The history of North Africa is dominated by the Sahara, which has always been a vital factor in the lives of the peoples of Barbary and the Western Sudan. The cultural and economic development of both has been profoundly affected by intercourse between the two. Yet they are separated by a desert which forms one of the world's greatest barriers to human intercourse.

A slight increase in the aridity of the Sahara would so extend the waterless stages that the caravan routes would become impassable to camels and therefme to men—leaving, of course, mechanical transport out of consideration. A correspondingly slight increase in rainfall would quickly multiply the waterholes and desert pastures and render man independent of the now necessary camel. The question of climatic change in historic times is therefore a matter of importance to the student of the history of northern Africa.

Les étonnantesm trouvailles retirées par la mission russe de Tsalka (direction B. A. Kuftin) des grands tertres funéraires ou kourganes de la vallée supérieure de la Khram dans la province de Trialeti, Géorgie centrale, à l'Ouest de Tiflis (1), ont causé une sensation dans le monde des archéologues (2). Comme, à l'occasion d'une étude d'ensemble sur la chronologie du Bronze au Caucase (3), nous venons d'étudier ces nouvelles trouvailles, il nous paraît utile de publier ici nos conclusions relatives à la date qu‘;il convient d'attribuer au kourganes de Trialeti. La question, en effet, intéresse au plus haut point l'archéologie du Caucase.

Disons tout de suite que Mr. Kuftin considère l'époque de la quatrième tombe à fosse de Mycènes et celle de Troie vi comme le terminus post quem des plus récentes des kourganes qu'il classe à la fin du Bronze Moyen. Il ne croit pas devoir envisager pour eux une date postérieure aux xvue siècle avant notre ère, tandis que nous serions en faveur d'une attribution de l'ensemble de ces kourganes aux xvie-xve s., c'est-à-dire au début du Bronze Récent.

Does a unique eroded prehistoric carving on one of the sarsen uprights at Stonehenge link the most famous of English megalithic monuments to Brittany?

Using the World Wide Web is not unlike visiting an unfamiliar place to look at the archaeology. You want to know if there is anything interesting to see, so you start in the library, looking for information; you read books and articles from journals; perhaps you contact colleagues who can tell you about the place; you want to know how to find the sites and to get to them; and once you are there, you want to visit the museums as well as the monuments, and to locate people who are working there, whether they are from academic institutions, government archaeological bodies or local societies. You will want to check that access arrangements have not changed since the last published information; you also want to ensure that as far as possible the information you have is accurate, so that you do not waste time looking at sites which are not relevant to your interests.

An ingenious derivation for the La Tène dagger with anthropoid hilt shows how craftsmen gave an agreeable character to a working weapon. The dagger remained every bit as effective, but the splayed person on the hilt added a touch of playful luxury to the serious business of stabbing. By way of a modern anthropoid corkscrew, the author lures us away from an obsession with symbolism and encourages us to look for a more down-to-earth ‘psychological functionality’ in decorated objects.