The physiographic approach to the problems of Pleistocene chronology has often been under-rated and sometimes completely ignored.

It will be well to begin this paper with a quite general statement of the basis on which this approach depends. In simplest terms it rests on the fact that the deposits with which we are concerned and to which it is sought to apply the method of palaeontological or archaeological dating were all accumulated on land-surfaces. These surfaces are themselves a proper subject of study by geomorphologists. The deposits are an integral part of the developing surface of the land. Any conclusions concerning their age and origin must be consistent with the general physiographic sequence. Physiographic considerations do not in themselves provide a very close or detailed chronology, but their indications are evidently worthy of consideration in any general purview of the difficult chronological problems concerned. Your ‘geo-chronologist’ needs to be, to this extent, a geomorphologist, as well as a palaeontologist or typologist. River-gravels and glacial ‘Deckenschotter’ mark, in general, old valley-floors and the movement of ice, in part at least, is controlled by the form of the underlying surface, subject to the evident fact that ice can, in some circumstances, move uphill.

The recent discovery of decorated stones in the cruciform Passage Grave of Barclodiad y Gawres, in Anglesey, has made a notable addition to the volume of megalithic mural art known in Britain. The examples of such art described in the present paper increase the number still further. In his discussion of the chamber tombs of England and Wales, Daniel mentions the Calderstones as a possible former burial chamber. At that time (1950), the six Calderstones were arranged in a circle and stood in a small enclosure outside the Menlove Avenue entrance to Calderstones Park, Liverpool (fig. 1). This arrangement was, however, comparatively recent; the original monument was destroyed early in the nineteenth century. The markings were first published in 1864. In 1883, J. R. Allen made measured drawings of the stones, showing the disposition of all the markings known at the time. The same drawings were used by Stewart-Brown in 1911. Allen's drawings recorded only those portions of the stones above ground; examination of the areas then below ground level has revealed a number of new markings.

Large areas of blown sand are among the characteristic natural features of North-west Lincolnshire, and for many years it has been known that these sandy warrens were prolific in remains of early occupation, particularly flint implements, which begin with a rich Mesolithic series. At certain sites, among which Risby Warren is pre-eminent, wind erosion of the surface has also revealed the Neolithic and Bronze Age pottery which is the subject of the present paper.

The recent publication by Dr H. N. Savory of a corpus of beakers found in Wales enables us, for the first time as far as that part of Britain is concerned, to draw conclusions about the beaker cultures based on a considerable body of evidence from an area forming a geographical unit within the Highland Zone. In his discussion of this, Savory has raised general questions of considerable interest with regard to the origins and development of the British beaker cultures, and in particular to the derivation and spread of the A-beaker culture. The purpose of the present paper is to re-examine this evidence and to supplement it with the evidence from beaker graves in Wales (tabulated in Appendix I), including burials of beaker type not actually accompanied by pottery (Appendix II). The conclusions reached differ in some respects from those of Savory.

The belief formerly held that Wales is poor in beakers is no longer tenable. The precise number is of course uncertain since the sherds from sandhill sites cannot be allocated to an exact number of vessels, but it seems clear that at least 64 separate beakers must be represented, and perhaps fragments of an additional number whose total is unknown. Not all of these survive in their entirety: only about half have been preserved either intact or sufficiently complete for their shapes and the main outlines of their decoration to be ascertained and all these are illustrated in figs. 1–7; but even the unrestorable fragments preserve elements of decoration and can tell us much about the vessels to which they originally belonged.

This paper arises from the work of the Ancient Mining and Metallurgy Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute, of which Committee the authors are Chairman and Deputy-Chairman respectively.

The method of research has been to obtain drillings from the uncorroded metal of typical Early Bronze Age implements, for analysis in research laboratories. Ninety-eight analyses are published below in Tables I–III (pp. 106–21). They are of 51 halberds (fig. 1), 39 axes of various types and 7 knives or daggers of Beaker Culture type. The halberds are classified according to Ó Ríordáin; and certain of the axes according to Raftery; broad and thick-butted (fig. 2, 41–2) referred to below as ‘thick-butted’; narrow and thin-butted (fig. 2, 23) referred to below as ‘thin-butted’; other types of axe are bevelled (fig. 2, 25), similar to the thin-butted, but generally squatter, with edges bevelled; and flanged (fig. 2, 95), the thin-butted type with flanged edges. Certain thin-butted or flanged axes are decorated and these are classified I (fig. 2, 85) or III according to the system of Megaw and Hardy; some axes cannot be classified, being unfinished; a few are anomalous wafer-like forms.

The barrow whose excavation is described below was situated about 770 feet above Ordnance Datum a hundred yards south of the Hardy Monument on Black Down Hill, Portesham, on the edge of a large gravel pit. In the winning of gravel during the war the face of the pit had been worked round the barrow on both sides destroying the southern half of the ditch and part of the south side of the mound. As the mound was slowly falling into the gravel pit, it was decided by the Ministry of Works to excavate the barrow before further deterioration took place. The first-mentioned author undertook the supervision of this work for the Ministry in April and May, 1955, with a further fortnight in October of the same year, with the kind permission of the owner, Mrs H. Tuke.

The barrow is situated on the eastern fringe of the township of Bishop's Waltham, Hampshire, in the south-western corner of a recreation ground, adjacent to Folly Farm (fig. 1). It is some 190 feet in diameter and 7 feet in height; the grassy slopes (pl. XII, 1) have provided, for many years, a tumbling ground for the local children. At the end of 1953, the Parish Council planned to level the barrow, and lay out a football pitch. In the face of this impending destruction, excavations were undertaken by the Ministry of Works, under the directorship of the writer. He was assisted in this task by Miss D. G. Duckett (Mrs J. G. Hurst), who during the latter part of the operation was in charge of all day-to-day activities. Her good management and shrewd observation, in conditions which were often adverse, ensured the measure of success with which the labours were crowned.

In the years between the two World Wars considerable research was done by Sussex archaeologists on the Late Bronze Age settlements of the South Downs (figs, 1 and 30). Several habitation sites were partly excavated, notably Park Brow near Worthing by Mr Garnet R. Wolseley in 1924, New Barn Down, Harrow Hill near Worthing by Dr E. Cecil Curwen in 1933, and Plumpton Plain, near Brighton, by Dr E. Cecil Curwen and Mr G. A. Holleyman in 1934, and an analysis of the pottery from these sites by Professor C. Hawkes has provided a typological and chronological basis for subsequent research.

After World War II the authors, inspired by the work of Dr J. F. S. Stone on the Deverel-Rimbury Settlement on Thorny Down and of Dr G. Bersu at Little Woodbury, decided to strip completely a small group of earthworks of probable Late Bronze Age date on Itford Hill near Lewes. In the spring of 1949 the site, together with the adjacent linear earthwork and group of lynchets, was surveyed by Mr E. W. Holden and Mr G. A. Holleyman. Excavations were carried out for each of five seasons (1949–1953) by means of volunteers and with the financial backing of the Brighton and Hove Archaeological Society.

This fogou was known to antiquaries as early as 1842. In that year Buller refers to it as ‘one of those subterrain caverns situated in a small garden’, and as ‘one of those (fogous) which have never been inspected, so little interesting, no one, I suppose, thought it worth the trouble and expense of moving a mass of stones with which this entrance was enclosed, there being no prospect of discovering anything to justify the curiosity of him who undertakes the work’. The site, about half a mile from the northern coast of Cornwall, lies below the hamlet of Boscaswell, half a mile from the village of Pendeen, which consists of some cottages and many walled enclosures, large and small. One of these, that referred to by Buller as ‘a small garden’, oval in shape, adjoins the fogou at its eastern end. It forms part of a complex which contains a fogou-passage running from west to east, a creep, and a section now roofless extending into the enclosure. The latter undoubtedly perpetuates the site of a courtyard house into which the fogou originally opened.

The following notes have been contributed from many sources and grateful acknowledgment is made to all those who have assisted. We are indebted for the material relating to Eire to Prof. M. O'Kelly and his contributors; the Council for British Archaeology, the Ministry of Works and many individuals have contributed notes on English excavations; Mr E. M. Jope has supplied the notes on Northern Ireland; the Scottish notes have been abstracted with the assistance of Mr J. G. Scott from Discovery and Excavation: Scotland, 1956, published by the Scottish Regional Group of the C.B.A.; and Dr Savory has contributed most of those for Wales.