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.

Tangas are small convex triangular pottery covers found in large numbers in the Amazon delta. Their suggestive shape has long been attributed to use as a cover or shield for the female Mound of Venus, for protection, modesty (‘cache-sexe’ is the French term) or embellishment. Here the author offers a typology and searches for correlations between the shapes, sizes and patterns of the tangas and the date, location, purpose and status of the women who wore them. He emphasises that in spite of this advance, better understanding requires new information from properly designed excavations; 85 per cent of known tangas have been acquired by looting, purchase or low-precision digging.

The unusual assemblage of aurochs horn cores from the baths of Bourbonne-les-Bains suggests votive deposits. But were they? The authors describe the assemblage, date it to the later Roman to early medieval period, discuss its possible environmental and ritual connotations, but also raise the possibility that it relates to craft-workers making use of the hot water supply to work the horn.

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.

On the resumption of excavation in the autumn of 1972, a funerary complex belonging to a community of priests was discovered among a group of religious buildings in the early urban Bronze Age centre of Altin-depe in South Turkmenia. All the material found there dates from the early stages of Namazga V, or, using the accepted chronology, from the end of the third millennium BC (Masson, 1973, 481). It had previously been established that the chief building of this religious group was a stepped, tower-like edifice which had clearly been built in the style of the Mesopotamian ziggurats and had been rebuilt three times in the course of its existence (Masson and Sarianidi, 1972, 117–18). The funerary complex excavated in 1972 corresponds chronologically to the first, relatively small, ziggurat and was situated southeast of it.

The authors recount their personal experience of the recent assessment of archaeology teaching in the United Kingdom.