During the great drought in 1929 there came to light at Gouthwaite Reservoir in Nidderdale three sites of Upper Palaeolithic industry. In that summer the level of the water became so low that the reservoir was less than half full, thus affording an opportunity for field work. The Pleistocene deposit exposed consists of a stiff yellow clay covered with sand and gravel along the banks of the reservoir, washed out by the action of the water in rough weather, from the lateral moraines. This clay is exposed in many places when the water has fallen 4 ft. below ordinary level, and it is on this horizon that Upper Palaeolithic man apparently lived. A complete geological section across the valley in this part does not exist, but sections of trial holes were made when the construction of the dam at Gouthwaite was being undertaken and for the copies of these sections I am indebted to Mr. E. Tillotson of Leeds University. The dam is actually built at the upper end of the last, and best preserved, terminal moraine in the valley. From the section it appears that the yellow clay stretches right across the valley, forming the uppermost stratum of the terminal moraine. This being so, and if this was the horizon on which the inhabitants lived, then the terminal moraine must have been cut through by the river action, otherwise the horizon on which the Upper Palaeolithic implements are found would have been under water and not habitable.

In the following study, the region dealt with is bounded on the north by the Thames, and on the west by the Avebury and Stonehenge areas. It consists therefore of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Berkshire, Surrey, Sussex and Kent, and a small portion of Dorset. The area contains about five thousand barrows, or ancient burial-mounds, about seven-eighths of which I have seen; it is believed therefore that the following details are fairly complete.

The pygmy and small implements shown to-night from Cornwall were found on the landward slope of Trevose Head, near Padstow, on the north coast of the county. The sea end of this promontory rises to some 200 feet, and thence the ground inclines rapidly back to the mainland, the connecting neck being not more than half a mile wide. At the narrowest part the rain-water, constantly filtering through the adjacent peat, wastes down the hard bedrock of slate, comes out as a small spring, which, in the course of ages, has cut a channel of a hundred yards in length to the cliff edge. At the springhead stands a cairn of a massive block of white quartz, obviously of great age, but whether coeval with the prehistoric settlpment it would be impossible to say. This cairn or beacon would be seen from a long way over the adjacent bay, and might have served to guide seafarers of any age to the fresh-water supply. Here, amongst the faint traces of trenching and hut circles, the small implements, and chips made in their manufacture, all of snow-white patina, were lying about in great profusion.

In 1937, in a series in honour of Sir John Myres, Professor Childe wrote an essay entitled ‘Neolithic Black Ware in Greece and on the Danube’. Childe made two major points. He clarified his position that the major direction of diffusion in the spread of the village-farming community was from south-western Asia towards Europe. Secondly, he considered the then available south-west Asiatic evidence—mainly ceramic—which seemed antecedent to similar elements in Greece and subsequently on the Danube.

In this essay in Professor Childe's honour, I propose to bring his second consideration up to date, informally, and with main emphasis on the south-west Asiatic end. Weinberg has recently covered the ground from the Greek point of view with much greater perception than I could do.

It is a bit unfortunate, in relation to Childe's first point, that this essay cannot be postponed for a year or two. During the 1954–5 field season of the Iraq-Jarmo project, we secured a series of fifty-two radioactive carbon samples. Included are specimens from the Halaf levels of Arpachiyah and Tell Halaf itself and from the basal levels of Hassuna, Mersin, and Byblos, as well as further samples from Jarmo and from several of our test excavations. Professor Zeuner has samples in hand from early Jericho, Dr Milojčić has some from Otzaki-Magula, and there may well be other pertinent samples of which I am unaware. It does seem that presently, within the range of reliability of the radioactive carbon dating process, we shall know where we stand chronologically in somewhat more precise terms. Present indications are that the whole dating system, prehistoric, as well as early historic, customarily given for south-western Asia will be depressed. In the chronological study cited, Weinberg finds this tendency will make the equations with Greece all the more reasonable.

Childe's essay implies that the early dark-faced burnished ceramic of south-western Asia must be a manifestation of a discrete assemblage, but at the time he wrote, it was impossible to speak of anything but pottery. In his Grundzüge … Kleinasiens in 1945, Kurt Bittel could do little more than suggest the antecedent rôle of the early Syro-Cilician dark-faced burnished ware to the general burnished sequence of Anatolia. Veronica Seton Williams gave further definition to the pottery and its distribution, as against Christian's rather amorphous ‘Saktschegözü- Stufe’, in her brief catalogue and map of the occurrences of the burnished ware. In 1952, my wife and I prepared a study in which we attempted to delineate what seemed to us to be the separate and distinct ‘essential’ assemblages of the earliest village range in south-western Asia.

Although a number of specimens of Combe-Capelle type are recorded for the Gipping Valley above Ipswich few have so far been recognised in Norfolk. Fig. 1 shows the various aspects of a beautiful specimen found by Mr J. H. Capon in a shallow working for gravel on Mousehold Heath, on the northern border of Norwich. Dr. J. D. Solomon examined the section and reports:— ‘The deposit in which Mr Capon found the implement is a portion of the upper gravel of Mousehold Heath, which contains outwash from the Chalky Boulder Clay and is clearly of Great Eastern date. But the actual portion, in which the implement was found, has clearly been disturbed and re-arranged by solifluxion, perhaps of Little Eastern date. The implement is therefore, not to be considered as in situ in the main mass of the gravel.’

It is of fine quality flint. The flatter face (fig. 1 c) is white and porcellanous, highly lustred, and showing two small patches of cortex. The flaking is flat in the extreme, only two of the scars showing resolved flaking. The upper face (fig. 1A) shows grey flint with distinct bluish patina, particularly towards the edges, fine white lines meandering over the whole surface, giving a typical criss-cross effect; some of the flaking is heavily resolved whilst the edges show a rather nibbling re-touch.

The most recent views on the origin of the Windmill Hill culture have been set out by Mr Stuart Piggott in the last Proceedings of this Society. The point he stresses significantly is that the origin of the Windmill Hill, or Neolithic A culture cannot any longer be regarded as a single one; already in the earlier, A1 phase, there are at least two distinct elements present, which when combined and influenced by the Peterborough culture produced the later A2 phase. He is willing tentatively to accept the possibility of the close relationship that I suggested last year between the A1 element represented by the plain, baggy pots of the lowest levels at the type station, Hembury, and elsewhere, and the néolithique ancien, or Cortaillod culture, of the Swiss Lakes. The second element is represented by carinated bowls of his form D and G with lip diameter greater than that of the shoulder, but apparently by nothing else. If it is agreed to accept a distinct origin for the simple ‘baggy’ A1 pottery, which carries with it the associated interrupted ditch camps and antler combs, the D–G bowls are clearly left alone. Piggott demonstrates how these bowls can be derived by an admirable typological sequence directly from the tulip-beaker of the well-known Michelsberg culture centred on Switzerland and the Rhine. The tulip-beaker grows more sharply shouldered and shallower, and, therefore, more nearly conforming to the D–G bowls as one passes down the Rhine from south to north. But for this typological and geographical series Piggott claims absolutely no chronological significance. Surely such a denial must make the whole story meaningless ? Either the low carinated form developed from the tall tulip-beaker as the culture extended northwards and is therefore appreciably later in beginning than the tall form, although this persisted along side it, or else it did not, and the two forms need have no connection with one another–a reductio ad absurdum.

When, in 1948, Childe reviewed in these Proceedings the later phases of the European Bronze Age he expounded a series of new views on the causation and chronology of episodes apprehended in archaeology by the spread of cremation urn cemeteries, and by advances in bronze technology. He also put forward proposals for changes in terminology, for he was well aware of the haphazard and casual way in which archaeological nomenclature had come about. Childe's interpretation of the origins of the urnfield cremation rite was valuable as a stimulus to a reassessment of the problem, but research in the years that have followed has produced so much new information that a very different story can now be told. Nor has the terminological reform seen much progress. The grounds on which Childe has been opposed as regards the nomenclature of subdivisions of the later Bronze Age have carried weight because it has been generally agreed that at least for the zone of the North Alpine foreland, a genuine cultural break should be recognized in and after the phase that Reinecke originally defined and nominated: Bronze D. This phase is the ‘End Bronze Age’ of many scholars, and what comes after is either ‘Hallstatt’ or ‘Urnfield’, appropriately subdivided and so Childe's Bronze phases E and F have not been accepted.

The purpose of this paper is to present an adequate record of the Iron Age pottery found in 1922–23 at a site on the left bank of the river Wey, at a point east of Wisley Church, of which only a small, and not fully representative selection has yet been published. The pieces hitherto recorded were selected from material presented to the British Museum, but a larger quantity has been kindly made available by Dr Eric Gardner, F.S.A., and is here published, together with pottery from the same site, now in Weybridge Museum. Account has also been taken of the sherds in the British Museum.

The pottery is stated to have been found in a series of pits, among which were some containing neolithic B rim sherds proving earlier occupation of the site, but no plans or sections or other adequate information about the site was published, though the report states that ‘four large kilns were uncovered and one small one, made expressly for firing the largest urn.’ It is also recorded that ‘a few loom-weights were found and wattle-and-daub was abundant.’

Not only is Grimes' Graves an essentially East Anglian site, but it is also one of the most interesting, and most perplexing, prehistoric sites of Britain, presenting many controversial problems which only persistent research and careful observation will solve.

Recent work upon the site has marked a distinct advance in this direction, notably by the fortunate discovery in 1920 of Floor 85 with its definite stratification, and evidences of successive occupation during at least five widely separated intervals of time. With Dr. R. V. Favell as a co-worker, excavations were resumed upon this floor in August, 1921, and continued for six days. An additional 40 square yards was carefully and systematically explored down to the level of the boulder clay, resulting in the recovery of a further series of important flint implements and examples of engraving. Owing to the favourable nature of the site with its stratified chipping and occupation levels, each sealed and separated by sterile layers of humus, and closely compacted chalk debris, it has thrown important light upon some of the problems of the Grimes' Graves industry, and should enable not only certain definite conclusions to be arrived at, but materially assist in the ultimate classification of the various cultural forms of the implements from the Graves generally.

In remote times bleak and exposed sites in the east of the county of Durham were occupied by folk who made microlithic implements. On the top of Sheddon's Hill, near the Black Fell, Gateshead, these relics were fairly abundant among hundreds of pieces of flint collected; and examples have been found elsewhere in the district and on the coast.

Many of the Belgian Tardenois types are represented among these finds, the small trapezoid which has not yet been excavated on Sheddon's Hill was found on a site near by and a small round scraper on a coast site. The finding of these remains on Sheddon's Hill adds something to our information about the distribution of the Tardenois folk in Britain who probably as Capt. Buckley has suggested spread westwards from the Continent at a time when the North Sea did not exist.

Landscape studies offer the archaeologist a way to move towards the holistic integration of disparate aspects of research, such as excavation, survey, and specialist analysis. Because landscape perception is socially constructed, like other forms of material culture, it is possible to approach social behaviour in a way which previously was only argued for portable artefacts. Memory studies have allowed historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists to link observable human behaviour with long-term human thought. Memory is also being used as a way of linking the otherwise invisible mind with the material by-products of society, such as monumental architecture. This paper will investigate how two contemporaneous settlements of Late Iron Age peoples, situated on the northern shores of Lake Ullswater, in the Lake District, Cumbria, manipulated their material landscapes as part of the process of transmitting cultural memories. Further, this information will be used in order to find a way of approaching the similarities of their cultural practices with each other and with the wider Iron Age community of Britain.