The earliest Christian churches of England must have been built‘while the Romans yet dwelt in Britain’. It is quite possible that some remains of them exist, unrecognized by modern eyes, and offering in their arrangements none of the conventions which have since so greatly influenced the development of the church plan. But we have at Silchester the plan of a building which has been claimed as a Christian church, probably of 4th century date, and of it we may say that if it be actually so—a matter which is not capable of definite proof,— it falls well enough into line with later churches of whose nature there can be no doubt. It is a little building with a rectangular nave flanked by side chambers or aisles and preceded by a porch. The nave ends in an apse, in this instance to the west, with transeptal chambers to north and south.

Brunanburh was fought in the late summer of 937 between king Athelstan and all the might of England on one side, and the viking Olaf Guthfrithson, king of Dublin and claimant to the throne of York, and his ally Constantine II, king of Scots, upon the other. The thousandth anniversary of this British battle of the nations is an occasion for reviewing critically the evidence upon the disputed question of its site. The well-known poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, being impressionist rather than narrative, provides only two or three slight clues; the Latin poem preserved by William of Malmesbury,l of early but uncertain date, helps us only a little further; and the Northumbrian annals used by Symeon of Durham seem to have supplied him with an alternative name for the battlefield but no other indication of its locality. Judgment must therefore be based largely upon the names by which the battle was known and upon traditions preserved by writers who had no claim to be contemporary; and the reliability of such evidence must be tested.

It was a quarter of a century ago that ANTIQUITY first announced the ‘Pleistocene colonization of Australia’, when Mulvaney (1964) reported secure dates before 12,000 b.p. from Kenniff Cave, Queensland. The last three years alone have seen dates from New Guinea of around 40,000 b.p., early dates from the offshore islands of the Bismarck Archipelago, and dates from Australia itself that show a rapid colonization of both the arid central desert and cold, wet Tasmania – environments very different from the tropical islands of Southeast Asia, whence the first Australasian populations must surely have come. It is a record with great implications for early settlement elsewhere, most plainly of the American continents.

In this fascinating article, the Professor of Archaeology in the University of Exeter shows us that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was not only the author of Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and of beautiful lyrics, ballads and love-songs, but was keenly interested in prehistory and was well abreast of the subject as it was developing in Germany in the early nineteenth century.

Thus the sum of things is ever being renewed, and mortals live dependent one upon another…and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners hand on the torch of life.