The first appearance of iron in Europe north of the Alps involves more than one story, and much, often ambiguous, evidence. It will be necessary to draw on Greece and Italy more than once in due course, but attention in the present state of enquiry should first be given to the region of the lower Danube, and territory stretching south along the Black Sea to the Bosphorus. This is not because of any abstract deductions that Thrace should form a necessary spring-board from Asia Minor into the depths of Europe, but because material is now coming to light that calls for special consideration on its own merits. A major step forward has resulted from excavations at stratified sites in the Dobrogea, in particular at Babadag (Morintz 1964), and at Cernatu (Székely 1966), and from the latter especially there is substantial evidence for iron smelting as well as forged products: iron strips as ready metal, but also shaft-hole and lugged axes, and blades for sickles, and other heavy duty tools. The chronological position of this iron industry remains open to discussion, and is bound up with evaluations of the pottery sequence especially as worked out at Babadag. The iron industry occurred in a level with pottery of the Middle Babadag style at both sites mentioned. Middle Babadag pottery continues shapes and motifs of the Early style, but decoration is executed with twisted and impressed cord, apparently a regional development.

The occurrence of fires in many types of woodland and forested environments would have benefited human populations in several different ways. In addition to greatly increasing the mobility of the human groups, the occurrence of fire in many types of forest would have led to substantial improvements in the economic potential of the environment. Improvements in both the quantity and nutritional quality of the food supplies available to herbivorous animals would have increased not only the total carrying capacity of the environment for these species, but also the relative growth-rates and reproductive rate of the animals. In certain cases it is likely that burning would have increased the overall ‘productivity’ of ungulate populations by a factor of × 10. Similar improvements may have been achieved in the yields of certain vegetable food resources. The potential impact of these environmental changes on the population numbers and settlement patterns of human communities is discussed, and it is suggested that the adoption of systematic policies of forest burning by hunting and gathering populations may have led in certain situations to the emergence of more complex patterns of man-animal relationships which were closely similar to those of traditional ‘herding’ or ‘pastoralist’ economies.

Following an outline of some aspects of continental Early Celtic art in which the importance of Mediterranean plant-derived motifs and compass construction work is emphasised, the authors consider some significant aspects of the development of the various sword sub-styles. An analysis of selected insular pieces points out the differences from, rather than the seeming similarities to continental Celtic art. It is argued that the earliest of such pieces cannot antedate the developed third century sword style(s) though absolute chronology is impossible to achieve as yet. A final section indicates that the later insular styles see a unique re-emergence of the reliance on compass based designs.

It is now some twenty years since Clark wrote his paper ‘A Microlithic Industry from the Cambridgeshire Fenland and other industries of Sauveterrian affinities from Britain’ (Clark 1955), and almost as long since he considered the cultural and chronological implications of flint industries with Trapezes—bitruncated blades—in North Western Europe (Clark 1958). Since then some 150 to 200 radiocarbon determinations have become available for the Mesolithic of this area—most particularly from Denmark, the Netherlands and Britain, with rather fewer from France. It is, quite deliberately, not the intention of this paper to attempt a detailed consideration, or presentation of all these new dates—not even for Britain where some sixty recent determinations and their associations will be the subject of a separate larger paper (Switsur and Jacobi, in preparation). More worrying, however, than this mass of new datings is a proliferation of new and mainly regional terms for stone industries, which, while believed to show sufficient diversity to demand such an extended nomenclature, are nevertheless obviously closely linked at the techno-complex level. It is then at this techno-complex level at which it is intended to work, and it is towards a simplified, or at least manageable, terminology that it is proposed to aim. The Key to the article will remain Britain in relation to the European mainland.

In the history of west Mediterranean contacts and communications, obsidian has a special place, being the first traded commodity documented in the archaeological record. The commercial contacts which it reveals precede those of the Mycenaeans by more than three millennia. The general outlines of this trade and the principal sources exploited have previously been documented by trace element analysis undertaken by optical emission spectrography. The present article presents the data obtained by a different trace element approach—neutron activation analysis—and sets out to compare and evaluate the results obtained by the two methods. One important new archaeological outcome is the significance of the Sardinian sources, and the extent to which southern France participated in the contacts of the time. Regional and temporal trends now becoming apparent have a wide significance for Mediterranean prehistory and clarify the role of interregional contacts within it. No direct contacts with the east Mediterranean or Aegean are documented over the time range studied, nor do obsidian finds suggests that southern Iberia was in close touch with the west-central Mediterranean during the neolithic period. Four zones of interaction, each with a natural source of obsidian as focus, may be identified.

After a mesolithic occupation, with pits and hearths, the site had been successively cleared, cultivated and abandoned before the digging of a pair of parallel ditches—Kilham I. After a period of silting a larger structure enclosed by a timber wall set in a bedding trench—Kilham II—had a banked burial chamber with a forecourt at its eastern end. The construction of the long barrow of chalk rubble derived from flanking quarry ditches took place in two phases separated by burning of lengths of the timber enclosure. A ring ditch dug across the line of the avenue east of the long barrow belongs to an Early Bronze Age use of the locality. Any covering round barrow mound had been completely removed by cultivation that affected the area from the middle of last century down to the present day.

Analyses have been directed towards providing an objective basis for the untested assumption that interrupted ditch enclosures, discovered in riverine situations by aerial reconnaissance, are related to the high-lying neolithic causewayed enclosures. The results of a series of attribute analyses appear to justify the unity of the enclosures, while at the same time suggesting a division into four geographical groups. Aerial photography has been used to provide data for comparative studies. In this case, sites known only from the air have been compared with excavated enclosures which show similar characteristics. The resulting classification is thought to demonstrate the feasibility of such an application of aerial photographs.

Prehistoric cemeteries on the Upper Rhine appear to reflect changes in used land, but variable factors influence the recovery of information. Despite these limitations, it appears that marginal land was taken in after the Neolithic, and the extensively colonised loess soils were deserted. Other parts of the North Alpine zone experience similar abandonment of primary Neolithic areas. River terraces may then have been kept open by reduced settlement or seasonal grazing, inviting renewed attention in the Late Bronze Age and further colonisation of the valley soils in the Iron Age. Major shifts in settled areas may have resulted from soil exhaustion induced by limited agricultural techniques.

The excavation examined two barrows which formed part of a cemetery in use towards the middle of the second millennium BC. The smaller barrow (Site 17) contained a large pit-grave in which successive inhumation burials had been made associated with a long-necked beaker, bronze earrings and a flint knife. The larger barrow (Site 16) began as a small mound covering an inhumation burial with a Food Vessel. Four stake circles were added following a second inhumation burial and the original mound was enlarged on two subsequent occasions. Many features of the barrows find their closest parallels in Yorkshire.

The Plain of Macedon, North Greece, has seen remarkable changes in its physical geography during the Holocene. The significance of these changes for prehistoric and historic settlement is evaluated, with particular reference to the Neolithic site of Nea Nikomedeia. This reinterpretation contrasts dramatically with previous studies of the Plain's development and with the prehistoric environment postulated by the excavators of Nikomedeia.

This round barrow, a bowl type, was built in two phases, its construction and use extending from about 1600–1400 bc (2000–1675 B.C.). The first mound was constructed with a mixture of chalk and sand from an oval ditch, covering a contracted burial of a child in a grave cut out of the chalk. The child was accompanied by a hybrid beaker. In the second phase the centre of the first mound was removed and partly pulled back into the ditch, and a contracted burial of an adult accompanied by a late beaker interred just off centre of a new mound built of sand covering the first, and capped in chalk obtained from a second ditch. Either simultaneously, or within a very short time a further burial, unaccompanied, in a tree-trunk coffin, was placed nearby, and this was followed by subsequent interments, the earliest of which was accompanied by jet beads and a spacer plate. Finally a further digging out of the mound took place on the east side to establish a cremation area, afterwards mounded over.

The prehistoric structure described in this paper is only one of a large series of wooden roads and trackways that run into and across the Somerset Levels. The Levels themselves consist of a number of wide expanses of moorland separated by ‘islands’ of rock and sand, the whole covering a region in Somerset of about 200 square miles. In the northern part of the Levels, the peats of the valley of the River Brue have for long been subjected to hand-cutting and machine-cutting by a number of individuals and peat-companies. Through their activities, many prehistoric discoveries have been made and these have been reported at intervals in these Proceedings and elsewhere. In 1973, the Somerset Levels Project was formed to organize and conduct fieldwork and excavations in the Levels, and, through co-operation with both the Department of the Environment and the many peat interests in the Levels, the Project has been able to undertake many more investigations of prehistoric remains than had previously been possible; about 15 reports relating to recent works have been published, and those relevant to the present paper are listed in the References.

The wooden trackway described here has been known to exist for almost 90 years, but so far as we are aware it has never before been fully examined, nor has it had the benefit of specialist studies dealing with dendrochronology and with fossil coleoptera associated with the trackway. These, allied to extensive wood identifications and pollen analyses, allow a more closely defined description and interpretation of the trackway which appear to us to alter the original concepts as published previously.