A hundred years ago, when Paxton's Crystal Palace went up among the elms of Hyde Park, it would never have entered the mind even of the Prince Consort that it should contain a section devoted to British Antiquity. The Great Exhibition was a glorification of the Present, of Progress, and its most conspicuous salute to the past took the form of a proliferation of Gothic ornament, and Pugin's gorgeous Medieval Court. The 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition on the South Bank will include a pavilion illustrating the Origin of the British People with material drawn almost entirely from the discoveries of British archaeology made since 1851. I do not think that this can be regarded as a tribute to the progress of our subject in any simple sense, rather it is a result of the development of the historical consciousness so characteristic of our time, and of which this progress itself forms a part. However, without further metaphysic, it remains a fact that one of the two official lines of entry into the South Bank Exhibition will be through a pavilion where many hundreds of thousands of people will find it difficult not to give at least a passing glance at a display of British prehistory.

Ever since the beginning of recorded history, Ancient Egypt was dependent upon the goodwill of the Phoenician overlords of the mountain land of the Lebanon for supplies of timber in the long running lengths required for the construction of large ships, especially those intended for use on long voyages by sea ; fine timber was also in considerable demand for the making of the elaborate wooden sarcophagi of nobles and of members of the royal family as well as for furniture of superior quality. This lack of suitable native timber made the Egyptians late comers in sea-trading ; indeed, it restricted progress so seriously that their water-borne commerce was limited to traffic with Nubia and the South by way of the Nile waterway, to occasional expeditions down the Red Sea to Southern Arabia and to Somaliland (Punt) and to short coasting trips to Phoenicia to buy timber logs and to the coasts of the Sinai Peninsula in search of copper.

Originally there were two main points of controversy about Piltdown. Did the Piltdown cranium and the Piltdown jaw-bone (mandible) represent one creature, ‘Eoanthropus’ as Smith Woodward inferred; or did they belong to two creatures, the cranium that of a man and the jaw-bone that of an ape, as David Waterston, Gerrit Miller and A. T. Marston believed? The second point of controversy concerned the antiquity of the specimens.

It is hardly necessary to remind readers of ANTIQUITY of the importance which environmental studies have assumed in archaeology. Since the pioneer work of Crawford and Williams-Freeman in 1912–15 we have become increasingly aware of environment. As a body we are (at least in theory) clay-land-and-damp-oakwood-conscious; we approach no problem of field archaeology without a hopeful eye on the geological map and our idea of its implications.

If sometimes we have held our beliefs in too simple faith, that in the beginning was an excusable fault. In the early days generalizations which saw things in their least complicated form were—and for that matter still are—valuable. Heavy clay-land=damp oakwood and marsh unsuited for settlement and therefore avoided; light soils=open land much sought after by early man. The jargon comes readily to us, and remains no less true, for those whose purpose is generalization, for the facility with which it is uttered.

We are grateful to Chris Evans for convening and introducing this imaginative archaeological tribute to the work of Charles Darwin, 150 years after the publication of his On the origin of species – the inspiration for an evolutionary concept of history in so many fields. June 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of a yet more momentous event in the history of archaeology, the endorsement of the antiquity of human tool-making by observations in the Somme gravels. Clive Gamble and Robert Kruszynski reconstruct the occasion and publish the famous axe for the first time. Chris Evans returns to present us with the bitter-sweet spectacle of the Darwin family as excavators and Tim Murray rediscovers a suite of pictures made for John Lubbock which show how prehistoric life was envisaged in polite society at the time. Lastly we are grateful to Colin Renfrew for his own reflections on the anniversary.

Antiquity has recently received some information* of great value in connexion with radiocarbon dating from the advisory committee on the subject set up by the American Anthropological Association and the Geological Society of America. It consists of an historical foreword, a corrected list of dates, a number of reports on specific problems, a summary and a bibliography, partly in typescript and partly on microfilm. The list differs little from the printed one which was distributed to a number of interested people in September 1950, though it contains a few additions and corrections, and the real importance of the material now received lies in the reports and the summary.