And now I will tell of the men who lived in Pelasgian Argos, who dwelt in Alos and Alope, in Trechis, Phthia, and Hellas of the Fair Women. Their names were Myrmidons and Hellenes and Achaeans; and they and their fifty ships were unde Achilles’ command.’ (Iliad, 11, 681-5.)

The late Editor and Founder of ANTIQUITY had to deal with a difficult monument when he wrote his Long Barrows of the Cotwolds (1925). This was the Three Shire Stones which stand in an alcove in the wall on the west side of the Foss Way, two miles north of Batheaston, at the junction of Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire and the parishes of Batheaston, Marshfield and Colerne. Here are three uprights supporting a capstone. Inside is a broken boundary stone bearing the date 1736, and on the 2-in. manuscript map of the district at the Ordnance Survey (dated 1813–14) there is a note saying ‘Shire Stones, erected 1736’. As Crawford wrote, ‘The present structure is evidently a modem imitation of a “dolmen”.’

If we all accept the Three Shire Stones as an 18th-century ‘dolmen’, as we must, it prompts us to wonder what other megalithic imitations or ‘follies’ were constructed in England.

In 1792 Lord Arundel employed Josiah Lane to make a grotto for him at Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. Lane was a celebrated constructor of rock-work and his grotto at Wardour is a most remarkable and charming structure. To quote Barbara Jones’s description of it: ‘Built on a brick basis, it is of tufa and stone with the usual occasional ammonite, now covered with green moss and long ferns, for it is in a very sheltered and gloomy situation. The plan is most cunning, turning in and out with many views through jagged holes into other parts. The dark yews and the bank which it is built against, and the patternbook construction, make it the most Gothic of grottoes.’ Apparently Josiah Lane in his rock-work used part of a chamber tomb on Place Farm, Tisbury: three stones from this tomb were removed in 1792 and used at Wardour Castle.

The site of Troy was first occupied by men at some time not long before or after 3000 B.C. Whatthey built on the bedrock was the fortress of a chieftain, a few large wellfurnished houses within an oval of stout walls. After some 500 years the stronghold was consumed by a great fire; and the same people rebuilt a far bigger and stronger Troy, the Second City, with massive walls and monumental gates, and a great palace or temple on the summit of the enclosed hill. Some 300 years elapsed before this fortress, like the first, was totally destroyed by fire. The next settlement, Troy III, was relatively insignificant; Troy IV was not much more progressive; but Troy V rose to a higher level, performing much and promising more.

One of the most characteristic features of Sardinian architecture, playing an important part in the scenery of the island, is provided by the ancient, forbidding and imposing megalithic structures which the local inhabitants, in the original prehistoric and pre-Indo-European tongue, call nurakes, nuraghes, nuraxzk, nuraccis, nuragis, nuracus, etc., according to district and dialect. We generally know them by the Italian form of the word, nuraghi (singular nuraghe).

Built of large blocks set without mortar in more or less regular horizontal rows, the nuraghe, in its simplest form, appears as a round tower with battered sides. Its height depends upon the number, from one to three, of the storeys it contains, and may sometimes, as at the nuraghe Santu Antine at Torralba in the province of Sassari, reach as much as 20 m., with walls from 2 to 5 m. thick (PLATE VIId).

In 1878, General Pitt Rivers excavated the motte and bailey castle on the downs behind Folkestone and published the results with characteristic promptness and accuracy. Today, over three-quarters of a century later, only four excavations, all in the past ten years, have advanced our knowledge further. While these have solved many problems, they have posed others, for few mottes are adequately documented (Old Aberystwyth is an honourable exception) and the dating of results can only be approximate.

The Ordnance Survey of Great Britain is now in its 167th year. Founded in 1791, it has provided a map coverage of this country which is unexcelled in its completeness and in the range of its scales. All the most important towns are now being mapped on a 1/1250 (50-in,) scale in a new survey, over 60 per cent of which have now been completed. Only a few mountainous and uninhabited regions are excluded from the 1/2500 (25-in.) scale which otherwise covers the whole country. Consequential from this scale is a further series of maps at scales of 1/10,560 (6-in.), 1/25,000 (2½-in.), 1/63,360 (1-in.), 1/126,720 (½-in.), and 1/253,440(¼-in.). Except for the north-west of Scotland the 1/25/000 (2½-in.) scale map covers the whole of the country, but the 1/126,720 (½-in.) scale has only recently been started and will take some years to complete.

An unusual feature of the whole of these map series when compared with other national surveys is the attention it pays to the mapping of antiquities. This is not confined to the delineation of those ancient features which have size and bulk which make it impossible to omit them from any map. A big range of antiquities is shown. The current list shows 107 different types ranging in date from the earliest times down to the 18th century. Some, like burial mounds, are small; others, like major hill-forts or Roman town sites, cover many acres, while others of linear type like Hadrian’s Wall or Offa’s Dyke approach or exceed 100 miles in length. Apart from this kind of antiquity which can still be recognized on the ground, there are many places indicated where important finds of portable objects have been made, and the sites of battles and other historic events are shown.

The general situation in archaeology in China today is one of enormous expansion. Intensive training of specialists is going on, so that it is possible to have teams accompany the builders of the great public works (roads, railways, canals, etc.) in order to deal scientifically with any remains which may be unearthed. Every large city in China now has a good historical and archaeological museum and the number of these is rapidly being extended to the smaller towns as well.

Rarely in recorded history has there been a louder and more persistent chorus of R complaint against the taxes than under the later Roman Empire. Already under Diocletian (284-305) Lactantius declares that the burden was intolerable, and under Justinian (527-565) Procopius raises the same lament. Nor was it only the taxpayers who complained. Valentinian III in 444-5 publicly admitted that ‘if we claim these expenses from the landowner in addition to what he pays already, such an exaction will crush his last feeble strength: if again we demand them from the merchants, they will inevitably sink under the weight of such a burden.’

It has been the general assumption that all the oldest New World cultures were direct importations from Asia–more specifically, from Siberia–and that the prototypes for their distinctive features must be sought in this latter area. A number of successive migrations by very different groups have been taken for granted to account for the varied archaeological picture in Palaeo-Indian times, to say nothing of the subsequent linguistic and physical diversity, but any contacts with the Old World on the Neo-Indian horizon have been generally viewed with suspicion. No specific evidence in support of this viewpoint has ever been adduced, it is true, but so long as Siberia remained a terra incognita, it was assumed that the proofs must be there, awaiting only the spade of the excavator. The proposition was argued, as it were, on the grounds of historical necessity.