The Siren Vase, an Attic red-figure stamnos by the Siren painter (PL. xvra), was made between 490 and 480 BC, and is now in the British Museum. Odysseus is shown bound by his own order to the mast of his ship, the only man to hear the Sirens’ irresistible song and to survive it. Their ears stopped with beeswax, his crew row stolidly on.

The Iraqi Government is proposing to supersede the Antiquities Law drawn up eleven years ago, and approved by the League of Nations, by one which will admittedly be far more onerous to the foreign excavator working in Iraq. As a prelude to the introduction of the bill before the Iraqi Parliament there has been a regular campaign of propaganda intended to show that under the existing law Iraq has been robbed, by concessions made to foreign missions, of the treasures which were legally and morally hers, and that Iraq never has had fair treatment and will not have it so long as the division of the objects from excavations is conducted by a foreign Director of Antiquities. To what lengths this campaign has been carried may be illustrated by the following: in March 1934 Abdal Rizaq Effendi, the Curator of the Baghdad Museum, personally repeated to me the statement, published in the local press, that the normal share accruing to the Baghdad Museum from the division of antiquities with a foreign mission, as conducted by the Director, was no more than one half of one per cent. of the objects catalogued.

Introduction

The study of maritime archaeology is a relatively new activity in Northern Ireland. This paper introduces the approach that has been adopted in investigating the maritime cultural landscape and takes a detailed look at the maritime archaeology of Strangford Lough.

Only in the last decade has government in Northern Ireland been responsible for the management of maritime archaeology. The Department of the Environment agency, Environment and Heritage Service (EHS), administers the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 in Northern Ireland's territorial waters. Having no knowledge of the subject and faced with the management of shipwrecks, EHS Grst created a register of known shipwrecks. A Senior Fellow, Colin Breen, was appointed in 1993 in the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's University Belfast. Using docurnentary sourc:es such as Lloyd's List and Lloyd's Register, together with Parlianientary Sessional papers and many other documentary sources, he identified some 3000 wrecks around Northern Ireland’s short coastline (Breen 1996).

There is little room for doubt that the remains of ancient roads or causeways still to be seen in Yucatan are, so far as the history of the peninsula is concerned, of considerable antiquity. Two of the earliest and most important historians of Yucatan, namely, Diego de Landa and Bernardo de Lizana, mention them, and brief notices of their existence have been made by explorers in the nineteenth century. It seems highly probable that as early as a thousand years ago a broad highway extended a considerable distance across the northern part of the peninsula of Yucatan, if indeed it did not reach from the eastern to the western shores of the country.

At a classic meeting of the Prehistoric Society, held during April 1948 in the old home of the Institute of Archaeology of London University, V. G. Childe and C. F. C. Hawkes presented two papers, each complementary to the other, on the chronology of the Late Bronze Age in Europe. This joint approach was focussed on the relative and absolute dating of the Urnfields of the North Alpine foreland, whence Hawkes applied the results to the West, and pre-eminently to Britain; but, by arrangement, Childe approached the crucial area from Hither Asia by way of the Danube corridor, and from Greece through the Balkans, while Hawkes worked his way forward from the Aegean up the length of Italy, and so northwards over the Alps.

It is worth recollecting that this was the first time that British archaeologists had formally addressed themselves to this most difficult set of problems in detail, and on Central European territory. Furthermore both papers suffered, one feels, from being among the first essays in archaeological synthesis to be attempted in this country after the war, with all that is implied in that. At all events within a year of publication Childe was saying that he no longer had any confidence in his derivation of the flange-hilted bronze sword from Hither Asia; and he had also by then become less assured of some of his other Asiatic derivations. While in the course of the international discussion which followed, Hawkes felt obliged to revise a number of his dates, chiefly in the direction of a longer chronology. Nevertheless, both essays commanded a splendid range of material, and were fortified by a sufficient exposition of the history of research in this field to give a sound sense of perspective. If today they have been outmoded in many particulars by the work of a small army of scholars working in half a dozen countries, they remain for English-speaking students an indispensable starting-point, and an admirable introduction to their subject.