The progress of archaeology in Britain, as elsewhere, depends on excavation. This is a commonplace; but a more leisurely approach to that final arbitrament than is usually adopted would, we think, be advantageous. Until an area is studied, its visible antiquities planned, the evidence afforded by their geographical and topographical relationships weighed, the natural environmental conditions—forest and open country—assessed, and resultant possibilities discussed, the selection of particular sites for excavation in that area is premature. The following account of a field survey of a limited area in Glamorgan is a practical expression of this point of view.

Profound books are always worthwhile. If we agree with them, their ideas become a direct contribution to our knowledge. If we disagree, they impel us to examine the basis of disagreement and to develop our own counter-ideas, and thus they make an indirect contribution to our knowledge. R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1946) is the most penetrating work on the foundations of historical method known to me, but I find it unacceptable. My major difficulties result from his ontological idealism and his dichotomy between mind and nature.

Many years ago I was put in charge of the excavation of an ancient mound-site at Abu Geili on the Blue Nile near Sennar. Careful records were kept, but for reasons wholly outside my control it is only recently that I have been enabled to write a full account for publication. In the course of doing so I have constantly been brought up against first principles; in the present article I propose to consider how these principles apply, as I see it, to Sudanese archaeology at the present time.

The problem of Roman windows and their furnishings has never been studied seriously in this country as so little evidence is usually forthcoming. Window glass is found in fair quantities on most sites and, where the pieces are large enough to indicate size, they would appear to be no more than g to 12 in. square, but there is little indication of how they were fastened into the window. Such technical details have unfortunately escaped attention in those countries where sufficient remains have been found to attempt reconstruction. While R. Herbig has discussed windows generally: the most detailed treatment has been that by Vittorio Spinazzola in his survey of the excavations of Via dell’ Abbondanza at Pompeii. As he indicates, while houses were only of one story, the window openings tended to be very small slits but, as soon as an upper floor was built, more light could be obtained without sacrificing safety or privacy. Once the advantages of this became apparent, new and larger windows were inserted on the ground floor, architectural ingenuity being displayed in directing the light to particular parts of a room where it was needed. He touches upon the question of the infilling without adding much detail. Some of the smaller windows appear to have been openings in the wall with wooden, sliding shutters on the inside. The larger ones were filled with iron gratings in a form of a simple grille which has been reconstructed as horizontal flat bars, through which round vertical bars passed, a piece of construction which seems to be unnecessarily difficult. A grille, merely of crossbars, has also been found at Herculaneum.

The obvious English-language literature on the early civilizations of the Ancient East gives less attention than it might to the northern aspects, towards central Asia. Here, one of the leading researchers in Soviet Central Asia reviews an important new French book on the Iranian plateau and its inter-relations.

What is the nature of the cities and chiefdoms, the states or proto-states or would-be states that fringe the Roman Empire? Modern Spain, like other regions that were first outside and then inside Empire, shows social transformations that were as important as they are now hard to judge from enigmatic evidence.