The Early Iron Age of Wessex has been the study of many distinguished archaeologists, and any fresh investigation is bound to be in large part either a synthesis or a development of the results of earlier workers. Among the latter must be included not only such notable scholars as General Pitt-Rivers, the Cunningtons, Professor Hawkes, Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Mr Radford, but a multitude of professional archaeologists and amateurs, whose accumulated labours help to give solidity to the picture. The present writer owes a profound debt to all of these; he would also like to acknowledge personal help especially from Mr Raymond Farrar, Mr J. Stevens Cox, Mr A. L. F. Rivet, Mr J. B. Calkin, and from the Curators of the Museums at Dorchester, Farnham (Dorset), Salisbury, Devizes and Taunton.

The present paper is a study of the ‘C’ cultures, i.e. cultures of the latest phase of the Early Iron Age which are not simply survivals of ‘B’ cultures, in Wessex. For the present purpose I take Wessex to be the area covered by Sheet 11 of the Ordnance Survey ¼ inch map, excluding the area of undoubted Belgic occupation in the East (which I shall attempt to define later), and in addition a westward extension to the River Exe. In other words, it is a study, primarily (Part I) of the ‘Durotrigian’ culture of Dorset and its borders, and also (Part II) of whatever Belgic penetration can be demonstrated in the surrounding area.

An attempt is made to classify and list in detail the known disc-barrows in and around Wessex—about 170 in all, 155 being of normal type, 13 of ‘Dorset’ type, and two of exceptional character. Of these, 93 are in Wiltshire, 57 being within ten km of Stonehenge, and 36 within five km of that monument, which evidently acted as a magnet in attracting major barrow cemeteries to its vicinity.

The normal disc-barrow is of the ‘Wessex culture’ of the Early Bronze Age. The rite is nearly always cremation, but a very few possible instances of primary inhumation need further investigation. The grave-goods are usually necklaces of beads (amber, shale, faience, in four instances all together), in three instances with amber space-plates; bronze awls (pointed at one end and flat at the other which probably went into a handle); and small two-edged bronze knives. Occasionally the cremation is in an urn or with an ‘Aldbourne’ or other cup. The frequency of beads, and the absence of warrior equipment such as ‘Wessex’ bronze daggers, has until now led to the conclusion that they were the places of interment of females.

Since 1953 seven disc-barrows have been scientifically excavated but final reports are still awaited. The primary cremation from one of the mounds of the oval twin barrow Milton Lilbourne I was probably female. The primary cremation from the central mound of Collingbourne Kingston 18 could not be sexed; but two cremations from a large pit beneath the eccentric mound of the same barrow were identified as probably and possibly adult male. Cremations from the other sites could not be sexed. These meagre results suggest that the central or other primary mounds of disc-barrows were for females but the eccentric mounds may have been for either sex. The sexing of more cremations is urgently needed.

Excavation of a headland on the north coast of Cyprus has revealed a neolithic settlement with well-preserved stone buildings which belong to one stage of a multiphase site. Evidence was obtained for changes in architecture, definable growth patterns and, in Cypriot terms, deeply stratified deposits with painted pottery that clearly links the early Troulli and the Sotira styles. Eighteen structures, many re-built two or three times, two winding passages and open yards were located in such deep, artificial hollows that the settlement may be considered as partly subterranean. Groups of houses were arranged in sectors, in one case divided by an uninterrupted 4 m. wide ridge. A series of Carbon-14 determinations indicates the fourth millennium for this phase; its predecessor was defended by an impressive 4·5 m deep ditch. Faunal and floral analyses disclose a range of domesticated species suggestive of a lively agricultural, rather than fishing-based, mixed economy. As a result of associated surveys, many unexcavated sites may now be placed in the dated Vrysi framework and a start made to the definition of neolithic settlement patterns on the north coast. The connections o Vrysi with excavated sites necessitates a reassessment of the prehistory of fifth-fourth millennia Cyprus which seems to be characterized by cultural continuity, regionalism and, the island's isolation.

In the autumn of 1949 when ploughing was taking place on a south-eastern spur of Steyning Round Hill (Map Ref. 51/166099), fig. 1, two schoolboys D. Atkinson and M. J. Manetta found the remains of nine Late Bronze Age urns with cremated bones just under the surface of the plough soil. They lay in a circular area roughly 30 feet in diameter covered with large flints. Most of these urns were wisely left in situ until the Steyning Grammar School Archaeological Society under the direction of the Headmaster, Mr J. Scragg, and Mr W. Gardiner, assisted by Messrs N. E. S. Norris, G. Mason, and the writer, members of the Brighton and Hove Archaeological Society, undertook a methodical exploration. Our grateful thanks should be recorded to the farmer, Capt J. T. Mackley, who permitted the excavation and to all who helped in the work and dealt with the finds, as well as to Mr D. C. Tutt for kindly drawing the plan and pottery.

‘They have accused the archaeologist of tatting endless taxonomic rosettes of the I same old ball of “material culture” and maintained that his findings are next to useless for the purpose of history and culture study. It seems that the archaeologists are becoming as Tolstoy once said of modern historians, like deaf men answering questions which no one has asked them. In their broader implications these accusations are all too true’ (Taylor, 1948, p. 95). Certainly this not too kind, ironical remark was explicitly aimed at archaeologists in the United States; yet it may, perhaps, be suspected that even some of their European colleagues feel somewhat uneasy on being confronted by such an unflattering mirror. One has, undoubtedly, the feeling that relatively few archaeologists in the West have ever really scrutinized critically what they and their field of study are ultimately aiming at, apart from the somewhat loose and undefined aim of ‘reconstructing the past’. Now, this ‘past’ obviously does not consist of ‘taxonomic rosettes’ for their own sake, nor of economic techniques only. There can be little doubt of the validity of V. Gordon Childe's remark that the cultures established by archaeology represent societies, and in other of his writings, most explicitly in his intriguing book, Social Evolution (Childe, 1951), he has laid down the foundations of a ‘socio-archaeology’.

Excavation of the basilica of the Roman town of Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum) has produced evidence for two phases of pre-Roman occupation. The earlier, probably dating to the mid-first century BC, consisted of roundhouses and pits. Around 20 BC a rectilinear steet pattern, with building plots at right angles to the streets and rectangular buildings, was laid out; later a palisaded enclosure was built. Imports included amphorae and fine pottery; Central Gaulish wares suggest an early trade connection to the south. There is some evidence of disuse before the Roman streets were laid out on a different alignment in mid first century AD.

The Late Neolithic pottery of the Isle of Man falls into two types: Ronaldsway and Grooved Ware. This paper focuses on the former style which is markedly different from other contemporaneous pottery styles in use in Britain and Ireland. The discussion draws upon the biographical history of Ronaldsway vessels from the choice of raw materials to the deposition of the finished pots. At each stage in this biographical history the approach adopted by Manx potters and pottery users is compared with that employed in surrounding parts of the British Isles.

The Middle Palaeolithic site of Karabi Tamchin is presented here for the first time. Karabi Tamchin is a collapsed rock-shelter in Eastern Crimea (Ukraine), and is the only known, stratified Palaeolithic site in the highland regions of the First Crimean mountain range. Preliminary results of three excavation seasons indicate that the site differs fundamentally from Middle Palaeolithic sites excavated at lower altitudes, in terms of both lithic and faunal exploitation. The site, therefore, provides essential information regarding regional land-use patterns in Crimea. Karabi Tamchin was probably repeatedly occupied by relatively small, mobile groups during short-term, possibly seasonal hunting forays into upland regions.

For well over a decade archaeological theory has been discussed in terms of a number of problematic yet familiar dichotomies. Prominent examples would include the distinction between processualist (scientific) and postprocessualist (post-modernist) thinking, and its concomitant distinctions of biology versus culture, Positivism versus Relativism, and Realism versus Idealism. This paper outlines a novel framework (Cultural Virus Theory) which crosscuts these familiar dichotomies, while also suggesting new explanatory possibilities. Recent convergent trends in archaeological theory are summarised. Some of the basic principles of the theory are defined. It is argued that ideas, rituals, and artefact production systems are culturally reproduced life-forms (‘viral phenomena’ or ‘living artefacts’); that people are therefore biocultural ecosystems of more than one lifeform (‘personal ecosystems’); and that the internal constituent life-forms of personal ecosystems may be found in both symbiotic, and parasitic or predatory relationships, just as are those of larger ecosystems. Human actions, therefore, cannot be approached as if they constitute the behaviour of a single united organism; as ecosystems, people are often subject to internal adaptive conflict and are, in short, ‘biocultural schizophrenics’. Lastly, the anatomy of the synthesis is briefly discussed with reference to first post-processual, and then processual approaches to the familiar ‘megalith icon’ of monuments and their associated rituals — termed ‘megalithic religions’ for convenience — in Neolithic north-west Europe.

Finds of heated stone from prehistoric sites in England were for many years interpreted as ‘potboilers’, a view recommended for the south-east of the country in particular by the finding of pots – invariably of later Bronze Age date – filled with them. When exposed to stress, stone behaves in a predictable way. A comparison of stones from apparently in situ archaeological potboilings with those produced during experimental potboilings supports the evidence of earlier work on pottery (Woods 1984) that they were nothing of the sort, the wider contextual associations of the archaeological finds suggesting instead that they comprise votive deposits. At the end of their functional life, heated stones acquired a symbolic charge, and were placed in pots in funerary contexts. This realisation both supports and qualifies Brück's recent post-modern interpretation of deposits of heated stones from later Bronze Age sites in southern England, reminding us on the one hand of the need to understand our data in terms its of its own nature – in this case geological and sedimentological – as well as its wider archaeological context, and on the other of the importance of non-traditional approaches to these. A number of other possible explanations for heated stones found in Bronze Age pots are reviewed and – for the time being – discarded.

The present writer has had recently the opportunity to carry out a revision of the deer of the Cromer Forest Bed series of East Anglia. The entire work is to be published in the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). The stratigraphical conclusions will be summarized here.

The occurrence of relatively archaic species together with more modern species in the Forest Bed fauna has puzzled many palaeontologists. Whereas the older authors concluded that it was wholly Pliocene (Reid, 1890, with bibliography) or partially or totally derived (Dubois, 1905), more recently a tendency has become prevalent to attribute the whole fauna to the early Pleistocene, and to explain the more archaic species as relics (Osborn, 1922; Zeuner, 1945). It may be shown that all these interpretations are untenable.

A Pliocene age is ruled out by the presence of species which immigrated into Europe after the close of the Villafranchian. On the other hand, the older representatives, once attributed to the Pliocene but actually of Upper Villafranchian age, do not constitute isolated relics: an entire faunal assemblage characteristic of that epoch is present. Moreover, primitive species occur in the Forest Bed fauna together with their more advanced descendants, and the fauna is richer in species than in any other locality.

The authors of these notes acknowledge the ready co-operation of the numerous excavators who have contributed information concerning their work carried out during the present year.

It is, with a few exceptions, only in very recent years and with works such as that by Guilaine and his colleagues on the Abri Jean-Cros (Guilaine et al. 1979) that the site locational and ecological approaches have made their appearance in the French archaeological literature. Studies of this type are still not common, despite the richness of certain areas of France in prehistoric settlement evidence and the existence of a body of geomorphological research which often makes this type of approach particularly attractive. The present article attempts to use both geomorphological and settlement evidence for a consideration of the relationship between changes in the landscape and patterns of site distribution in the Marais poitevin area of western France during the period 2800–600 bc.

The basis for the study is provided by locational information on a series of Late Neolithic fortified settlement sites which has been discovered in this part of France in recent years. These impressive sites have a striking distribution pattern which invites interpretation in terms of their landscape setting. Geomorphological and archaeological evidence makes it possible to reconstruct at least in outline the development of this landscape during the later prehistoric period, and to suggest what it may have been like at the time the sites were occupied and how it may have affected their foundation and their abandonment. The evidence relating to landscape development is crucial to our understanding of the prehistoric sites and no apology is made for considering it in some detail below. Bronze Age as well as Neolithic sites have been included in the final analysis. This allows the Late Neolithic fortified settlements to be viewed in a broader context and related to changes in site distribution patterns over a period of approximately two thousand years.

A number of distinctive physiographic regions fall wholely or partly within the county of Lincolnshire: the limestone and chalk uplands of the Lincoln Edge and the Wolds, the valleys of the Trent, Ancholme and Witham, and the low lying areas of the Isle of Axholme, the Fens and the Marsh (fig. 1). The scatter of finds of Later Bronze Age metalwork shows considerable local variation (fig. 2).

These differences in distribution can be analysed statistically using the Chi Squared test (Gregory, 1963, 151–66). A comparison is made between the observed distribution of objects (o), and the pattern expected if the distribution was the product of random factors alone (e). A null hypothesis is tested by applying the formula:

.

The probability that the null hypothesis is true can then be shown graphically (Lindley and Miller, 1953). A high reading (e.g., more than 95 per cent) would indicate that the observed distribution was consonant with a random scatter, while a low reading (e.g. less than 5 per cent) would suggest that some factor other than chance governed the distribution.

In the light of discussions surrounding the social changes attributed to the arrival of the Corded Ware culture in central Europe, here we investigate the economic strategies of one of the cultural complexes of the immediately preceding Late Neolithic. The Cham culture of southern Bavaria is characterised by a variety of economic choices but problems remain in synthesising and combining archaeozoological and archaeobotanical evidence. Using lipid residue analysis from Cham culture pottery excavated at the unenclosed settlement of Riedling, Lower Bavaria, we succeed in identifying a dairying economy at this time. Compound-specific lipid radiocarbon dates are then combined with other samples to provide a formal estimate for the duration of activity at Riedling and the first Bayesian chronological model for the Cham culture as a whole. Although data are currently not fine-grained enough to distinguish between competing models for site permanence, we suggest that the Cham culture pattern fits into a wider central European trend of greater mobility and economic flexibility in the pre-Corded Ware horizon, concluding that key economic strategies previously associated with ‘steppe invasions’ were already present in the preceding centuries. Finally, the demonstrated use of cups for milk-based products, as opposed to alcoholic drinks as previously suggested, leads us to propose possible alternative uses and users for these items.

While examining the pottery from Little Woodbury in 1939–40, Professor Hawkes observed that the critical pottery from the lower filling of the Ditch ‘DA’ was so sparse as to be useless for comparative purposes. On his suggestion, the Council of the Prehistoric Society decided that a substantial section of the Ditch should be cleared for the purpose of obtaining additional material from the primary filling, and in the spring of 1947 it became possible to put this project into effect. The work was superintended by Mr J. W. Brailsford and Professor Stuart Piggott and Mrs C. M. Piggott, with the assistance of Mrs M. F. Brailsford and members of the Archaeological Society of Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury. The Prehistoric Society is indebted to the landowner, Mr F. H. T. Jervoise, F.S.A., for permission to carry out the excavation, and to his tenant, Mr Tilley, for the interest and cooperation which he showed throughout.

Two ten-foot lengths of the Ditch ‘DA’ were cleared, in the northern sector, Pl. XXIV lower (inset). Significant finds of pottery and other objects were recovered from all levels of the filling, though it was confirmed that layers ‘A’ to ‘C’ were very poor in archaeological material. The pottery is included with that from the pre-war excavation in the Pottery Report, and the small finds are described in the general report on small finds (Part V).

Reports on the animal bones by Dr F. C. Fraser, of the Dept. of Zoology, British Museum (Natural History), and on the non-marine mollusca by Mr A. E. Ellis of Epsom College are appended to this note.

The skeleton described below was discovered recently in Southery Fen, Norfolk, by men employed in widening and deepening a drainage ditch. It was unfortunately removed before it could be seen in situ, but I was able by an examination of the ground not only to determine the exact level of the skeleton, but also to recover the lady's bronze pin or awl. She had lain on top of a layer of compressed sedges 2ins.-3ins. thick, which rested directly on undisturbed clay, and she was covered by 1ft. 9ins. of peat. The place where she was found was 28 yards away from one of the second type of Major Fowler's extinct waterways (“Old Run,” Plate XXXII.). There was no evidence of burial, and we conjecture that she had been drowned, carried down by this river, dropped among the sedges bordering it when the flood subsided, and subsequently covered by the growth of peat.

According to the workmen's account she was lying face downwards with one arm across her face and the other arm extended. The bracelet of jet beads (Plate XXXIII., a) is said to have been round the wrist of the extended arm; pin or awl (Plate XXXIII., b) must have been worn near the waist.

Excavations on behalf of the Research Committee for the Archæological Excavation of Derbyshire Caves (British Association and Royal Anthropological Institute) were commenced by the writer in the Pin Hole Cave, Creswell Crags, in September, 1924, at a point 23 feet from the entrance, where the superficial examination of the upper beds by the Rev. Magins Mello had terminated in 1873. The work has steadily progressed, and has now reached 80 feet beyond the datum point, and is proceeding in the large inner chamber which has been revealed by the removal of the deposits which, over half its area, had accumulated to the level of the roof. The section embraces an upper cave-earth from 6 to 7 feet in thickness, mostly sealed beneath stalagmite, or breccia, and containing artifacts ranging in time from Upper Mousterian at its base to Magdalenian at the top. The lower cave-earth, 10 to 11 feet in thickness, contains three lower Palæolithic cultural zones, the lowest of which is 13 feet beneath the floor of the cave.