When we remember that the Maoris volunteered no traditional information about the extinct moa (Dinornis) until Europeans had unearthed its bones, said nothing about the Chatham Islands until after their discovery by Europeans, only recalled dim memories of inhabitants before the Fleet of A.D. 1350 in response to persistent questioning by Europeans, and could not tell us whether Hawaiki was Tahiti or Samoa, we realize the always supine rôle of Maori tradition in aiding the researches of the culture historian.

However the sheer mass and variety of these orally transmitted traditions prevented the student from realizing how irrelevant they were to his theme, and caused him to believe that the Maori purpose in transmitting traditions was like his—to satisfy an essentially academic curiosity about the past. The gradual cessation of the output of published traditions has given students the leisure to realize the limitations of those already recorded, and sobered us against the expectation that a Maori tradition current in the 19th century might include a description of a bird which lived perhaps in the 13th, or go into detail over the appearance and habits of the tribes whom his Fleet ancestors dispossessed in the 14th.

Fortunately the need for the family to maintain its status within the clan, the clan within the tribe, and the tribe as against other tribes, did involve the careful transmission of family trees (Whakapapa). By comparing the number of generations in many lines back to a Fleet ancestor, the arrival of the Fleet was placed in the mid-14th century. By a brilliant application of the method beyond New Zealand, Percy Smith found a three generation name sequence immediately prior to the Fleet arrival common to Hawaii, the Society Islands, the Cook Islands and New Zealand. This established with reasonable certainty that the movement which brought the canoes of the Fleet to New Zealand originated in the Society Islands and simultaneously sent migrants to the Hawaiian and Cook groups. Traditions in New Zealand recorded with a significant unanimity the names of the canoes of the Fleet migration, their landing places, and the tribes which sprang from each. They noted the introduction by the immigrants of the sweet potato (kumara), the taro (Colocasia antiquorum), the gourd (Lagenaria), and the yam (uwhi), both by means of references to incidents of the voyage or by accounts of subsequent return trips to Hawaiki to fetch these plants.

It is widely known that war-time air photography has led to the discovery of many new archaeological sites of importance in Mediterranean lands. Many hundreds of tumuli have been added to the list, at such famous Etruscan cemeteries as Cerveteri and Tarquinia and complete systems of Roman land-partition by Centuriation have been identified round the coloniae of Iader and Salonae, on the shores of Dalmatia. But by far the most notable discoveries of all are those on the Foggia Plain, in the Province of Apulia, in Southeast Italy. Great numbers of Prehistoric, Roman, and Medieval sites are being identified, and some preliminary results have already been published in ANTIQUITY(' Siticulosa Apulia ', December 1946). Select examples were exhibited at the Classical Conference at Oxford and at the British Association Meeting, in 1948, and again for several months this year, in the Ashmolean Museum. These were chosen from a number which it was fortunately possible to acquire for the University of Oxford, now housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum, where they are being studied in detail. This collection was based on vertical photographs taken by the Royal Air Force, and oblique photographs taken by Major Williams-Hunt and myself (which were the first to reveal this dense concentration of sites, spread more thickly on the ground than almost anywhere else in Europe). This heavy concentration is of much more than local importance. During the last few years I have examined many thousands of air photographs of Southern and Central Europe taken at various seasons, in the course of my research. While these provide much interesting data and give us, as it were, an illustrated ' Domesday ' survey of Europe in the middle of the 20th century (of capital value to Anthropology), in no other area has there as yet been anything approaching the quantity of crop-marks, grass-marks, soil-marks and earthworks which have come to light in Apulia. There are various reasons for this and a detailed account must await a later report. For our present purposes, it will be enough to single out one or two areas, for comparison.

Since about 1870, when a Dr Leitner, of the Punjab service, brought from north-western India a small collection of Buddhist ‘Indo-Scythian’ sculptures to England, the literature of the so-called Gandhāra art has not ceased to grow, and the last decade has added rather more than its quota. Dr H. Buchtal has re-emphasized and re-illustrated the affinities between this Buddhist art and that of the Roman Empire (1). Dr L. Bachhofer has recognized the emergence of a Partho-Buddhist art based on secular Hellenistic imports into Gandhāra in the 1st century A.D. (2) Entrenched behind the formidable ramparts of his unpublished Taxila, that great veteran Sir John Marshall has machine-gunned both the learned doctors with a vigour most happily unimpaired by the ills to which he lightly refers (3). And, since I do not always find myself in agreement with Sir John, I may at once say this : that, had Drs Buchtal and Bachhofer done no more than draw his fire, they would have deserved sufficiently well of us.

No one, so far as I know, has as yet made any particular study of the many local learned societies that were founded up and down France in the years after the French Revolution, and of their effect upon contemporary thought. These Sociétés d’Émulation differed from the local archaeological and historical societies of England in being more all-embracing ; they included in their scope pure literature, philosophy and science as well as the history and antiquities of the district, and often developed a philanthropic side as well. At the time of their foundation they were often of a free-thinking colour ; but as the balance of French life came to be restored after the Revolution this element was forgotten, and the more learned priests of the neighbourhood were often included among their members.

These societies fostered a peculiar polymathic quality among those who regularly attended their frequent meetings. They were to a great extent self-supporting in the provision of papers and communications, and it would have been pure selfishness for any member with any claim to versatility to specialize too deeply. Their standards, too, were not those of the Metropolis, where a new professionalism was bringing higher and more exact criteria into every branch of knowledge and speculation. Rather, we can see in the Sociétés d’Émulation of the nineteenth century the continuance of the amateur spirit that in the eighteenth century had flourished in the aristocratic circles of Court and château : a spirit surviving in a less polished form among the lesser gentry of the provincial towns.

For more than half a century Sir Arthur Keith has been one of the world’s leading authorities on the physical evolution of man. As a young man, Sir Arthur spent some years of medical practice in Borneo and became interested in the comparative anatomy of the anthropoid apes and the relation of these higher primates to man. By dissections and other anatomical studies he accumulated the largest body of accurate scientific information on this subject available to students before Professor Adolph H. Schultz began his researches in this same field in the nineteen twenties. In 1901 Sir Arthur published his Human Embryology and Morphology, which is one of the few technical treatises on man’s embryology that is anthropological and primatological in its orientation. From 1908 onward Keith concerned himself with the problem of the transformation of the body and brain of the ape precursor into that of a human being. This subject led him into intensive studies of the skeletal remains of fossil men and apes, culminating in his great works, The Antiquity of Man (1925) and New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man (1931).

During the long years in which he was thus engaged, Sir Arthur was also considering the evolution and differentiation of the modern races of man, not only from the biological and anatomical viewpoints, but also on the bases of history, social anthropology, and psychology. Recently, as he approaches the end of his fruitful scientific career, this great anthropologist has produced two volumes dealing with human evolution in its entirety—a preliminary book Essays on Human Evolution (1946), and the present work.

Primitive peoples judge other races strictly by the yardstick of their own virtues and capacities. Those, who do not conform to their customs, are mad or stupid. Those, who cannot communicate with them, are dumb or have an impediment in their speech. If they are obliged to admit that the foreigner with all his defects can do certain things remarkably well, they are more likely to ascribe this to magic than to superior but distinctive capacities. When the newcomers are, like the Spaniards in the New World, the Europeans in the Pacific, so dazzlingly accomplished that it is hard to disparage them, the natives welcome them as supernatural beings more readily than as a more developed race of men. They will change their gods more willingly than their good opinion of themselves as the norm of humanity. The Greek word for people whom they could not understand was βὰρβαρoι or ‘stammerers’, the Russian word for the Teutons, with whom communication was difficult, was ‘nyemets’ or ‘dumb’. A variant of this word was used by all the other Slavonic peoples. Many less familiar instances of this practice could be collected. These names were retained for centuries after the idea that mankind was divided into many races equally but differently equipped had become familiar.

Perhaps at no time more than the present have British archaeological studies had such need of a stocktaking'. An occasional stocktaking of knowledge and techniques is essential to the successful advancement of any study, and the Council for British Archaeology has undoubtedly stimulated archaeological studies by the publication of the first part of the Survey and Policy of Field Research. Under the joint-editorship of Professor Hawkes and Professor Piggott many of Britain's archaeologists have co-operated to review the present position and the future development of British archaeological studies. The volume is divided into two chapters; the first surveys our archaeological knowledge, and the second indicates how the major problems may best be tackled. Its span in time appals the mere historian. It ranges from the Palaeolithic Age to the 7th century of the Christian Era, from the so-called ' eoliths ' to the so-called ' Kentish jewelry '. No single scholar would have been competent to discuss all the problems raised, and no single scholar is competent to criticize the work of this team of specialists.

It has been generally agreed that Devonshire lies outside the area formerly cultivated under the open-field system. The map which serves as frontispiece to Gray’s monograph on the subject shows the western boundary of the open-field area beginning in west Dorsetshire and passing up northward across Somerset so as to exclude Devon, Cornwall, and west Somerset. Dr and Mrs Orwin, while revising and correcting Gray’s data at several points, are emphatic where the south-western counties are concerned. ‘In Lancashire, Devon, and Cornwall, there is nothing to indicate that the system [of open fields] was ever followed’. Recent text-books naturally follow in the wake of these authorities. Professor Darby, for example, writes that in Cornwall, and by implication in Devon also, the prevailing type of rural economy ‘had no relation to the three-field system’ ; and he illustrates his remarks with a reproduction of Gray’s map.

One well-known fact, which at first sight appears irreconcilable with these pronouncements, was not overlooked by the authors. I refer to the existence at Braunton, in northwest Devon, of an open field of some 350 acres, divided into nearly five hundred arable strips of intermixed ownership. ‘Some persons own very many of the strips scattered all over the field ; that is to say, several strips in almost every division of it. Others have a few only, one here and there. But in all cases the strips of one owner are everywhere separated from each other by interposed strips of other owners . . . The line of demarcation between any two strips is commonly indicated by a narrow unploughed balk . . . The lesser plots appear as a rule to approximate in area to half an acre, more or less, and the others to multiples of this quantity . . . Very few exceed the limit of two acres’.

I Was enthusiastically received by the monks of Debra Damo who gave me every help and encouragement in the project of restoring their church, the most ancient surviving in Ethiopia. The scheme was first mooted by Mr D. R. Buxton, who visited the church and found it in a state of collapse. The efforts of Mr O. G. S. Crawford, the Society of Antiquaries, and the British Council, resulted in the Emperor’s agreeing to spend up to £5,000 on the works, and in my being appointed architect in charge of the restoration. I had the unique opportunity of entering parts of the building not hitherto seen and recorded by Europeans, and during the process of partial demolition I was able to discover the exact method of construction, this knowledge throwing light on ancient Axumite building methods.

It is not known exactly how old the church is. It is certainly the most ancient and perfect of the early Ethiopian churches, and an important example of an early manner of building in that country.

The method of construction is unusual (FIG. 1) ; the walls consist of tile-like stones set in earth mortar, strengthened with longitudinal beams which are themselves fixed to the walls with cross-pieces, projecting, and called ‘monkey-heads’ by the Ethiopians. Such a method of construction has been used in countries as far apart as Crete, Asia Minor, and Tibet. It also seems to have been the normal constructional method of the Axumite builders, who translated the pattern of horizontal timber, monkey-head and window framing into the decoration of the storied obelisks of Axum, nearby. This is yet another example of timber forms being translated into stone, a common architectural trend. Even today, the tradition is still alive, and modern church builders in this part of Ethiopia still use timber in a similar way to stabilize their walls.

The great Syrian fortress of Le Krak des Chevaliers, the best known, as it is on the whole the finest and best preserved, of the Crusader castles, has recently been made the subject of a brilliant and exhaustive study by M. Paul Deschamps; taken in conjunction with earlier notices by Rey, Van Berchem, T. E. Lawrence and others, this has left archaeologists in an exceptionally favourable position with regard to their knowledge of this castle. A few objections on points of detail might be raised to Deschamps' conclusions, but it appears to me that there is only one important question on which further clarification of our existing knowledge is needed : the reconstruction of the siege and capture of the Krak by the great Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Bybars, in April 1271. The accounts given by the Arab historians of the period are not perfectly clear, and the explanations offered by Van Berchem and Deschamps do not appear to be the best possible, in view of the evidence of the fabric itself. In order to obtain a sounder idea of what occurred in the siege, it will first be necessary to consider the buildings and their history in brief.

Till 1948 the coherent record of farming in Northern Europe began with the neolithic culture represented in the Danish dysser (‘dolmens’) and most readily defined by the funnel-necked beakers, collared flasks and ‘amphorae’ found therein. As early as 1910 Gustav Kossinna had remarked that these distinctive ceramic types, and accordingly the culture they defined, were not confined to the West Baltic coastlands, but recurred in the valleys of the Upper Vistula and Oder to the east, to the south as far as the Upper Elbe and in northwest Germany and Holland too. He saw in this distribution evidence for the first expansion of Urindogermanen from their cradle in the Cimbrian peninsula. In the sequel Åberg filled in the documentation of this expansion with fresh spots on the distribution map and Kossinna himself distinguished typologically four main provinces or geographical groups—the Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western. Finally Jazdrzewski gave a standard account of the whole content of what had come to be called Kultura puharów lejkowatych, Trichterbecherkultur, or Tragtbaegerkulturen. As ‘Funnel-necked-beaker culture’ is a clumsy expression and English terminology is already overloaded with ‘beakers’, I shall use the term ‘First Northern’.

The orgin of this vigorous and expansive group of cultivators and herdsmen has always been an enigma. Not even Kossinna imagined that the savages of the Ertebølle shell-mounds spontaneously began cultivating cereals and breeding sheep in Denmark. As dysser were regarded as megalithic tombs and as megaliths are Atlantic phenomena, he supposed that the bases of the neolithic economy were introduced from the West together with the ‘megalithic idea’. But the First Northern Farmers of the South and East groups did not build megalithic tombs. Moreover, in the last ten years an extension of the North group across southern Sweden as far as Södermannland has come to light, and these farmers too, though they used collared flasks and funnel-necked beakers, built no dolmens either. In any case there was nothing Western about the pottery from the Danish dysser, and Western types of arrow-head are conspicuously rare in Denmark.

In ANTIQUITY 1948, p. 35, a brief account was given of the first season’s work on a Bronze Age sanctuary and burial site on Cairnpapple Hill, near Torphichen in West Lothian. With the co-operation of the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works, excavations were continued in the summer of 1948. The site was completely stripped, and revealed a complex series of structures indicated by the sockets of once-standing stones or by stones still extant. It will be laid out and conserved by the Department as an Ancient Monument under guardianship. The following account of the main results of the 1947–8 excavations is intended as a preliminary to the full excavation report, which will appear in due course in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, who financed the first season’s work.

Cairnpapple Hill, the summit of which is within the 1000 feet contour, is a part of the Bathgate Hills, which form a compact block of high land between the main road to Stirling on the north and from Glasgow to Edinburgh on the south. On the summit, the site before excavation was chiefly distinguished by the grass-grown cairn which gives its name to the hill, but most maps and the earlier antiquarian literature indicated a ‘fort’ on the same site. Field-work in 1946 had shown that the cairn stood eccentrically within a low roughly circular earthwork (the ‘fort’) which on surface showing was almost certainly a member of the ‘Henge Monument’ class of structure. The site was confused by an octagonal turf dyke which had been made round the cairn in the late 18th or early 19th century to enclose a plantation of trees, now vanished.

Every schoolboy knows that King Rimush of Agade was struck down in a Palace revolt-some say pierced to death by sharp bodkins, others that his skull was smashed by heavy stone tablets. And it is now almost common knowledge that Bur-Sin died of a pinched shoe-it may have been following on a septic foot contracted at Eridu, when he was pacing the sand in the precincts of his unfinished Ziggurat. No less undignified was the death of Sin-iddinam of Larsa, crushed to death in his Palace by the fall of a staircase. But who ever heard of a Pharaoh so ludicrously stricken? There lies the difference between the Egyptian and Mesopotamian concept of monarchy. The Pharaoh was a god and the son of a god, made in the image and likeness of Horus, son of Osiris: it is true that was mortal, as was more than one of the ancient gods, but his mortality lay lightly u him because when the time came for his end upon earth he was predestined to rebirth as Osiris. In the Tigris-Euphrates valley a king, whatever else he might be, was pre-eminently a man, even if only a little lower than the angels, and even the mighty Sargonid Kings of Assyria, could on occasion receive and accept a rebuke from their subjects. Indeed the Assyrian kings, whom we are accustomed to think of as arrogant warriors, were no less the slaves of the society they served than the humblest members of their realm.

Two notable events in Peruvian archaeology, which are of wide general interest, have recently taken place. One was the discovery of pre-ceramic horizons on the Peruvian coast, and the other was a conference held in New York in July 1947, at which several acknowledged experts felt that the time had come to explain the known facts in terms of a general scheme of development, and attempted to do so independently with strikingly similar results. The papers read at the conference on this and other matters have recently been published, and they include the fullest summary so far available of the preceramic discoveries.

Mr Junius Bird has long been known for his work on the prehistory of unpromising and difficult regions in South America. He has studied successions in Tierra del Fuego and on the southern end of the Chilean mainland, which contain stone and bone artifacts but no pottery, from which he estimates, by such methods as the rate of rise of land and of accumulation of deposits, that human occupation began about 5000 years ago, i.e. at the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C.. His methods of course involve some very large assumptions, but the results are reasonable when considered in relation to the usual estimate of about 10,000 years for Folsom man. He has also discovered non-pottery and non-agricultural horizons in the middens of the north part of the coast of Chile, but these may not be of any great age and their poverty may be due to the inhospitable nature of the region.

Fixed points in the chronology of the Harappa Culture are not abundant and such as exist tend rather to emphasize the earlier phases of that remarkable civilization. Evidence for close contact with Akkad about 2300 B.C., based primarily on stamp-seals, has been the subject of review by Piggott, and much clearer light has been forthcoming as a result of excavations at Harappa by the Archaeological Survey of India during 1946 under the direction of Professor R. E. M. Wheeler. These excavations included cuttings through the rampart of the citadel, and investigations of the later cemeteries superimposed on the culture. Whilst accepting the evidence for the earlier fixed point Wheeler faces up to the problems raised by these cemeteries and is strongly inclined after reviewing the facts available, and certain passages in the Rigveda, to agree with Childe that the ‘Cemetery H intruders “may belong to Aryan invaders”, the conventional date for whose first incursion into India is the 15th century B.C.’. As a result he concludes that ‘the combined weight, such as it is, of these various indications suggests the millennium 2500-1500 B.C. as a possible inclusive date for the mature Harappa civilization, without prejudice to the still-unplumbed depths of Mohenjo-daro’.

Attention has recently been focussed by Piggott on these later phases of the civilization as a result of a study of the type and distribution of certain spiral headed and animal headed pins, and of a bronze mace-head found at Mohenjo-daro and Chanhu-daro. He here sees clear evidence pointing to trade contacts or folk movements from the West and affecting India at the end of the Harappa phase, if not indeed when it was actually defunct, probably ‘after 2000 B.C. rather than before and possibly some centuries later’. And with Wheeler he does not appear to be disinclined to accept the traditional date of about 1400 B.C. for the incursions into India ; though both are fully aware, and in fact state categorically, that the Akkadian contacts are the only well fixed chronological points.

The late Mr Thomas Burke was well known for his popular writings on London life, and the phrases employed by literary reviewers of his earlier works are precisely applicable to his English Townsman: ‘it swarms with rare and amusing pictures,’ ‘it is a mine of out-of-the-way facts.’ A man of strong prejudices, Mr Burke was accustomed to see what he expected to see, factory workers, for example, to this day commencing toil at 6 a.m. while their employers ‘roll-up in their cars at about eleven.’ Nevertheless he is concerned to emphasize the wholly laudable thesis that it is just as ‘natural’ for men to live in towns as in villages. Yet his supporting arguments are not always very happy, as when he cites the Victorian sociologist, Henry Mayhew, who had worked out (and mapped) the geographical incidence of crime. It seems that while total criminality did not vary, the townsman was addicted merely to burglary, larceny, forgery, pocket-picking and shop-lifting, while the countryman specialized in crimes ‘of the kind named unmentionable’ (which incidentally included illegitimacy). And after all, says Mr Burke ‘burglary and thieving are fairly wholesome and quite natural activities.’ Many of our towns, so he thought, were at least as old as our villages, for ‘when [man] rose from savagery it was instinctive in him to gather with his fellows for mutual protection, for the exchange of knowledge and for the sharing of experience’. Such an opinion may pass muster in a book which, in point of fact, makes very entertaining light reading. But unfortunately it is the kind of opinion that is very widespread, and in particular our Planners, like Mr Burke, have never read their Gordon Childe. Build some houses, add a so-called ‘trading-estate’ (actually a congeries of small factories), ‘decant’ the ‘over-spill’ of some growing city into the houses and ‘steer’ some industrialists (or bribe them) into the factories : there is your recipe for a New Town. The habit of studying present-day cities in their functional aspects, and of examining the relationship between function and geographical situation has not yet spread from the geographers to the borough engineers, borough surveyors and county architects who form the corps d’élite of physical Planners; still less of course do these experts probe with the archaeologist and the historian into the problem of the roots and origins of urban life. In the United States there is evidence of a wider vision, and if the young men and women reading philosophy, history and economics at Oxford together with their contemporaries reading mathematics and physics at Cambridge were even to flit through just the Syllabus and Maps of the Chicago course in Anthropology described by the Editor in the September number of ANTIQUITY, our future governing classes might be in a better position to resolve the antithesis between Plato and Karl Marx.