The Egypt Exploration Society's Survey of Memphis was begun in 1982, the aim being to provide a full documentation for the past study of a much-neglected national capital of the ancient near east: indeed, as the authors of this article remark, ‘A history of ancient Egypt which omitted Memphis would be like a history of ancient Italy which omitted Rome’. The programme of investigation is being undertaken in the face of encroaching agricultural and residential development, and an ever-rising water table. Excavation may be regarded as auxiliary to broader survey and environmental questions. The authors are Professor Harry Smith, Edwards Professor of Egyptology, who has worked in Egypt for the last 30 years, including the groundwork for the Unesco-backed Nubian survey in the 1960s; and David Jeffreys (Research Assistant at UCL) who has worked for 16 years on sites in the UK, Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

In this penultimate contribution to our series in which archaeologists look back at archaeology in their time, John Mulvaney, formerly Professor of Prehistory and head of the Department of Prehistory and Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, Canberra, speaks of his work as a teacher, writer, researcher and archaeological politician. More than anyone he has taught the world about Australian prehistory and the Australians about their own past—and the need to preserve it, culminating in the triumphal campaign to save the Franklin River region of SW Tasmania. He resigned from professional commitment to Australian archaeology at the early age of sixty. His retirement will allow him more time for writing, reading and, perhaps, recreation (the Production Editor treasures the gift of his book, ‘Cricket Walkabout’, in 1967: an account of the Aboriginal Cricket Tour of England, 1867–8).

Mr Jack Hanbury-Tenison is a Field Director of the University of Sydney excavations at Pella, and has combined this with doing surveys of his own in Jordan to pick up settlement patterns in the fourth millennium. In writing a thesis on the Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze I transition in Palestine and Transjordan he says he is trying to steer a course between the anti-empiricism of the New Archaeology and the positivism of the Kenyon school. He says, engagingly, that ‘what got me on to Hegel and Darwin was wondering where people got their loopy ideas from’. This essay is a plea for commonsense, and an understanding of how pastoralists use the landscape today. Hanbury-Tenison is a research student of Magdalen College, Oxford.

We print here a slightly revised version of a lecture given by Professor Stuart Piggott to the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society at Devizes on 15 October 1985. It includes new material, particularly relating to the Richard of Cirencester forgery, that has come to light since the publication of his book on William Stukeley, the new edition of which was recently reviewed in these pages (1986, 67–8).

Almost sixty years ago, Miles C. Burkitt, Lecturer in Prehistory in the University of Cambridge, visited South Africa at the invitation of the University of Cape Town where his former pupil, A.J.H. Goodwin had recently started work. The purpose of the visit was to show Burkitt the sites and elicit his opinions in preparation for the meeting of the British Association in South Africa the following year (Burkitt, 1962, 37; Goodwin, 1958, 32). It seemed appropriate, at a time when the work of South African archaeologists has been denied a hearing by the Southampton World Archaeological Congress, that we should publish an account of recent work there and current perspectives on Southern African prehistory. The authors of this article are: Carmel Schrire, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University; Janette Deacon, Department of Archaeology, University of Stellenbosch; Martin Hall, Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, and David Lewis-Williams, Department of Archaeology, University of the Witwatersrand.