The School's main excavation of 1967 was at Knossos, where work was resumed after an interval of five years. In addition, under the sponsorship of the School, Mr E. S. Higgs's excavations in two Palaeolithic caves in Epirus were rounded off and Dr P. Warren excavated an Early Minoan settlement on the South coast of Crete. Outside Greece, the School sponsored further survey work at Tocra in Libya and a supplementary excavation season at a Byzantine-Frankish castle in Cyprus.

The latest radiocarbon datings available confirm that the Asprochaliko and Kastritsa caves are to a large extent complementary. Only the former includes Middle Palaeolithic deposits (one of them dated around 40,000 BC), but for the Upper Palaeolithic period the two together have provided the only known full succession between France and the Levant. At Kastritsa, the 1967 campaign exposed successive beaches within the caves formed by periodical changes in the level of the Lake, the latest datable about 22,000 BC.

Late Celtic Europe is discernible along three lines: from sources in texts, in coins, and in general archaeology. Where all converge, on any portion of its story, visibility ought to be good. Such a portion is the tale of the folk whose name was (in the Romans' spelling) Belgae. Julius Caesar, within the Gaul that he conquered in 58-51 BC, met Belgae first in the basin of the Marne, and then throughout between the Seine, the sea and the Rhine [I]. Their distinctness from neighbour Celts, which he opened his Memoirs on the Gallic War by stressing [2], was afterwards declared in Strabo’s Geography to have been quite slight in language [3]. Yet they themselves could account for it by old tradition, which Caesar learnt, on approaching the Marne, from envoys sent him by their tribe the Remi. ‘Germani,’ beyond the Rhine, had been ancestors of most of them, and these had crossed it and acquired their present good lands with eviction of Gallic occupants. In the north-east part of the country, towards the lower Rhine and in the Meuse/Maas basin, tribes could still use ‘Germani’ as their common name [5]; one supposes them therefore ‘more Germanic’ than the rest. None the less, the envoys reckoned them Belgae in the broader sense [6]. In that same sense, after Caesar’s war was won, the Roman government called all the province ‘Belgica’. But there is something more to add. The Gallic War employs another land-name, ‘Belgium’. What did this mean?

The excavation of the Clickhimin site in the Shetland Islands by the Ministry of Public Building and Works revealed the arrangement of living quarters inside a small stonebuilt fort occupied between the 4th and 1st centuries BC [I]. With the exception of a large communal stonebuilt hut in the centre of the enclosure, the inhabitants dwelt in a series of half-timbered storeyed ranges attached to the inner face of the fort wall (FIG. I). The pent-roofs of these ranges were supported by a dwarf, or casement, wall built on the wall walk, and access between the rooms at first-floor level and the walk was obtained through a series of doorways. Two stonebuilt duns in the Western Isles, Dun Ringill and Dun Grugaig, still retain the jambs of such doorways and at Clickhimin a similar door was preserved in the blockhouse guarding the fort entrance though here it led to a passage which gave access to a stair to the parapet walk at second-floor level [2].

I’m pleased with the news of the discovery of a runic record of a Norwegian expedition to Oklahoma in the 11th century. Why it should have gone round the Carolina coast and Florida and up to Oklahoma, not the most attractive of American states, I cannot imagine. But the Vikings were an odd people. The deciphering of the runes seems to have been extremely ingenious; and the fact that the runes are in code is also extremely interesting. Why the bishop put his record into cryptograms is even harder to understand than why Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, concealed his authorship of the plays attributed to Lord Oxford by Mr Looney. (I am no expert in Shakespearian cryptography, relying on the lucid description of it in Dr P. G. Wodehouse’s work, The Mulliner Omnibus, pp. 234 ff.)

Urban archaeology in Britain is still in its infancy, conditioned on the one hand by a concentration on the Roman period to the detriment of later centuries, on the other by a lack of close co-operation between historians and archaeologists. Only since the last war has archaeology begun to be accepted in Britain as an important source of evidence for the history of towns. This growth of interest in urban archaeology is partly due to the example set by European scholars working in the same field.

Many of our important towns were founded during the Roman occupation and this has given to their archaeology a character wholly different from that typical of the towns of northern Europe. The needs of Romano-British archaeology have dominated the excavation of towns, partly because classical studies have been fundamental to British education, and partly because medieval historians have not regarded archaeology as relevant to their interests.

Durrington Walls lies one quarter of a mile to the north of the outskirts of Amesbury in Wiltshire and 9 miles north of Salisbury (SU 150437). Stonehenge is situated 2 miles to the south-east and 80 yds. to the south of the enclosure is Woodhenge which was excavated by Mrs Cunnington in 1926-8. The much ploughed bank, which encloses a dry valley opening on to the River Avon, was initially recorded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare in the early 19th century (1812, 169), but until the recently completed series of excavations the only digging on the site was that carried out by Professor Stuart Piggott in 1952, despite recognition of the enclosure as being one of the largest henge monuments in the country. The 1952 excavations were in the nature of an exploration on both sides of a pipe trench where it intersected with the bank in its southern sector (Stone, Piggott and Booth, 1954). A double row of post-holes was recorded along the outer edge of the bank and a quantity of animal bones, flints and sherds of Grooved Ware was found on top of the old land surface which was preserved beneath it. Sherds of Grooved Ware and two small fragments of Beaker were recorded from domestic refuse overlying the bank talus. Radiocarbon dates of 2620± 40 and 2630 ± 70 BC were obtained from charcoal under the bank in its southern sector (Piggott, 1959, 289). These determinations were described by Professor Piggott as ‘archaeologically unacceptable’ as two small scraps of Beaker pottery were found in association with the abundant Grooved Ware.

The actual nature of the Cretan bull sports can scarcely be in doubt. The wealth of representations of all stages of this extraordinary exhibition are clear enough as far as we are concerned with what actually happened. There remain, however, many unclarified questions about its motivation and purpose, the identity of its performers, its frequency, and above all its location. There has been much speculation on this point, which, reduced to its essence, seems to postulate that the sports took place either in the Central Courts of the great palaces or in some other, as yet unidentified, arena. Evans [I] and Pendlebury [2] both suggest the existence of a temporary wooden palisade outside the palace (at Knossos, on the level ground to the east). Their objections to the Central Court as the site of the bull sports are largely of a practical common-sense nature. An excited bull is a dangerous creature, and extremely difficult to control. To get it on to the court, through the narrow corridors and ornately painted and furnished rooms by which the court is approached, would pose formidable problems ; but once arrived the difficulties could be even greater.