At the date of about 1000 B.c., that is to say a little after the A beginning of the Iron Age and two centuries before any effective colonization by the Etruscans coming from Asia Minor, northern and central Italy may be partitioned into five distinct spheres of civilization. For convenience of treatment I shall assume that each of these spheres represents a comparatively homogeneous people, passing over the question whether there may not have been submerged minorities of some local importance. And I shall give each of these five peoples, or nations as they may not unfairly be called, a conventional name of geographic derivation, to avoid the endless and futile controversies as to tribal nomenclature. As the accompanying map therefore will show the north-west is occupied by the Comacines, part of Venetia by the Atestines, the Bolognese region by the northern Villanovans, Tuscany and part of Latium by the southern Villanovans. East of the Apennines, from Rimini to Aufidena, the Adriatic coast and the central Apennines were held by the Picenes, who must be understood for this purpose to include some of the tribes known to history as Samnites in addition to a small number of Umbrians. The first four of these nations were related by more or less close ties of kinship and practised the same burial rite of cremation, but the Picenes were of wholly different origin and used only the rite of inhumation. Of the Ligurians, occasionally mentioned by classical writers as occupying the coast of the Italian Riviera, it is impossible to say anything as they have left no remains by which their civilization in the Iron Age can be judged.

The royal tombs that have been discovered at Ur this winter are remarkable not only for their contents but for their construction, and for the light they throw on Sumerian funeral customs unguessed hitherto.

We have dug some nine hundred graves in this cemetery and the types are well established. There are a certain number of clay coffins; they form a small proportion of the whole and tend to be commoner in the late than in the early period, but do occur even in the earliest time. The normal grave is a rectangular shaft measuring little more than 1½ metres by I metre; the bottom of this may be lined with matting and the body, wrapped in a mat, simply laid in it, or there may be a coffin, generally made of wickerwork with wooden stays, occasionally of wood: it contains the body and the more personal ornaments, while the rest of the offerings are deposited by the side of it in the grave-shaft.

Out of Africa there is always something new, as Aristotle wrote in the fourth century B.C., and although the Libyan Desert is one of the most desolate areas of the world’s surface, recent explorations have shown that there are many archaeological discoveries to be made which will throw considerable light on the early history of peoples and their migrations in North Africa.

In the eastern Sahara and in the Libyan Desert, there are still many unexplored tracts, and even, it is probable, several unvisited oases, particularly in the great white spaces on the map which stretch southwest and southeast of the Kufara oasis-group.

When the first lake-dwellings were discovered in 1856, people at once began to explore every site above or below water where the presence of stakes indicated a pile-settlement. These investigations, however, were carried out with no regard for system or stratification ; had it been otherwise the problem under discussion would have been solved then. Unfortunately the collection of masses of objects was the main consideration ; digging was conducted quite haphazard, and was concentrated on those spots where finds were expected. Thus has it come about that the surface of our Swiss lake-dwellings is so riddled with pits that too often it no longer exists at all save as a memory. But when surface-digging proved barren it often happened that excavations were simply discontinued, with the result that the upper layers or those below remained intact. It was this fact which moved the Neuchatel Committee for Archaeological Research to undertake a series of systematic excavations, by means of which a limited number of sites would be uncovered layer by layer, with the least possible disturbance. After several fruitless attempts we have at last found, amongst the most important of our Stone Age sites, some which are virgin and have never been dug into ; and these have enabled us to determine the succession of the different neolithic cultures.

Cists are often met with on the open moors of Britain, and a brief account of them may therefore be of interest.

First, a few words about terminology. Our predecessors used also the words ‘Kist’ and ‘Kist-vaen’, and indeed the latter word still survives in some of our remoter western districts. ‘Kist-vaen’ is however an impossible word ; it was invented by antiquaries to whom all prehistoric monuments were ‘Celtic’, requiring therefore a Celtic name. Since the original name was unknown, new ones had to be invented. In the days when the words of Authority were heard with undue respect and awkward questions were seldom put, those spurious terms obtained wide currency. The word ‘cist’ has long been used by Scottish archaeologists, and it is the one adopted by the British Ordnance Survey.

The visitor to Tours, having exhausted himself, as is soon and easily possible, in ‘doing’ the chateaux of the Loire, may find refreshment for his jaded brain by passing from history to prehistory, and turning back the pages from 1500 A.D. to 2000 B.C. or thereabouts, which he may do in the course of two short journeys from his hotel.

There are many prehistoric remains in the departement d'Indre et Loire, and in the arrondissement of Tours alone there are g dolmens. The first of the two described in this paper is situated 10 kilometres from Tours by road. The other, though not in the same departement is within easy rail distance from Tours, and adjoins the town of Saumur.

One of the problems that students of Maltese archaeology have to face is the meaning of the numerous cart-tracks furrowing most of the barren rock-surfaces. These tracks are scarce on Gozo and non-existent on the islands of Comino and Filfola.

They consist of pairs of parallel grooves running for long distances on the hard coralline limestone patches, now straight and now curved as if avoiding an obstacle or having to change their direction. The grooves are mostly v-shaped, usually from 10 to 20 inches wide (25–50 cms) on the surface, and about 4 inches (10 cms) at the bottom. Between the two grooves, measured at the middle part, the distance is nearly always 4 feet 6 inches (1.37m). Naturally the depth of the grooves varies with the lie of the ground; if there is a strong tilt sideways, one of the grooves is shallow whilst the other is very deep.

In this wonderful century when discoveries and inventions have followed fast on one another’s heels Man seems to look dazed and half comprehendingly at the works of his own hands. So that there are some who say that he is on the brink of new andmore wonderful mastery over Nature ; others that there are no more discoveries to make ; and others again who wish to cry halt, and ask, hopelessly, for ten years’rest from the innovations and disturbances which scientific inquiry is bringing into their world.

The standard Roman histories, especially when written by authors who have an undisguised contempt for archaeology, give very little idea of the civilization and development of Italy before the later days of the Republic. They are histories of Rome but not of Italy. And so the reader is subconsciously led to suppose that the Romans were the most important and the most advanced people on the peninsula, who gradually extended the benefits of their superior civilization over a series of more or less barbarous neighbours. This is a complete inversion of the real facts. The Romans of the Republic were a rather backward people, and it was hardly before the second century B.C. that they could begin to rank as the equals of the Italian provincials in general refinement and culture. Incessantly occupied with the wars which were essential to their very existence, the Romans had no leisure, even if they possessed the inclination, to cultivate the arts and humanities. But, while the future head of the world was struggling for bare life, a rich Italian civilization had been born and developed in the independent territories which had not yet fallen under her sway. Before ever they came under the organizing and levelling domination of the central capital, Etruria, Venetia, Lombardy and Picenum had each evolved its own distinct and very valuable local culture; while the whole south from Naples to Brindisi had been civilized by Corinthian and Ionic influence. Rome when she conquered and annexed these territories in due sequence fell heir to a fully finished product. Italy had been created, but not by Rome; the task that fell to the Romans was much more suited to their peculiar abilities—they had to organize and administer the country.

The theory that American aboriginal civilization was derived from south-east Asia and indirectly from Egypt has received such wide publicity that it is no longer possible to dismiss it lvithout refutation and wait for it to die a natural death. Such was the policy followed when the extravagances of Lord Kingsborough claiming that the inhabitants of Central America were the lost ten tribes first saw the light. Le Plongeon's fantastic claims too had their hour and then passed into the limbo of lost causes. Other heads of this hydra, peopling Central America from the lost continent of Atlantis, from Babylonia, Africa, New Zealand, Easter Island, and in fact from nearly every quarter of the globe, were not lopped off but left to wither away from lack of that blood, so necessary to this type of hydra–reasoned argument and proof.

Hallstatt and La Tène are the names given to the first and second phases of the pre-Roman Iron Age. They are derived from the sites where objects characteristic of the respective cultures were first identified, neither Hallstatt nor La Tène having any claim to be considered as the cradles of the cultures named after them. The former lies in Upper Austria. La Tène (‘the shallows’) is situated in Switzerland at the eastern end of the lake of Neuchatel.

The upper limit for the chronology of the Hallstatt Period is a vexed point. If by Hallstatt we mean a period when iron was in general use, it can hardly have said to have begun before the ninth century B.C. ; if we regard it as denoting the time when Villanovan and other contemporary influences first made themselves felt in Central Europe, it can hardly have begun later than c. 1000 B.C. Reinecke would even put it back as far as c. 1200 B.C. The lower limit is somewhat easier to define. Generally speaking it came to an end c. 550-500 B.C. ; but in some districts it persisted until c. 400, while in north-east Germany and other remote areas, the La Tène culture cannot be said to have succeeded it until c. 150 B.C., or even later.

In the American journal Science for 1920 mention was made of my plan for investigating certain laminated clays in North America. During a previous visit to that country in 1891 I had noticed, in several places, laminated clays, similar to late glacial melting sediments in Sweden ; these I had found, by long continued investigations, to represent the annual deposit from the melting water along the border of the retreating ice-edge. (Plate I). With the aid of a graphic method for the comparison of the sharply marked annual layers or varves, I had succeeded in identifying such varves from one point to another, and ultimately worked out a systematic plan for the elaboration of a continuous time-scale. (See page 309). This was mainly carried out in 1905-6 on the basis of field measurements made with the assistance of a number of able young geologists. During the following year this standard scale was completed at many points. I thus succeeded in tracing, step by step, the recession of the ice-edge and the immediately following progress of the clay varves over one region after the other, until the whole line from the south to the centre of Sweden had been traced.

On the continent as in Britain the later phases of the Bronze Age are marked by the spread of large cremation cemeteries generally termed urnfields. One of the several groups of urnfield cultures in Central Europe occupies such a pre-eminent position that it may even claim to be the parent of all the rest. It is known as the Lausitz or Lusatian culture after the area where it is most richly and typically represented—a strip in eastern Saxony and western Silesia.

Here the bodies were cremated in ustrina close to the cemetery, and the ashes, carefully purified from cinders, were enclosed in clay ossuaries or cinerary urns. The ossuary was closed with an inverted dish, but in all early burials a hole was carefully bored in its walls. It is supposed that this aperture was intended to allow the ghost to escape, and hence it has been called a ghost-hole (Seelenloch). The urn, with its cover, was buried in the ground with many accessory vases, presumably containing provisions for the journey into the next world. A barrow might be raised over the tomb, but in all cases the graves form regular cemeteries.

The archaeological interest of place-names has been dealt with by Mr Crawford in his article ‘ Place-names and Archaeology ’ published by the English Place-name S0ciety.l In that article numerous words associated with prehistoric or ancient remains are grouped together and their meanings discussed in detail, but up to the present time very few attempts have been made to deal with words of a similar kind in Cornwall.

In the course of several years’ study of the place-names of Cornwall I have amassed a considerable amount of evidence which may help to throw light on the dark period of Cornish history prior to the English conquest. As some years may elapse before the results of this survey are published, a brief discussion of some of the more interesting names in the county and in particular those names which have an archaeological or historical significance, may be of interest, and at the same time indicate in what direction future work of this kind should lie.

North of the village of Grassington, near Skipton in west Yorkshire, is a large field known as High Close Pasture, largely occupied by old cultivation areas separated from one another by lynchets and low, wide banks. The area so occupied runs 1200 feet in a northerly direction, and is roughly 300 feet wide. Formerly it extended considerably to the west, as remains of apparently the same series of lynchets are to be seen covering Kimbergill Hill and extending to the southern slopes of Lea Green. On High Close Pasture the lynchets and banks are well preserved ; they enclose rectangular fields among which, though varying in size and shape, the form of a short, broad strip seems to predominate. It is extremely difficult to deduce the dimensions of a customary acre from the actual fields on the ground? but in this case the strips average from 360 to 400 feet in length, and round about 75 feet in breadth–dimensions which suggest a I × 5 acre with an area of about 0.65 acre.

The peninsula of Athos, home of monks, resort of pilgrims and the sole surviving example of the life of the Middle Ages which exists in Europe, is the only spot in these days of hooting motor cars, roaring machinery and rushing, busy people, in which it is possible to lead a completely altered life. There only in Europe can one meet an entirely original mental outlook. Even in the remotest European village everyday life is of this age and it is only by exercising the imagination that one can transfer oneself to the past. But on arrival on Athos this earth is left behind and one begins to experience the life of a pilgrim of the Middle Ages. One sees from actual experience what that life really was, and one continues to live it until the discomforts of the thirteenth century finally persuade one that the evils of this age are amply repaid by its merits and that the romance of the Middle Ages is even excelled by the adventurous spirit of today. The medieval life is something that one likes to remember as a curiosity, something to be experienced occasionally only. But the claims of its art are more lasting and in these days of ease and luxury we can appreciate them the more fully.