Fossil human remains which can be attributed to the Lower Palaeolithic period are so rare that it is important to investigate thoroughly all finds for which such claims have been made. Almost all the human skulls discovered in Pleistocene deposits in Britain have proved to belong to Homo sapiens. Where the deposits are older than Upper Palaeolithic it is more than likely that such remains are not contemporaneous but represent later intrusive burials. However, the confirmation of the Lower Palaeolithic (Acheulian) age of the Swanscombe skull which, in so far as it is preserved, is not distinguishable from Homo sapiens, has revived interest in other human remains of modern type which have been reported from early deposits but laid aside as being of doubtful antiquity. Unfortunately some of these finds are now lost (e.g. Foxhall jaw). Outstanding among those which have survived are the Galley Hill skeleton and the Bury St. Edmunds skull. By application of the fluorine-dating method the former has been shown to be a comparatively recent intrusive burial (Oakley and Montagu, 1949).

The human skull fragment found near Bury St. Edmunds in 1882 has been preserved in the Moyse's Hall Museum at Bury, and is especially worthy of re-investigation as it Was claimed to be in a fossilized condition, and to have been found in a deposit which contained remains of mammoth and Acheulian implements. A Committee under Section H of the British Association was appointed in 1949 to re-investigate this discovery, and to try to find out (1) the geological age of the deposit from which the skull had been reported and (2) whether the skull was contemporaneous with this deposit. The work and conclusions of this Committee are described in the present report.

It is just over twenty years since Professor Ernst Sprockhoff published his classic study of bronze swords in Northern Europe, and a review of the situation as it presents itself today, surveyed from a point well outside the limits of the Nordic area, may not be out of place.

The ground covered in this fine work had already in part been traversed by Sophus Müller and Gustav Kossinna; but in the process it had become a field of battle where the bitterest partisan spirit had all too recently been displayed, and might all too easily have been re-aroused. It is not the least part of our debt to Sprockhoff that he refused to treat his material on controversial lines, and confined himself to a presentation so objective that it immediately became possible, for the first time for many years, once more to discuss the subject in a sane and cool manner. Thus, adding much that was new and solely his own, he set down in plain, precise terms the whole of the evidence relating to the history, development, and chronology of the flange-hilted bronze swords of the North.

Of this structure the main fabric, without any doubt, stands firm. The central theme, based on a large number of closed finds, and supported by an intimate knowledge of the material, need fear no criticism. Yet some aspects at least of the relations between the Nordic world and other parts of Europe call for re-examination, and the work of the past two decades enables some adjustments to be made. In fairness to Sprockhoff it should be stated quite clearly, at the outset, that the most important of these adjustments have been either made possible, or actually anticipated, by his own work in related fields since 1931.

The excavation of these barrows was undertaken in the autumn of 1949 for the Ministry of Works in advance of building. They stood immediately adjacent to each other on Plateau Gravel overlying the Bagshot Beds towards the western extremity of the Hampshire Basin, and only a hundred yards north of the crest of the Bourne Bottom which leads down to Bournemouth and Poole Bay about three miles distant (fig. 1). The surrounding heath is rich in round barrows, and the district has yielded plentiful evidence of prehistoric man.

The object of this paper is to record and discuss the investigation of an unusually prolific Mesolithic chipping floor recently located on War Department land between Bordon Camp and the hamlet of Oakhanger, near Selborne, on the Hampshire Greensand. These lands are particularly sterile and undulating, and are dissected by a stream which emerges from Oakhanger Ponds to enter the Oakhanger Stream about a mile to the north (fig. 1). The section west of this stream is named the Warren, and that on the east is called the Slab. The site now being discussed is one of five located on the Warren and Slab, and is known as Site V. The group forms part of a series fringing the watercourse known sectionally as the Oakhanger Stream, Kingsley Stream, Oxney Stream, and the Slea, which eventually feeds the Frensham Wey. Thus the Oakhanger sites integrate with the important network investigated in West Surrey.

The Warren, together with the Slab, forms a roughly quadrangular area with its northern side coinciding, for about a mile, with the Bordon-Oakhanger road. Together they make up, approximately, a square mile of rough ground which is marshy along the course of the dividing stream. Geologically it is on Folkestone Sands which, in this area, are extensively covered by blown-sand deposits. Towards Oakhanger, half a mile to the north, these deposits are unusually thick and form dunes. In the Folkestones there is much carstone in thin layers which, here and there, tend to induce marshy conditions. The nearest chalk outcrop is some two miles to the westward in the Selborne district.

The recent discovery at Knossos of a bronze bell helmet (pl. 1; also de Jong and Hood, 1952, and Hood, 1952) of Late Minoan 11, usually dated 1450–1400 B.C., focuses attention on the series of similar helmets that have long been known from Europe. The helmet from Knossos is topped with a knob within which is a tube that penetrates the inside of the helmet. This must have been for a plume. The knob is held in place by seven small rivets. There are also a pair of cheek pieces of a more elaborately curved profile than the plainer ones from Ialysos of Late Helladic III (Lorimer, 1950, 211, pl. XIII), Weissig in Saxony of Bronze Age III b (Kleemann, 1941–2) or the pair belonging to the Pass Lueg helmet from Austria of Hallstatt A or B (Merhart, 1941, 30, fig. 8, 3). Around the rim of the Knossos helmet and around the cheek pieces are rows of small evenly-spaced holes. Inspection of the Ialysos cheek piece shows that it had a similar row of holes, though the examples from Weissig and Pass Lueg did not. Evidently these rows of holes were to attach a padded lining as well as to fasten the cheek pieces to the helmet and to the chin strap. No neck guard was found, though such were in use in the Aegean on boar tusk and other kinds of helmets of this shape (Lorimer, 1950, figs. 16, 22). I am greatly obliged to Mr Sinclair Hood of the British School in Athens for so generously giving me photographs and full information on this important find.

It is a commonplace that of all the mobile art-forms of prehistoric times pottery is the least mobile and the most domestic. It would be wrong to assert categorically that never before the Roman period or the years immediately preceding it was pottery the subject of trade and transport; but the traffic was at least on a limited scale. Unlike objects of metal, therefore, which may wander far from their place of origin in the course of trade or other movement, pottery closely reflects in its distribution the relationship between culture and geography.

Pot-making, too, is a comparatively lowly, if an expressive, craft. In a wealthy community, or in a community with varying levels of wealth, pottery takes second place to metal or (where it exists) glass: usually, therefore, pottery is the borrower both of form and of ornament. And while with an inventive people the result may in due course be something new and significant in itself, in less fortunate circumstances—as for instance under the mass-production methods of Roman times—the potter's debt becomes a lifeless imitation of, or a negative development from, the forms and motifs of the superior materials.

In 1951 Dr Werner Kissling, who for many years has been studying and collecting specimens of the old folk culture of the Outer Hebrides, asked me to undertake the excavation of some site on South Uist (fig. 1) to encourage the local people to take an interest in their antiquities. The site chosen was a large midden among the dunes in the Kilpheder machair (sandy coastal plain). Five hundred yards to the northward a midden with a few stones is all that remains of a wheel-house, known as Bruthach an Tigh Tallan (the brae of the buried house), which was completely removed some years ago. Half a mile to the north of this another wheel-house, Sithean a Phiobaire (the piper's fairy hill), was removed to build a wall round a nearby grave-yard. The middens of both these wheel-houses have produced ring-headed bronze or iron pins similar to ones found in the North Uist wheel-houses and approximately dated at Traprain Law in Haddingtonshire to between A.D. 100–200. To the south-west of our site, one about 150 yards distant, the other some 200 yards further on, are two more middens with traces of building stones. One of these produced a specimen of the well-known long-handled weaving comb. Yet another midden of the same period, two hundred yards to the south east, is now completely buried. It will be seen that this was once a highly populated area. I have not enumerated all the sites which are known to exist.

This paper deals with an unusual example of the triskele and the significance of the pattern in general; and with the intrusion of scrolls and palmettes which transformed it. One of the later patterns thus evolved, decorates a horse-brooch; and the paper ends with a discussion of the function of these newly-identified objects.

In 1939 a comprehensive survey was undertaken of the prehistoric plant husbandry in Great Britain and Ireland. The result of this work was published in 1944 by Knud Jessen and the present writer. One obvious and serious omission, due to circumstances connected with the impending war, was that a series of collections in the southern part of England was not examined. Since these included the Windmill Hill Collection in the Morven Institute Museum at Avebury opportunities for elucidating the initial plant breeding in the British Isles were evidently not exhausted.

This deficiency in Cereals has been commented upon and has been felt severely by the authors and the readers alike, especially in Britain, and the idea of resuming the investigation was repeatedly discussed. In 1951 the writer was offered the opportunity of taking up the thread once more, and the examination of the pottery and grain deposits of southern England was carried out in the spring of 1952.

It is not my intention in this paper to deal with the whole field of antiquities found on the southwestern moors and I shall only refer to the sepulchral and other remains of a ritual character in so far as they have a direct bearing on the interpretation of the settlements (fig. 1). Inclusion of the Cornish moors is prompted by the fact that certain stages in the development of the settlements are not represented on Dartmoor but can be illustrated from the lower moorlands further west.

The material on which my interpretation is based is largely the result of work carried out by the Dartmoor Exploration Committee of the Devonshire Association. Beginning in 1894 this Committee, in addition to other work, explored some 20 settlements excavating nearly 150 hut circles. The objects discovered are mostly in the City Museum at Plymouth and some of the pottery is now illustrated for the first time. Most of the Committee's work was carried out in the first ten years of its existence, but the excavation of a site now flooded by the Torquay Corporation's reservoir was undertaken as late as 1933 and the Committee remained in existence until 1950, when the Association reconstituted its arrangements in respect of Dartmoor. As the last surviving member of the old Dartmoor Exploration Committee it is perhaps fitting that it should fall to my lot to interpret the results then obtained in the light of more modern knowledge and methods. The Association has kindly sanctioned the republication of figs. 4, 5, 6 and 9.

British Iron Age tankards and their handles have been somewhat neglected in recent archaeological literature and so far have not received a separate study. This paper is intended to bring together such information as is available to the writer in the hope that it may prompt a greater interest in this minor field of Iron Age craftsmanship. The first part is a general discussion of those tankards which are either complete or could be reconstructed, their handles, and handles found unassociated with any vessel. The second offers some comment on chronology and typology. The appendix contains a distribution map and an inventory of all the known examples. A list of acknowledgments is at the end, but special mention must be made here to the generosity of Mr R. W. Feachem, who unreservedly placed at the writer's disposal all his material which had been collected for a similar study but which he relinquished on hearing of the present paper.

At the time when the type-sites of the Dordogne were being explored French archaeologists were equally active further south in their country. From caves and surface sites in the Mediterranean provinces local landowners, doctors and clergy were collecting material which not only matched most of the palaeolithic tool forms being distinguished in the south-west of France, but was later to provide Déchelette with many of his illustrations for the neolithic and metal ages. It was not uncommon for flints, pottery and metal all to come from the same cave.

These old collections, or such of them as can be traced, are the basis of what is known about the prehistory of the south of France. Unfortunately, much of the material has come down to us with very little information, apart from provenance, and although some details of excavation were carefully recorded it seems generally to have been considered that plans of caves were more informative than sections through them.

Topographically the south of France consists largely of a narrow alluvial plain, stretching right round the Gulf of Lions between the Italian and Spanish frontiers and broadening out in the delta of the Rhône. Today the region is distinguished from the rest of France by its Mediterranean climate. East of the Rhône, in Provence, this coastal climate is soon modified to the north by the high mountains, but in the old province of Languedoc between the Rhône and the Pyrenees the typical Mediterranean vegetation is carried up onto the rocky limestone plateau, or Garrigue, until it reaches the barren Causses of the Massif Central. In France, the western limit of this climatic zone falls between Carcassonne and Toulouse, but eastward and to the south the Mediterranean conditions continue, so that the south French plain forms a climatic unit with the coastlands of Italy and Spain.

This plain, shut in to the north by high land, is most easily accessible from the sea or coastwise from adjacent Mediterranean countries. Easy communication with the rest of France is confined to the great river valleys of the Rhône and Aude which cut through the mountains to the north and west.