The study of Geoffrey's book and of the allied Welsh texts is a subject of such complexity, and has produced such a mass of technical literature, that the intrusion of a newcomer into these jealously guarded preserves of recondite scholarship is naturally liable to direct at once the cold stare of disapproval, or at best the wan smile of tolerance upon one so rash. I am not unmindful that in a previous world-conflict Sir (Emeritus Professor) Flinders Petrie put forward views on the Historia from an outsider's standpoint which were instantly demolished in a few quietly incisive notes by Professor R. W. Chambers. But, despite the vast tangle of adherent commentary which now envelops Geoffrey's book to an extent that all too often dwarfs the actual text, it seems likely that certain basic questions—is it a work of fiction or of fact, or if both, in what proportions—should be answerable to some extent by enquiring whether certain passages read convincingly as sheer invention, and if not, what prevented the author from making them so. I hope to show that one can trace in the Historia a use of certain documentary sources which to the best of my knowledge have not been recognized in full before. I venture therefore to put forward these tentative ideas in the hope that they may be followed up or refuted by those more qualified for the task than myself, examining the problem for the first time and from the outside, and in those enforced circumstances in which the only really accessible works of reference are the King's Regulations and the Manual of Military Law. As a contrast it is a pleasure to record my thanks to those who have aided me, notably Professor Ifor Williams, who has given me invaluable advice and helped to eradicate the more egregious errors from my argument.

The judgements shaping archaeology and every subject in British universities (see remarks in the Editorial above) are based on certain presumptions about how research and teaching can best be done. Some of these premisses are noted.

The two volumes of rock-drawings from southern Upper Egypt collected by Dr H. A. Winkler, and published by the Egypt Exploration Society, together form a work of the utmost interest and importance to all interested in the archaeology and ethnology of North Africa. In the first volume, published in 1938, Dr Winkler included a selection of the material collected from the deserts east of the Nile and from the Nile valley itself. In the second volume, just published, the drawings and paintings are all from the deserts west of the Nile and cover three main regions : first the edges of the Nile valley itself from Qena to Aswan ; secondly the regions between the Nile and Kharga; and thirdly certain parts of the central Libyan Desert towards the extreme south-western frontiers of Egypt, in particular the mountain ‘ desert oasis ’ of Gebel ’Uweinat.

At the time when Darwin published his Descent of Man comparatively little was known of the fossil remains either of men or apes, so that the discussion of the evidence of palaeontology played an altogether insignificant part in his argument. Apart from the discoveries that had been made in the Neanderthal cave and at Gibraltar, nothing was known of fossil man, and what little was known was puzzling rather than helpful. Little more had then been recovered of the fossil remains of apes than a few fragments of Pliopithecus and Dryopithecus.

A further statistical study of the weights of distinctive objects from the Scandinavian Bronze Age finds, again, a system of standardized units, and looks as far as Egypt for an identity of pattern.

Of all the prehistoric periods yet distinguished in Western Europe the Neolithic has suffered the hardest fate. Having in the past enjoyed a seemingly secure and important position in the field of prehistory, with an estimated duration of several thousand years, this unfortunate period has of late been so assailed before and behind that its very existence has been called in question. In Britain, however, recent researches seem to have rescued our Neolithic from complete extinction by the encroaching Mesolithic and Bronze Ages, and given it an established position once more, albeit a more humble one than it occupied in its days of undue inflation. Because it has become better understood, an epoch to which formerly thousands of yearswere allocated is now limited to hundreds.

The stone circles of northeast Scotland (Figure 1) take a most distinctive form. On one level, they are made up of structural elements that are widely distributed in Britain: they are built from raw materials that had been selected for their colour and texture; the monoliths are graded in height towards the southwest and may have been aligned on the moon (Burl 2000). On another level, they have a character all of their own. They are known as ‘recumbent’ stone circles because their most massive component is a large flat block which is bracketed by two tall pillars or ‘flankers’ (Burl 2000: 215–33).

The Basquesmith project aims to illuminate the cycle of iron production and consumption by early medieval rural farming communities in the Álava province, Basque Country, northern Spain.

In his 2017 masterful film Happy End, the European auteur Michael Haneke returns to some of his favourite themes by portraying the life of a contemporary dysfunctional, white bourgeoisie family in Calais, France, struggling to deal with the skeletons in their cupboard. They are also mostly oblivious to the thousands of migrants from the Global South attempting to negotiate yet another borderland and cross into Britain. In the final scene, a group of them bursts uninvited into the family's engagement party. This classic Hanekean tense moment reminds us that contemporary global migration, rather than being a novel and unexpected ‘crisis’, amounts to an unavoidable return, a return of the oppressed and the colonised; it is a moment in the unfinished histories of white European global domination. In that sense, rather than being a ‘migration crisis’, it can be better described as a reception crisis (cf. Christopoulos 2016), a crisis of the contemporary nation states in the Global North who find it impossible to come to terms with their own histories.