The twelfth season of work carried out at Ur by the Joint Expedition was also its last, and from this time onwards excavation will give way to the final publication of the results already obtained. It was indeed with a view of completing the material required for such publication that a twelfth season was undertaken and its scope was strictly limited by those needs. Of the many periods illustrated by our work the very important one known, since Professor Langdon's first discovery of it, as the Jemdet Nasr period was inadequately represented; but there seemed every likelihood that much light might be thrown upon it by the further investigation of the cemetery whose existence had been proved in the course of our season 1932–3, and this, therefore, was to be our main objective. Further, in 1932–3 we had found and cleared the north-west side of the Third Dynasty Temenos; but though the corners of it had been fixed, the direction and extent of the walls on the other three sides remained to be determined. The planning of these would complete our knowledge of the Temenos in historic times so far as the ruined state of its buildings allowed: this, then, was our second objective.

On the north side of the ante-chapel of New College, Oxford, lies a brass for John Yong, Warden of the College, who was titular bishop of Callipolis in Thrace. The date of his death, the 25th March, 1526, has not been filled in in the inscription, so it is to be inferred that the brass was put down in his lifetime, say c. 1525.

The pottery recorded in this paper was found at Flints sandpit on Lordship Farm early in 1933 by Mrs. C. Wager, till recently of Holwell, to whom thanks are due for permission to publish. The sand-pit is half a mile south of Holwell, a village 2¼ miles north-west of Hitchin. It is situated on a slope facing westwards, at 200 ft. above sea-level, and the soil is a patch of sand on boulder-clay (plan, fig. 1).

In the course of sand-digging, some pits were cut into and destroyed on the north side of the sand-pit. The pits were about 5 ft. in diameter and 4 ft. deep. Other pits may lie to the north. Mr. W. H. Lane, of Letchworth, has kindly sent the following note: ‘In one of the pits there were two hearths. The first hearth was at a depth of about 4 ft. 6 in. Above this was silted material sloping at a rather acute angle from east to west. The pit had then been levelled by dumping surface-soil, and the second hearth made some 2 ft. above the first.’

Apart from the Scandinavian crescentic flint sickles recently described by Dr. Grahame Clark (Proc. Preh. Soc. E. Anglia, vii, 67–81) we are not aware that any demonstrable flint sickle-blades have yet been observed in Britain. It is therefore all the more interesting that in the sand-pit at Selmeston, Sussex, where Dr. Clark has excavated mesolithic dwelling-pits later occupied by Peterborough folk (Antiq. Journ. xiv, 134), there has lately come to light a flint flake that has indubitably been used as a sickle.

The presence of a Saxon settlement at Selsey (other than that of St. Wilfrid, which is generally supposed to have been in the eastern half of the Peninsula) has recently been revealed by coastal erosion west of the remains of Medmerry Farm, (O.S. 6 in. LXXXI, N.W.). The site is on low ground, only a few feet above the marshy land which lies behind, and the Saltings on the east.

May I be permitted to make a few supplementary observations upon the late Mr. P. A. S. Phillips's valuable contribution to the history of the Goldsmiths' Art in England by his article on John Cooqūs, goldsmith to Charles II, in Antiq. Journ. for July 1934?

‘The most humble petition of John Cassen & John Cooqus Silversmiths, & Foreigners’, printed on p. 286, is interesting for several reasons: that they had practised the art and mystery of the silversmith in England since 1664; that their method of working, presumably their style of decoration, was different from that of the English silversmiths; that they were forced to employ foreigners as their journeymen; and that the Goldsmiths' Company of London refused to recognize their work, so far as to refuse to accept it for assaying and touching, i.e. hall-marking.

Antequera, in southern Spain, is in the province of Malaga, a little more than twenty miles north of the city of that name, the nearest point on the coast. The town lies at the foot of the mountains, overlooking a large and fertile plain; while just outside it, near the road to Granada, are three tombs which are notable in several ways. Two of them are less than a kilometre distant, the third lies farther away in the plain itself (pl. liii, I).

Perhaps the most striking feature of this comparatively isolated group is their marked dissimilarity from each other in type, one being a good representative of the ' cupola tombs' of Iberia; another, a simple long megalithic chamber and antechamber, built on a large scale; while the third, with its holed stone entrances, recalls the allées couvertes of the Paris region.

One feature they share, however, which does not seem to have been satisfactorily recorded, namely that each is contained in a large round barrow. All three barrows are formed of natural hillocks which have been scarped and shaped to form symmetrical circular tumuli.

Any evidence, however slight, that may throw light upon the age or purpose of many of the mysterious lines and enclosures revealed by air-photography cannot fail to be of service to future research. Some time ago Major G. W. Allen brought to my notice more than one instance of a remarkable type of rectangular enclosure in the valley of the Thames below Oxford, the age of which we were reluctant even to surmise in spite of their proximity to or association with other remains obviously belonging to the Bronze Age. Three at least of these enclosures had been detected; two in Oxfordshire, the one at Dorchester close to the huge circles described by Mr. O. G. S. Crawford, the other at Benson, and a third lying athwart the southern boundary on Drayton East Way between the parishes of Drayton and Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire. Something similar, but smaller (c. 300 yds. long and 10 yds. wide), with less accurately aligned ditches has been observed at North Stoke, Oxfordshire, amid numerous circles, one of which yielded last year a cremation and two interments, all of infants.

About 80 yds. to the north-east of an old house known as ‘Fitzharry's’ on the northern outskirts of the town of Abingdon is an early Norman moated mound in a good state of preservation. The mound is formed by the upcast of the encircling ditch and is covered with trees; it is roughly circular in shape, the axis from north to south measuring about 78 ft. and from west to east about 68 ft. At present the mound stands up about 10 ft. above the ordinary water-level. The moat is still (except in times of drought) filled with water supplied by an adjacent streamlet, an arm of which formerly appears to have entered the moat on the northern side. This entrance has since partly silted up but is plainly discernible. After flowing through the moat, the water rejoined the original stream at the south-east corner. The exit and the intake form at present only one channel. Originally there were separate channels. The mound and moat duly appear on the Ordnance Survey plans of 1875, and to the east is a tongue of land which may have served as a rudimentary bailey; in its present state it is roughly pear-shaped and much smaller than most of the known examples of the Norman bailey. On the further face of this tongue the streamlet surrounding it widens out considerably. Originally both the mound and the tongue were entirely enclosed by water, which, pursuing its course, descended through the town and fell into the Thames at Abingdon Bridge. On its way the streamlet served till recent times as a parish boundary.