From their onset, the first radiocarbon dates gave a range of the absolute chronology to come, but in their detail, they opened more problems than they settled, chiefly because of the possible or unsuspected questions in relation to the reliability of the samples themselves (Delibrias and Giot, 1970). It is only with the experience of great numbers of dates, and the possibility of considering them so to speak statistically, that one can evaluate the real implications of the time scales provided by the method.

In Brittany, beginning with a few dates provided by the Groningen Laboratory under H. de Vries, we have been afterwards nearly totally supplied by the Centre des Faibles Radioactivités at Gif-sur-Yvette (Giot, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971; Coursaget and Le Run, 1968; Delibrias, Guillier and Labeyrie, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969, 1970; Coppens, Durand and Guillet, 1968; Vogel and Waterbolk, 1963).

We now benefit with more than 200 radiocarbon dates for Brittany alone. We shall consider here about 140 of them, disregarding some duplicates, dates pertaining to periods older than the Neolithic cultures or on the contrary later than the Iron Age, and dates only concerning geological natural sites, though these can be full of interest by their information about the botanical scenery and the effects of cultivation or pasture.

Zu den eindrucksvollsten Geländedenkmälern der keltischen Zeit zählen nebst den grossen Stadtanlagen (oppida) die sog. Viereckschanzen. Ihre Hauptverbreitung (fig. 1) liegt im süddeutschen Raum, zwischen Main im Norden, dem Alpenrand im Süden, dem östlichen Schwarzwaldrand im Westen und dem Inn im Osten (Schwarz, 1959). Einige Schanzen finden sich auch in Frankreich (Schwarz, 1962, 74). Die Geschichte der Erforschung dieser Denkmälergruppe geht bis in das Jahr 1885 zurück und die im Laufe der folgenden Jahrzehnte ausgesprochenen Deutungen bewegen sich zwischen Befestigung, Gutshof, Viehpferch und Kultplatz (Schwarz, 1960, 7 ff., vgl. auch Berger, 1962, 26 ff.).

Eine dieser Schanzen konnte in den Jahren 1958 und 1959, dank der Unterstützung durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, zu einem grossen Teil untersucht werden. Sie liegt im östlichen Teil der Schwäbischen Alb bei dem Ort Tomerdingen (fig. 1), nordwestlich von Ulm an der Donau. Die bis jetzt noch nicht publizierten Ergebnisse sollen hier in einem Vorbericht bekannt gegeben werden. Sie gewinnen insofern an Bedeutung, als sie die aufsehenerregenden Grabungen von K. Schwarz (1958, 1959, 1960, 1962, 1963, [1968]) in der Schanze von Holzhausen südlich von München zu bestätigen vermögen und aufzeigen, dass die Situation in solchen Schanzen, auch wenn sie weit voneinander liegen (von Holzhausen bis Tomerdingen sind es rund 140 km) etwa dieselbe ist.

My initial Australian fieldwork was still a year ahead when, surprisingly, I featured anonymously on a verbal distribution map confidently sketched by the Disney Professor. I was the ‘Australia’ reference of his Inaugural lecture, thereby illustrating his proposition (Clark, 1954, 33), that ‘the geographical field of Cambridge prehistorians has been … the whole world’. My Cambridge contemporaries, Sieveking and Golson, respectively represented ‘Malaya’ and ‘New Zealand’.

We were indeed the forerunners of a sizeable band of hunter-diggers which ventured into the Pacific world and which numbers Cambridge amongst its totemic centres. Such incipient, though benevolent imperialism, has not gone unchallenged. A participant in an Australian archaeological congress recently deplored what he judged to be the errors and dogmatism of the ‘Cambridge school’. He erred in affixing this label, because there is no such implicit cohesion within the ranks; diversity is already a healthy characteristic of Pacific research.

What was relevant about Cambridge training, but no more so than of any sound methodological discipline, was that it encouraged respect for, and critical evaluation of, evidence. What was intellectually satisfying to the student were the concepts of universality and interdependence in past human affairs. Such is the message from Miles Burkitt's Prehistory to Grahame Clark's World Prehistory.

The attributes to be defined in this paper have been designed to characterize the main areas of variation of those scrapers which have been termed ‘Aurignacian’ (de Sonneville-Bordes, 1960, 29), owing to their numerical pre-eminence in Aurignacian assemblages. These attributes were worked out primarily on the Aurignacian assemblages (Levels 6–14) from the Abri Pataud, Les Eyzies (Dordogne), although to test the general applicability of the method, samples from the Grand Abri de la Ferrassie and from the Abri Castanet (Musée des Eyzies) were also considered.

As a group, Aurignacian scrapers may be distinguished from end-of-blade scrapers in that the majority of Aurignacian scrapers are manufactured on blanks produced by a non-blade technology. The term ‘Aurignacian scraper’ includes: (1) carinate scrapers (fig. 1), (2) nose-ended scrapers, (3) some shouldered scrapers (see p. 260) and (4) miscellaneous steep scrapers on flakes (fig. 2).

‘There thus appears to be good reason at least to believe that the Larnian is best known in its para-Neolithic tradition associated with the coastal phenomena of the Raised Beaches and their middens, and perhaps even to question the Mesolithic status of the whole industry’ (Herity, 1970).

The Mesolithic settlement at Morton lies some six miles north-north-west of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland (fig. 1). The area around the site, north-eastern Fife, is surrounded on three sides by water, and projects as a blunt peninsula into the North Sea. The river Eden and the Firth of Tay serve as southern and northern boundaries of this peninsula, which consists today principally of the wind-deposited sands of Tentsmuir. The area of Tentsmuir, now afforested, is one of the relatively few regions in Britain where land is building up into the North Sea, and this process has been in action for many centuries (Sissons, 1967).

The Tentsmuir Sands are a prolific source of later prehistoric and early historic finds, the earliest yet known being of the late third millennium B.C. In February 1957, while searching for such material on Tentsmuir, Mr R. Candow of Tayport collected some flints from molehills and other exposures on the high ground of the ‘Old Quarry’ field at Morton Farm (National Grid Reference NO 467257). Surface collections continued to be made until 1963 when excavations of the site were undertaken by Mr Candow in collaboration with Dundee Museum and Art Gallery (Candow, 1966). A total of 41 trenches were excavated between May 1963 and April 1967, and these are shown on the plan of site A (fig. 4, no. 1–41). In November 1967, site B in the same field was discovered and partially excavated (fig. 29, no. 51), before work was suspended and the writer was invited to continue the investigations.

The purpose of this article is to bring together further information from Epirus which is relevant to the consideration of man's environment in Palaeolithic times in Greece. Some aspects of this study have already been published elsewhere (Dakaris et al., 1964; Higgs and Vita-Finzi, 1966; Higgs et al., 1968) and it is sufficient here to give only a brief summary of earlier conclusions.

It has been thought that there are good grounds for believing that during the Last Glaciation mobile human groups occupied annual territories which ranged from the western coast of Greece to the central Pindhos mountain range (Higgs et al., 1968). Within these annual territories there were two groups of sites. One group, represented by Kastritsa, was at the base of the Pindhos and was occupied in summer, and another group of sites such as Asprochaliko was occupied in winter in warmer regions nearer to the coast. Together these groups exploited seasonally complementary resources which were so distributed that such a pattern was necessary.

The question arises, however, was Asprochaliko in fact a more suitable site for occupation during the winter than Kastritsa? An attempt was therefore made to assess the living environment of the two caves themselves. While such an attempt was immediately relevant to the problem with which we are concerned, it has wider implications with regard to the choice of cave sites for human habitation (Legge, 1972).

This preliminary report is the result of an archaeological expedition to Uganda, which took place from February to April 1968, and was sponsored by the Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale at Tervuren (Belgium) and the Comité des Fouilles beiges en Afrique. The expedition staff consisted of Dr F. Van Noten and Mr E. Vertriest of the department of Prehistory at the Tervuren Museum, and the author. The voluntary help of Miss J. Renard during the excavations is gratefully acknowledged here, as well as the advice of Professor M. Posnansky and the administrative assistance of Mr P. Bulenzi of the Uganda Ministry of Culture and Community Development. Much useful information was given by Mrs M. McFarlane of the Uganda Geological Survey, who has elsewhere pointed out the archaeological importance of the Buvuma Island group (McFarlane, 1968). Mrs McFarlane also deposited a series of Sangoan implements in the Uganda Museum. All drawings in this paper are by Miss N. Nypels.

The islands of Buvuma and Bugaia form part of the archipelago situated near the northern shore of Lake Victoria southeast of Jinja and about halfway between Entebbe and the Kavirondo Gulf. Both islands lie immediately to the North of the Equator, approx. between 0°00′–0°15′ North and 33°15′–33°20′ East, Bugaia being to the southwest of Buvuma (see the 1: 50.000 Dept. of Lands and Surveys map, Magyo, series Y 732, sheet 72/4, edition I-U.S.D.).

As will be apparent from this report, several interesting sites were encountered on both islands, two of which were excavated, one on Buvuma and one on Bugaia.