On behalf of Mr. Newall and myself I am making the 6th Report on the work carried out at Stonehenge which covers the season of 1924. The excavations were continued in a similar way to those of the previous year by making a succession of trenches between the rampart and the standing stones, beginning this time near no. 12 Aubrey hole and continuing towards the west. In the previous year a quadrant from north-east to south-east was searched, and it was determined to complete another quadrant from the south-east to the south-west.

The pre-Roman Iron Age communities of eastern England have not received the attention afforded to those of other parts of the British Isles. Admittedly, individual sites such as West Harling and Fengate have been published in detail, and the affinities of their materials have been discussed, but little attempt has been made to study the region as a whole. The nature of the problem, however, was vividly underlined by the admirable summary published by Clarke thirty years ago (Clarke, 1939). Although at the time many scraps of evidence were available, few sites had been adequately excavated, and still fewer published. In recent years the situation has improved and it is now possible to offer a tolerably coherent consideration of the earliest phases in the Iron Age occupation of the region. Even so, the evidence is thin and without support from further controlled excavations the framework offered below can be regarded only as a basis for further discussion.

This second interim report on a multi-period settlement palimpsest being rescued from annihilation by quarrying for gravel demonstrates that crop-marks are site indicators, not site plans. A sample area even as large as 650 × 500 feet square, containing Belgic, Romano-British, and early Saxon settlement features and parts of two cemeteries cannot be understood out of context. Extensive plans emphasize that successive landscapes share a preference for strategic siting on this gravel terrace at the head of the Thames estuary. The validity of presupposing a wholesale transfer of continental settlement types from the known ‘invasion’ of the Migration period is questioned. The archaeological evidence for the two main house types at Mucking—round and sunken—is described.

A British team has been working since 1978 upon a programme of documentation and analysis in the Insula of the Menander at Pompeii, one of the irregular city-blocks situated immediately to the west of the old part of the city in an area which was developed from the early fourth century B.C onwards. Study of the structural techniques, of wall-abutments, and of anomalies in plan can be used in conjunction with the evidence of painted wall-plaster to identify five main phases in the building-history: Phase I (fourth-third centuries B.C), Phase 2 (second and early first centuries B.C), Phase 3 (c. 80-c. 15 B.C), Phase 4 (c. 15 B.C.-C. A.D. 50), Phase 5 (c. A.D. 50-79). These illustrate a complex pattern of changing property-boundaries, but underline the general trend towards increasing commercialization and greater pressure upon living-space in this area of the city. There is also interesting evidence of the economic basis of life in the individual houses during the years immediately before 79.

One of the first questions likely to be asked by someone confronted for the first time by the great Oceanus plate (missorium) from Mildenhall (I, pl. VII a)** is, What was it used for? The answer is that neither it nor any of its fellow flat, decorated plates of silver, whether round or rectangular, to be surveyed in this paper, was ever used for practical, domestic purposes to serve as table-ware. It is hard to imagine the highly sophisticated and often elaborate relief- or incised-work that they carry being concealed beneath piles of fruit, vegetables, cakes, or portions of meat or fish greasy with gravy or sauce. These reliefs or engravings, whether covering the whole surface of a plate or confined to its central medallion or to its central medallion and flange, were essentially pictures for display in their owners' houses, or in temples or churches, probably mounted on brackets or shelves fixed to walls or to cupboards or chests (some are pierced by one or more holes as though for suspension on a wall), where they could be studied and admired for their beauty as works of art and/or their political, cultic or mythological implications.

The timber-framed houses of south Lancashire and Cheshire first became familiar to antiquaries through the publication between 1851 and 1859 of Turner and Parker's Domestic Architecture of the Middle Ages. In 1884 the architect Henry Taylor produced a more extended study entitled Old Halls in Lancashire and Cheshire that remains today the best general account of the subject. Subsequently the only important addition to knowledge was the detailed description of the Lancashire halls for the Victoria County History, published between 1906 and 1914. Thereafter little work has been done on them, and certainly nothing comparable to the studies of timber-framed buildings in Sussex, Essex, or the midlands. As a group these northern houses are remarkable for their heavy timbering and a contrasted ‘black-and-white’ effect which is more marked than anywhere else in England.

The Holcombe mirror was found buried in a pit in a late Iron Age settlement, and beneath a Romano-British villa occupied from the late first until nearly the end of the fourth century A.D. A study of the design and motifs indicates that it was produced by a western school of metal-smiths active in the first half of the first century A.D.

The present report covers the fourth and fifth seasons of excavation on the Ilôt de l'Amirauté at Carthage. Evidence from a borehole suggests that the pre-fourth-century B.C. sand previously taken for ‘natural’ may be a 5-m. thick fill above a level containing pottery. The later Punic sequence seems to indicate that the island and circular harbour were not made until the construction of the stone shipsheds in the late third or early second century B.C. The earth and timber ramps of these shipsheds were discovered with barnacles and probable ships’ nails lying on their surface. Much new evidence for the superstructure of the shipsheds was also found and an attempt has been made to reconstruct their appearance. Evidence for the Roman monumental rebuilding of the island in c. A.D. 200 has also been increased to the point where reconstructions can be attempted, and a large body of new information has been obtained for the structural sequence on the island from c. A.D. 200 to 700. Uncertainties remain over the interpretation of its function throughout the Roman period, although the rebuilding c. A.D. 200 might be associated with the creation of the African corn-fleet, the Classis Commodiana, in A.D. 186; and the site was possibly known as forum Karthag(inis) in the late fourth century and ‘the maritime agora’ in the time of Justinian.

Apart from further small-scale work, the present excavations are concluded; some further study of the early environmental sequence in the harbour area will be carried out in the next two years. A fifth and final interim report is planned to cover the excavations since 1976 at the north side of the Circular Harbour.

The results of the 1968–9 seasons of excavations at Bottom Pond Farm, Owslebury (SU 525 246) are described, especially the layout of the pre-Roman settlement. Problems of the siting of the settlement, the land usage and the function of storage pits are discussed, and two inscribed bronze rings and an embossed bronze plaque are described in detail.

An important petrographical study of Anglo-Saxon and medieval honestones has been made recently by Mr. S. E. Ellis (British Museum, Natural History), and the object of this paper is to identify the hones of the pagan period mentioned therein, and to provide illustrations of them as well as comments on their archaeological contexts. Most of the stones used as hones were picked up locally, but there is a possibility of the export of Kentish Rag from Kent and greywackés from southern Scotland. Ritual is evident in connection with a few of the hones.

In 1910 Mr. G. Wyman Abbott read to this Society a paper in which he gave some account of his discoveries of early British remains at Fengate, Peterborough (see Archaeologia, lxii, 352 ff.). Since that date he has been assiduous in collecting from the same locality such further material as has been brought to light in the process of gravel-digging. This new material already serves to indicate that the site was occupied continuously from Late Neolithic down to Late Celtic times, and, if only for that reason, is of the highest importance, since it is but seldom that a site with signs of habitation covering so long a period comes to light in this country.

The hoard, one of the most important finds of metal work and coins of the Christian Saxon period, was discovered in 1774 by tin-workers in a streamwork, 17 feet under the surface of the ground, at Trewhiddle, St. Austell, Cornwall. It was hidden in a heap of loose stones which Philip Rashleigh in his original publication ascribes to an old mine working. The collection of the hoard was haphazard and it seems likely that a certain number of coins, and possibly some other articles, were lost before Rashleigh could collect them together at Menabilly. It is possible, for instance, that the chalice was intact when found and, if this is so, many fragments have disappeared subsequently. When they were found it is recorded that certain objects were covered with copper from a vein in the neighbourhood.

The development of open-cast ironstone mining has made necessary emergency excavations on an apparently undefended Iron Age and Romano-British settlement of at least 20 acres, situated immediately near the Jurassic Way six miles south of the Humber estuary. In the Iron Age, the site was characterized by complex ditch systems and small irregular gullies, and only two huts, both circular, have been located in an excavated area of 1.7 acres. The main occupation probably began around 100 B.C. with an Iron B pottery assemblage. The sequence continued, apparently without abrupt break, into an Iron C assemblage very closely related to the ‘Aylesford—Swarling Culture’ of the Thames estuary region. More marked modification early in the first century A.D., most clearly defined by the introduction of Gallo-Belgic pottery, resulted in cultural similarities with Camulodunum. The occupation continued throughout the Roman period. The site was then characterized by an irregular system of metalled roads flanked by ditches, and plots of land defined by ditches and fences. Within these plots stood individual rectangular buildings of timber and stone, together with ovens, wells, pottery kilns, and other structures of an industrial or agricultural nature.

At the eastward extremity of Castle Hill, Scarborough, below medieval and Anglo-Saxon chapels and the foundations of a Roman signal-station, have been found several filled-up pits containing pottery fragments of a date long anterior to the work of about a.d. 370, as the Roman walls had been carried over some of them with no precautions against settlement, and the contents showed no admixture of Roman date. In fact there must have been an interval of several centuries, as the potsherds can hardly be later than La Tène I, and belong more probably to the first part of the Early Iron Age, generally named after Hallstatt, the typical site in Upper Austria. About half an acre has been excavated by Mr. F. G. Simpson, now Director of Romano-British Field-studies at Durham University, on behalf of the Scarborough Corporation, with the active co-operation of H. M. Office of Works; and a preliminary report on the Roman building has been written by our Fellow Mr. R. G. Collingwood for the Corporation (see also Archaeological Journal, lxxix, 390).

An unusual group of gold jewellery was discovered by a metal detectorist near Winchester in southern England in 2000. The hoard included two possibly unique massive necklaces made in a clearly classical style, but different from typical classical necklaces and from the torcs and collars of Iron Age Europe. The hoard also contained extremely rare gold versions of types of brooches commonly made in bronze and iron in north-west Europe during the first century BC, the end of the pre-Roman Iron Age. This paper describes these unique objects and the results of an archaeological investigation of their find spot. Detailed scientific analysis of the objects’ technology has proven crucial for interpreting their origins and broader significance. Finally, the broader consequences of the find for interpreting the significant changes that took place in southern Britain in the century before the Roman conquest are discussed.

Encouraged by the attention you paid to the subject when I had the honor of conversing with you on it, I take the liberty of presenting you with two comparative specimens of the languages spoken in Sumatra and other parts of the east. The one exhibits simply a list of fifty words; of universal use from the nature of the ideas they express; as spoken in twelve different countries or districts. The other exhibits a view of those words in the Sumatran and neighbouring languages; which are observed to correspond in sound and signification, with words in the languages of places situated at a distance from thence.

The Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania started its ninth season at Ur on 1st November 1930, and continued in the field until 20th March 1931. The season was a long one and a larger number of workmen than usual was employed, the average for the first three and a half months being 280 and for the remainder of the time 200; the amount of actual excavation done was in consequence greater than in any previous year.

Shortly after the presentation of the Second Report to the Society, in March 1926, the gravel-workings from which the material for both this and the First Report had been obtained were abandoned, the site of House XX marking the southerly limit of the land leased for exploitation. On a tour, however, of the district south of the Thames between Drayton and Long Wittenham in 1930, I found that a wide drift had been cut leading southwards from the Drayton-Sutton Courtenay road immediately east of Council cottages newly erected, and that new workings had been for some time in progress under the management of the Berkshire County Council, along the eastern boundary of the older pit.