The discovery to which this paper refers was made by a series of very fortunate circumstances. A resident in Ivry Street, in the northern portion of Ipswich, was having an inspection pit sunk for his motor car, and during the excavation his gardener, who is familiar with humanly-worked flints, found a number of long flakes at a depth of about three feet from the surface of the ground. These he fortunately preserved and gave to my workman Baxter; who brought them to me.

I at once paid a visit to the site and, owing to the kindness of Mr. Makepeace, the occupant of the house in Ivry Street, was enabled to conduct a series of excavations and to find the various specimens which it is my purpose to describe.

This paper is a study of the 58 recorded antler maceheads of the so-called ‘crown’ type, their technology, distribution, dating, and possible origins and relationships. An illustrated catalogue is appended.

This is a subject to which scarcely any detailed attention has hitherto been paid. Parker Brewis pronounced the accepted theory when he said that the rapier ‘evolved by lengthening the dagger little by little, keeping step with the ever-growing command of metal and ability to make longer castings’. This general explanation has been accepted, since it conforms with the canon of technical evolution and is supported by the available evidence of associations. It is not, however, sufficient to explain the form taken by British rapiers, since comparison of the daggers of the Wessex and Food-vessel cultures with the daggers and dirks of the early part of the Middle Bronze Age reveals so great a difference between them that the latter cannot be considered simply to have evolved from the former. The Early Bronze Age daggers are much smaller and broader, they have three or more rivets, and ornamental hilts with separate pommels. Middle Bronze Age dirks are longer, stronger and almost invariably have two rivets in a simple hilt. Also, the distribution of weapons in the two periods differs: in the Early Bronze Age the chief concentration is in Wessex, but this area has produced hardly any rapiers.

Surveys and excavations in 1980–1 confirmed Peak Camp as a Neolithic enclosure on a flat promontory of the Cotswold escarpment overlooking the Severn Valley just 1 km south of Crickley Hill. Although heavily eroded by quarrying the site can be reconstructed as having two concentric arcs of boundary earthworks forming an oval plan which was probably open to the north where a steep natural slope defined the edge of the site. A section through the outer boundary showed four main phases of ditch construction, at least one causewayed. An extensive series of radiocarbon dates shows construction began in the late 37th century cal bc and probably continued through successive remodellings into the 33rd century cal bc or beyond. An internal ditch or elongated pit situated in the area between the inner and outer boundary earthworks had a similar history. Where sampled, the ditch and internal feature were rich in material culture, including a substantial assemblage of plain bowl pottery; flint implements and working waste; animal remains dominated by cattle but including also the remains of a cat; human foot bones; slight traces of cereal production; a fragment of a Group VI axe; part of a sandstone disc; and a highly unusual shale arc pendant of continental type. It is suggested that the ditch fills represent selectively redeposited midden material from within the site that started to accumulate in the late 5th or early 4th millennium cal bc. The construction and use of Peak Camp is contemporary with activity on Crickley Hill, and the two sites probably formed components of a single complex. Its use was also contemporary with the deposition of burials at local long barrows in the Cotswold-Severn tradition which are linked by common ceramic traditions and the selective deposition of human body parts.

Close ny chollagh lies on the southern coast of the Isle of Man (fig. 1), about one mile south-west of Castletown, and is one of the group of Manx fortified coastal sites. It is not on a promontory, having land adjacent to it on two of its four sides, but the deep gully to the south combines with an artificial ditch along the rest of the landward side to make it a position of some strength.

When it was chosen for excavation in 1953 it was thought that the Manx promontory forts belonged to the Viking Age, and Close ny chollagh did indeed have a mediaeval level in which the principal building was a long-house of Scandinavian type. There was also, however, an Iron Age level, separated by a sterile layer from the later one, clearly demonstrating for the first time an Iron Age origin for one of the Manx promontory forts. It is to this Iron Age phase in the history of the fort that the present report is devoted.

Investigations into the ceramic typology of the southern Italian neolithic have helped little in the understanding of neolithic origins there. In this paper the evidence of the radiocarbon chronology is used to demonstrate the antiquity of the southern Italian neolithic. There are now sufficient sixth millennium bc dates to suggest that the appearance there of a neolithic with mixed impressed and red-painted wares was contemporary with the earliest neolithic of both Greece and the West Mediterranean, while the penetration of those traits further north into Italy seems to have been delayed.

‘There thus appears to be good reason at least to believe that the Larnian is best known in its para-Neolithic tradition associated with the coastal phenomena of the Raised Beaches and their middens, and perhaps even to question the Mesolithic status of the whole industry’ (Herity, 1970).

In the first of his three chapters forming Aspects of Prehistory (1970), Grahame Clark discussed one important aspect of prehistoric archaeology about which he has not hitherto written much, namely the historical development of that branch of historical science which, by his own researches in the last forty-five years, he has done so much to further. This chapter, the first of three lectures he delivered at Berkeley in the spring of 1970, is entitled ‘The Relevance of World Prehistory’, and is mainly concerned with listing the story of the discovery of archaeological facts. The interpretation of archaeological facts is of equal importance and in this paper I am concerned briefly with some aspects of the history of archaeological theory and interpretation, and more particularly with the changing models of thought used by prehistorians.

Here, we need not go further back than the three-age technological model of C. J. Thomsen. Before that we note the mythological models of the medieval and later antiquaries who floated Trojans and Phoenicians and the sons of Noah across their invented prehistory, and the literary and theological models of the later antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who, eschewing invention, sought prehistorical information in the Bible and in Classical writers, and made over our prehistoric monuments to the Druids, and our gravels to an Universal Deluge.

This paper discusses the rock carvings at Kasen Lövåsen, a site which now lies 5 km inland but, during the Bronze Age, looked out over a sea in process of withdrawal by the isostatic rise of the land. The site carries eight panels of carvings that have been the subject of several surveys and descriptions. Recent work has clarified the nature of some of these and revealed more. Carvings include discs, numerous boats, human figures (some explicitly male), including helmeted individuals, spear and swordsmen and paddle or torchbearers, duck figures, boots, dog-like creatures, and horse-riders. Composition and siting are discussed in relation to the quality and preservation of carving, dating, and to aspects of topography, communication routes, and sea level recession. The reasons and mechanisms behind transformations in the imagery are explored in terms of changing social symbolism and ideology in response to a rapidly changing land- and seascape.

Correct identification of remains of cultivated plants is prerequisite to a reasonable concept of the early history of these plants and of agriculture in general. Sooner or later faulty or incomplete identification may lead to wrong conclusions and thus, on the one hand, obscure connections between places and peoples which might otherwise be indicated by contemporary cultivated plants, or on the other, suggest interrelations which did not exist.

Perhaps of all countries in the world Egypt is the one which has yielded the most material for the study of ancient plant husbandry, and yet the introduction of the plants into that country and the species grown is not yet fully elucidated.

Until quite recently Emmer (Triticum dicoccum Schübl.) was the only species of wheat reported in deposits of prehistoric and dynastic Egypt up to the Ptolemaean period. Then Eincorn (Triticum monococcum L.) was added to the list, in that its presence in the Late Neolithic find at el Omari near Helouan, and in the third dynasty tomb of Pharaoh Zoser at Saqqara was claimed by various authors. These identifications were disputed on the basis of reasonable doubt, but no documentation has hitherto been offered to prove the claim or the validity of the protest.

The authors of these notes have to acknowledge the ready co-operation of the numerous excavators who have kindly contributed information concerning their work. The foregoing notes are designed to put members of the Prehistoric Society in possession of the main results of the summer's work, most of which will not be published in full for several months. Once again we would draw attention to the fact that notes on the publications of the year will be published in the Archaeological Journal by Mr and Mrs Hawkes.

The practice of Archery in the Bronze Age and early Iron Age as it survives to us in the archaeological record is difficult of interpretation owing to the low survival value of most archery equipment—the one relic of fairly high survival value being the arrow-head, of flint, bronze or iron. This paper deals with a topic little touched upon previously, and, setting aside the tradition of stone arrow-head manufacture (which persisted well into the Bronze Age in various parts of Europe) essays a treatment of the evidence for the manufacture and use of metal arrow-heads. These will be divided into three types, tanged, socketed and spurred—a threefold division which will appear to be significant not only from the purely typological point of view, but also in the more general context of prehistory.

A catalogue of all finds known to the writer in 1967 will be found at the end of the paper. While this catalogue makes no claim to be complete, it is representative enough to serve as a firm basis, and although further research may bring more examples to light, it will probably not reveal any major new concentrations of metal arrow-heads within Europe (at any rate within the framework of existing knowledge).

A map made by F. N Hayward showing the location of the Lower Palaeolithic site of Baker's Hole, found in the Hayward Archive stored by the British Museum at Franks House, shows that the site was not at the location suggested by modern authors. The new location, near some remnant Pleistocene deposits, opens the possibility of using modern techniques to date the archaeological material recovered from the site in 1909.

The three palaeoliths figured below have been found in the last five years in the river gravels near Oxford and are now in the Ashmolean Museum. The authorities of the Museum have entrusted them to me for figuring and record and I have taken the opportunity to discuss their significance in relation to some fundamental problems of Pleistocene correlation. Any value this discussion may have is largely due to the prolonged co-operation of Dr K. P. Oakley, both in the field and by correspondence, though he is in no way to be held responsible for any errors or shortcomings. I am also indebted to Prof. W. B. R. King and Mr D. F. W. Baden-Powell for criticisms.

This paper is devoted to a study of the horned-cairns of the North-east of Ireland and their associated artifacts. The term ‘horned-cairn’ is used to describe those segmented gallery-graves set in a long cairn and entered from a semi-circular forecourt delimited by an orthostatic facade. It is realized that this term is not altogether satisfactory, but it has the virtue of brevity and its usage is now well established. Some contemporary Irish prehistorians, notably Professor Ruaidhrí de Valéra, have suggested the term ‘court-cairn’ for all the manifestations in Ireland of the segmented gallery-grave having elaborate structural forecourts. This would include cairns in the West of Ireland with completely enclosed courts (described as court-cairns in this paper) as well as horned-cairns proper. The confusion which might arise from the use of such terms as ‘full court-cairn’, ‘half court-cairn’, ‘forecourt-cairn’ and the like have decided the present writer to retain in this paper the simple terms ‘horned-cairn’ and ‘court-cairn’.

This study is divided into two main sections. The first is descriptive, being concerned with horned-cairns and associated artifacts and the second attempts to place the Carlingford Culture as a whole in its context in prehistory. In view of the paucity of detailed information about court-cairns, particularly the almost complete lack of excavation, no detailed study is made of these. At the time of going to press it is understood that a paper by Professor de Valéra on the court-cairns of the west is about to be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy.

Although a large number of bronze ‘razors’ have been found in these islands, the literature concerning them is very scattered, and there has been no attempt to synthesize the information concerning them. There are frequent references to the so-called ‘plantain’ (our Class I) form or to the ‘maple-leaf’ (Class II) examples with their suggested connection with Siculan razors, but there has been no detailed analysis of their chronological and cultural positions in the British Late Bronze Age. This paper attempts such a classification of the razors on a typological and cultural basis so that they can be fitted with greater accuracy intq their place in Late Bronze chronology.

‘The huts are now roofless, the fires of the hearths quenched for ever, the fortifications levelled; yet these ruins have out-lasted the erections of more civilized times, and they still remain to tell us something of the busy population who hunted, tended flocks, tilled the ground, and quarrelled and fought, at a very distant period (in the valley of the Breamish)’. George Tate (1863, 302)

This paper describes the results of the South East Cheviots Project undertaken by the former Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME; now part of English Heritage) during the 1980s. An area of 66 square kilometres was analytically recorded, ranging from the Breamish Valley in the north to Alnham in the south and from Brandon in the east to Schill Moor in the west. The project recorded with metrical accuracy all forms of cultivation remains, field systems, and settlements of all periods (only the prehistoric evidence will be reviewed in this paper). This landscape approach has led to a greater understanding of settlement histories in these remarkably well-preserved uplands. Recent excavations undertaken by the Northumberland Archaeological Group (NAG) and Durham University, under the auspices of the Northumberland National Park Authority (NNPA), have helped to clarify and contextualise further aspects of the chronology of settlement and landscape change recorded by the SECP.

This paper presents the results of an excavation at North Fen, Sutton Gault, Cambridgeshire, which revealed evidence of Early Neolithic occupation comprising some 48 pits together with two in situ artefact scatters preserved within buried soil horizons. Largely as a result of the spatial separation between scatters and pit sites/clusters, it has been possible to identify a series of ‘sites’, which appear to represent temporally discrete episodes of activity ranging from task-specific ‘visits’ to relatively long-lived occupation. Through analysis of pottery and flint assemblages an attempt is made to characterise each individual site in terms of the types of activities undertaken there and to consider their scale and duration. Set within a landscape that has seen extensive archaeological investigation over the past 30 years the excavation also provides an excellent opportunity to explore how these sites relate to activity in the wider locale and to what extent it is possible to characterise Early Neolithic occupation at a landscape scale.