursuits had of necessity to be curtailed. Foremost in the efforts to maintain a certain level of research were the Swiss Prehistoric Society and the Swiss National Museum, but in this work they were assisted by local museums of all grades.