The excavation of these barrows was undertaken in the autumn of 1949 for the Ministry of Works in advance of building. They stood immediately adjacent to each other on Plateau Gravel overlying the Bagshot Beds towards the western extremity of the Hampshire Basin, and only a hundred yards north of the crest of the Bourne Bottom which leads down to Bournemouth and Poole Bay about three miles distant (fig. 1). The surrounding heath is rich in round barrows, and the district has yielded plentiful evidence of prehistoric man.

The peat deposits in the Somerset Levels have yielded many finds of prehistoric and early historic age, ranging from flint and metal artefacts to roadways and other structures. These finds have been a source of interest to archaeologists for many years, and the work here described represents only one aspect of the early occupation of the region. The Levels themselves lie between the major uplands of the Quantock Hills and the Mendip Hills (fig. 1), but within the Levels are extensive ridges of limestone (including the Polden Hills and the Wedmore Ridge), smaller and lower areas of limestone (such as Westhay and Meare), and patches of sands (Burtle Beds) all of which provided dry ground for occupation or other activities. We are concerned in this paper with the earliest wooden roads and tracks of Neolithic age which were built to allow communication between the Westhay ridge and the largest Burtle Bed north of the Polden Hills (pl. XIV).

The purpose of this paper is to give an account of the ancient agriculture of the British highland, by indicating the broad distribution of the remains and by describing some examples in detail. The paper is based for the most part on records compiled in recent years in the course of the routine field reconnaissance carried out by the Archaeology Division of the Ordnance Survey, during which work on ancient highland agriculture was directed and prepared for publication by Mr James Fox, F.S.A., Assistant Archaeology Officer, Ordnance Survey. The illustrations are reproduced from documents held by the Ordnance Survey with the sanction of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Crown copyright reserved.

The highland areas of Britain comprise: 1, the southwest of England; 2, Wales; and 3, England and Scotland from the River Trent to the Arctic Ocean. Most of the new information about ancient agriculture in the highland refers to area 3. It will be convenient first to summarize the situation in 1 and 2 and then to discuss area 3 in greater detail.

The excavations of the cemetery groups at Balneaves, Loanleven and Park of Tongland facilitate an examination of many aspects of Bronze Age burial practices in Scotland. They are notable as much for the differences in burial ritual they imply as for the very narrow chronological period in which they were used. The three sites produced a total of seventeen 14C dates, two of which are aberrant, with means of the remaining fifteen falling within a period of 250 years (3370–3610 bp in radiocarbon years). The excavations were sponsored by Historic Scotland (formerly Historic Buildings and Monuments, Scotland).

At Balneaves, a penannular ditch enclosed sixteen features, including a group of seven pits with cremation burials, four of which were associated with a distinctive assemblage of collared urns. The cremated bone was well preserved. At least one large standing stone had been erected on the site, and this was buried in the medieval period.

At Loanleven, only a segment of the enclosing ring-ditch survived, within which were four cists, two containing inhumations and two cremations, one of the latter (Cist 2) associated with a fragment of a food vessel. A decorated slab, in so-called ‘Passage Grave Style’, was recovered from Cist 1, and the same cist produced palynological evidence for grave furnishings in the form of a mat of plant material which probably underlay the body. 14C dates give a terminus ante quem of 3620±50 bp (GU–2543) for the re-use of the decorated slab, and a terminus post quem of 3410±50 bp (GU–2542) for the food vessel grave.

Park of Tongland, regarded as a Four-Poster stone circle, was excavated after the fall of a standing stone. It was shown to be of multi-period construction, consisting of a cairn which overlay seven pits containing fragmentary cremation burials, two associated with collared urns. The standing stones may not all have been erect at the same time. A series of 14C dates fell within the range of 1480–1530 bc.

Over 45 years have now elapsed since attention was first drawn to an apparent paucity of pre-Roman Iron Age funerary sites in southern Britain (Hawkes and Dunning 1930). This remarkable lacuna, contrasting with a wealth of Bronze Age burial forms, received little further attention until Hodson defined an absence of burials as a ‘negative type-fossil’ of his insular and otherwise prolific Woodbury Culture and emphasized the cultural implications of this uncomfortable gap in the archaeological record (Hodson 1964). With the exception of supposedly intrusive continental disposal forms in restricted areas of Yorkshire and south-eastern England and a third rather hazy rite from the extreme south-west, the British Iron Age was characterized by an embarrassingly invisible method of disposal that could neither be compared nor contrasted with contemporary continental traditions. Although efforts have been made to explain this absence in terms of hypothetical practices that would leave no archaeologically recognizable traces, there have been few attempts to consider in detail the scattered references to human remains that have slowly accumulated in the literature. A reconsideration of this evidence in the light of more recently excavated material suggests that the dearth of funerary remains is to an extent illusory and that further distinctive disposal rituals can now be added to those already recognized. It is also apparent that certain shared characteristics may force a general reconsideration of the origins of these different rites.

In most societies, the presentation of human hair makes statements about projections of self, belonging, and difference. Drawing upon analogies from living traditions where hair makes an important contribution to symbolic grammars of personhood, this paper seeks to explore the evidence for symbolism associated with head and body hair in later European prehistory. This evidence is wide ranging, and includes the (exceptional) survival of hair in the archaeological record, iconography, and the equipment used for the management of hair. Questions are raised as to the manner in which hair may have been employed in visual languages, not only those associated with self-identity, but also in the presentation of ‘others’, whether social outcasts, sacrificial victims, shamed prisoners or special people, such as priests, shamans, or heroes. Issues of relationships between hair and gender are addressed, particularly with reference to iconography. The final part of the paper is concerned with the socio-political connotations associated with personal grooming and, in particular, the significance of adopting new, Roman, ways of managing hair in late Iron Age Britain.

The object of the excavations described in this preliminary report was to recover evidence of:

(a) the more perishable elements in the material culture of a Maglemosian community,

(b) the fauna on which this community largely subsisted and

(c) the vegetation which formed the ecological setting of man and beast alike.

The best way of appreciating the need for such an investigation and of judging the measure of success attained in this first season is to consider how knowledge of the Maglemosian culture in Britain grew up between the two world wars. There appear to have been two main clues, namely single finds of barbed bone points, commonly, though probably wrongly, referred to in the early literature as ‘harpoons,’ and flint industries of a type associated with analogous points on Maglemosian sites in the Baltic area.

Though the terrace gravels and palaeoliths of north-west Kent are well-known, there is little published on the stratigraphy of implements elsewhere in the county, except the Sturry deposits, two miles north-east of Canterbury (Archaeologia, LXXIV, 117). The geological Drift map is old (the latest edition issued in 1875), and there is no memoir to elucidate any but the Dartford area; but in 1925 the geology of the Canterbury district was described by Messrs. Dewey, Wooldridge, Cornes and Brown in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, vol. XXXVI, pp. 257–290, and Messrs. Wooldridge & Kirkaldy read a paper to that Association this April on the physiographic evolution of north-east Kent, which throws much light on the problem presented by the Fordwich flints.

Formerly the port of Canterbury, Fordwich lies on the right or southern bank of the Great Stour opposite Sturry, and at the foot of a steep hill, which rises to 150 ft. and leads to an elevated plain between the valleys of the Great and Little Stour. In the angle between the road leading due southfrom Fordwich and that from Stodmarsh to Canterbury, west of Moat Cottages (6 in. O.S. map, Kent, XLVI, N.E.), gravel has been worked over a considerable area, the depth being about 7 feet on the east and over 20 feet at the west end. The nearest bench-mark is 151·4 feet and the base of the gravel on the west is therefore about 130 feet O.D., rising to the east. The tongue of high ground between the rivers is covered in patches with gravel and brick-earth resting on Thanet Sand, and forms a plateau about 5 miles long at about the 100 ft. level.

Analyses of recent finds of ‘coin moulds’ from Levroux (Indre) and Aulnat (Puy-de-Dôme), France, confirm that these objects were used for casting globules of gold and silver. Though quantitatively the majority of recorded finds come from defended oppida, more than half the sites to produce ‘coin moulds’ are open settlements, suggesting coin production was not centralised, at least in the second century BC.

A part from its successes in the Somerset Levels, environmental archaeology has made little headway in studies of the South-west of England. On the uplands this is partially due to the lack of preservation of bone and most other organic remains in the acid soils now present. Again, in the region generally there has been little deposition in basins of the muds, marls and peats accumulated during the Post-glacial that are so valuable for reconstructing the botanical environment and the effects of early man on soils and vegetation; this is largely a consequence of the peninsula's escape from Pleistocene glaciation. Further, the published material on archaeology has until lately been so scattered that it has been difficult to compile a coherent outline of the settlement and economy of the region in pre-Roman times, a situation only recently remedied by the publication of Lady Aileen Fox's book South West England, providing a personal synthesis of the prehistory of that area.

In recent years increasing attention has been focused on the palaeoeconomic interpretation of prehistoric sites, and a number of projects have been carried out both in Britain and abroad on plant and animal remains from archaeological sites with a view to interpreting subsistence patterns and activities of early communities. Though large-scale, systematic sampling and recovery of palaeoethnobotanical data has been carried out on several sites in the last ten years, the practice is still not widespread and has yet to be judged by its results. Fundamental issues relating to sampling, recovery and data presentation still require attention. Although studies of palaeoeconomic material have been done on Iron age sites in southern Britain, for example at Portway (Murphy 1977a) and Abingdon (Parrington 1978), as yet little evaluation of this evidence has taken place. The aim of this paper is to present, assess and compare the evidence from two such studies of different types of Iron Age site.

The passage tomb at Newgrange served as a focus of ceremonial activity in the Late Neolithic and Beaker periods. A complex of monuments was constructed around the mound, consisting of a timber circle or woodhenge to the south-east and a smaller, possibly roofed, timber circle to the west; an enclosing bank constructed along the southern and western sides, and a free-standing circle of great stones encircling the monument. In this paper the view that the faunal and material remains from the Newgrange excavations are domestic refuse is questioned. The deposition and spatial patterning of the faunal material is interpreted as having a ritual significance and the use of this material as representative of the Late Neolithic/Beaker period economy is rejected

More than 70 years ago an early Predynastic culture was discovered in the Badari region near Asyut. It was named the Badarian and it represents the oldest known agricultural tradition in the Nile Valley of Upper Egypt. However, much remains to be learned about the Badarian as well as subsequent Predynastic developments in the region which may be expected to throw light on the adoption of agriculture in the Nile Valley and the rise of the Egyptian state. Consequently, new field investigations were initiated in 1989. A large part of the area was field surveyed and test excavations were carried out at the site of Hemamieh, originally excavated by Gertrude Caton-Thompson in the 1920s and famous for its stratified sequence of Predynastic levels.

During the 1989 season, the authors visited 42 sites, the majority of which have Predynastic remains. Most of the Predynastic occurrences date to the Badarian or Gerzean phases. Very little material was seen that could be assigned to the intervening Amratian phase, raising the possibility that elements of the Badarian culture remained prevalent in the Badari region at a time when only the Amratian was represented elsewhere in Upper Egypt. Our test excavations at Hemamieh revealed a stratigraphy similar to that described by Caton-Thompson with cultural deposits sandwiched between a surface scree layer and a cemented Limestone gravel deposit or ‘breccia’. The pottery recovered shows a continuous sequence beginning with the Badarian and ending with the Gerzean. Four radiocarbon dates were also obtained. Two of these are on samples from levels with Badarian ceramics and provide calibrated age estimates spanning c. 4400–4000 BC.

An extensively plough-damaged oval barrow of the third millennium bc was excavated. The entire mound had been removed by ploughing. No burials were found under the site of the mound but disarticulated human skeletal material was found in the ditches. The main flanking ditches appear to have silted in naturally with evidence of Beaker activity and Romano-British agriculture in the higher levels. Some evidence of deliberate back-filling, including the burial of carved chalk objects, was found in the ditches at the east end. A single Saxon hut was excavated in the north-east corner of the barrow and a rubbish deposit containing Middle Saxon pottery was found in the upper levels of the ditch in the south-west corner of the barrow.

The Polden Hill hoard, first noted in 1803, has never been fully published. The hoard consist of many elements of horse gear and trappings of the first century A.D.

The main object of this paper is to draw attention to the existence of Late Stone Age sites in South West Africa where perishable organic remains are preserved, and in particular to the ‘Big Elephant Cave’, discovered by Dr E. R. Scherz in the Erongo Mountains.

These lie some 10 to 15 miles north-north-east of Usakos, at approximately 21° 40′ S., 15° 40′ E., in a region of open grass steppe with stands of thornbush, mainly Acacia, with low sclerophytic scrub supported by an annual rainfall of between 150–200 millimetres. These mountains rest on Basement Complex rocks and consist of Karroo sediments through which have been introduced granites of post-Karroo Age. The western face of the Erongo forms the edge of the plateau escarpment, and looks out to the Namib Desert and the Atlantic Ocean.

The cave, to which we were conducted in May, 1959, by Dr Scherz, is situated in a commanding position on a kopje of rounded granite boulders near Ameib. It was first shown by its discoverer to the Abbé Henri Breuil when he was copying the Erongo rock paintings, but no study of the settlement was made and it was not revisited in the interim. Although the name ‘Big Elephant Cave’ has been adopted from Dr Scherz, it is, in fact, a deep rockshelter rather than a cave. It contains no paintings, but a line of male and female figures, in faded red paint, is drawn low down on a protected rock at the north side of the kopje. These have been published by the Abbé Breuil.

With one notable exception, the study of Italian prehistory has developed with little emphasis on the economic interpretation of cultures. The exception has been the so-called ‘Apennine’ Bronze Age of central and southern Italy, which has commonly been defined as a cultural phenomenon involving an economy of pastoralism and large-scale stock-keeping. In 1959 Professor S. M. Puglisi published his major examination of the Apennine Bronze Age, which has remained the principal statement of the ‘pastoralist’ hypothesis (Puglisi, 1959). In recent years the Swedish Institute in Rome has carried out an important series of excavations on the acropolis of Luni sul Mignone in northern Lazio (Östenberg, 1967). The excavations discovered imposing house foundations cut into the soft volcanic tufo or tuff; from this architectural evidence, as well as the analysis of faunal and plant remains from Luni and other sites, Professor Östenberg concluded that ‘the Apennine culture had a mixed economy with agriculture and stock-breeding as basic components … pastoral nomadism cannot therefore be looked upon as the primary characteristic feature of the Apennine culture’ (Östenberg, 1967, 260). Puglisi based his argument upon both ethnographic and archaeological evidence.

The later prehistoric rock-engravings of Mont Bégo, in the Maritime Alps on the French–Italian border, provide a rare possibility of grasping the meaning of a group in prehistoric art. Two elements in their limited repertoire of forms are daggers and halberds, which also occur as physical objects or as images in the contemporary sites of adjacent north Italy; their contexts show they are, in that area, associated with the status of adult males in society. That same interpretation is applied to the Mont Bégo figures, and this is found congruent with other motifs — especially ploughs and cattle — in the repertoire. It may explain also the other common motif, a geometrical form interpreted as a map of a prehistoric farmstead, by associating it with plough agriculture and land division. The insights developed from the study for what ‘meaning’ amounts to in the study of prehistory are set down.

The Broom Lower Palaeolithic locality, on the river Axe at the Devon/Dorset border in south-western Britain, yielded an assemblage of at least 1800 Acheulean artefacts between the 1870s and 1940s through gravel quarrying and antiquarian collection. The bifacial material, predominantly produced in chert but including a small flint component, is characterised by considerable typological diversity and a distinctive asymmetrical element. While aspects of the assemblage have been reported before, this paper presents new work on the artefacts of the C.E. Bean collection and the sample from Exeter Museum. The Bean archive indicates that the artefact patterning is not due to fluvial mixing of separate, typologically-discrete, assemblages. Analysis of the artefacts suggests that hominin knapping strategies were not notably constrained by variations in raw material granular quality, but that the typological variability strongly reflects blank form and shape. However, while the influences of blank form and resharpening, including the use of tranchet flaking, partially explain the assemblage's asymmetrical component, a significant proportion of those artefacts cannot be understood in these terms. The existence of local, short-lived manufacturing traditions, perhaps reflecting the idiosyncratic approaches of individual knappers, is argued to best explain the distinctive asymmetrical element of the Broom assemblage. This interpretation is further supported by (i) the geoarchaeological model of assemblage formation, which assigns the majority of the artefacts to a single phase of occupation, and (ii) the OSL ages of the Broom fluvial deposits (predominantly MIS-9 and 8) and the atypical character of the assemblage in relation to other British late Lower Palaeolithic material, which oppose the notion of longer-lived, locally, or regionally-maintained, traditions.