On 26th March 1926 a cist burial was discovered by the grave-digger in the cemetery of Penllwyn Calvinistic Methodist Chapel, near Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire. Notice of the find was sent to Mr. George Eyre Evans, of Aberystwyth, and the buried cist was examined by him and the minister of the congregation, the Rev. M. H. Jones, B.A. I cannot do better than quote the account of the cist and its contents written down by the former immediately after the discovery.

The vitality and progress of archaeology so greatly depend on museums for systematic records, for the collation of objects, and for a storehouse of authority, that it seems worth while to review the general situation, and to trace the gradual emergence of objectives, which are now so clear-cut in aim and so exhaustive in scope as to justify us in believing that the museum ideal has at length been defined and stabilized. It is true that the field of activity has been much curtailed since what was first called the Home of the Muses was established by the Ptolemies at Alexandria. The Mouseion was more grandiose in scale and more liberal in its appeal than anything of later date, for not only did it comprise a theatre and banqueting-hall, a botanical garden and a menagerie, but it was a university and the centre from which radiated the whole intellectual life of a vast region. It was perhaps a little disdainful of the past, differing in this respect from the outlook of our own times, and yet in many ways our modern methods are modelled upon Alexandria far more than upon the direct but more recent ancestors of our museums, only dating back two and three hundred years. These were miscellaneous assemblages of bric-à-brac, of which the Tradescant Collection was a fair sample, containing many curiosities of nature to which fabulous properties were ascribed. The Royal Society possessed a bone from the skull of a mermaid. The horn of the unicorn was valued at a tremendous price. Mummies could always be sold to advantage, for when ground into powder their medicinal merits were great. Quack remedies as well as superstition and witchcraft appear to have influenced the collector, though of course in certain branches the enterprise of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries differed but little from our own. The accumulation of coins and medals was for obvious reasons one of the most popular and widespread types of collection; arms and armour were gathered at every Court.

The Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania started its fifth season at Ur on 28 October 1926, and closed down field work on 19 February 1927. Of the staff, three had been with me in the previous season : Mr. M. E. L. Mallowan again acted as general archaeological assistant, Mrs. Keeling was responsible for the drawings, and Mr. A. S. Whitburn was architect ; this year the inscribed material was dealt with by the Rev. E. Buroes, S.J.

The small village of Glozel, commune of Ferrières, is situated about twenty miles south-east of Vichy. No car nor carriage can go farther; you must walk almost a mile, first along a narrow lane, then down a steep hill, till you reach the right bank of a rivulet called Le Vareille, which flows into the Souchon, a tributary of the river Allier. Above the wooded bank of the Vareille, at the foot of the hill, extends a little plateau which was thickly wooded till thirty years ago, when the trees and bushes were cut down. In 1924 the Fradin family, owners of the land, decided to sow there some vegetables, and young Émile Fradin, then a boy of 18, began to dig up the soil. Soon he discovered a brick bearing some regularly distributed cup-marks which aroused his curiosity (he is intelligent, though completely devoid of learning). Fradin showed that brick to a schoolmistress, who was much interested and mentioned it to a schoolmaster; people began to talk about the discovery of ancient remains. Meanwhile, Fradin pursued his work and found an oval building, the soil of which was paved with bricks, one bearing an inscription. The inner walls of that small structure were entirely vitrified by fire. It may have been a (medieval ?) kiln, but that is now difficult to decide, because the visitors almost destroyed the walls before they had been examined by a competent person. As no bones were discovered, it cannot be considered as a tomb.

In the course of last year I was concerned, together with Mr. R. J. Whitwell, in publishing in Archaeologia Aeliana a particularly detailed account of the construction of a galley at Newcastle-upon- Tyne in 1295. The building of this vessel was part of an extensive naval programme due to the war with France begun in the previous year. Although I was able to trace the accounts of many of the vessels built on this occasion, I failed to find those of the two galleys which the City of London was directed to furnish. Quite recently, I came upon the full particulars of the building of the second of these among the ‘Sheriffs' Administrative Accounts’ at the Public Record Office, which are a subdivision of the class of ‘Accounts, etc.’, formed from the ancient miscellanea of the King's Remembrancer of the Exchequer. With this detailed account I found a summary of expenses prepared from it, and a similar summary of the expenses of some repairs done at the same time and place to two barges. In the similar subdivision entitled ‘Works ’ was a like summary of the expenses of construction of the first galley. The accounts which I had previously found had been classified as ‘Army and Navy’, but the circumstances that in London the sheriffs were responsible for the expenses had led to these accounts being separated from those of the other vessels.

Although in the work of conservation and reconstitution of upper stories new lines have been recently struck out at Pompeii, at Ostia, and elsewhere, it may be fairly said that they have followed the example already set on the site of Knossos, where the work has now proceeded with successively improving methods for twenty-six years.

The country west and south of Quimper in the department of Finistère contains a notable concentration of megalithic monuments. They are of various types and some are quite distinct from the better-known monuments of the region round the Gulf of Morbihan in Southern Brittany. The map (pl. I) shows the distribution of the monuments. It is based largely on a survey of the area undertaken in the summer of 1924. I wish to express my thanks to M. Georges Monot of Pont-l'Abbé for his invaluable assistance and guidance in a country in which good roads are few, and the monuments very difficult to locate. The bulk of the work of excavation, in this area, was undertaken by the late P. du Chatellier towards the end of the last century. Many of the monuments were ravaged before he began operations, and even those found more or less intact were rarely preserved after excavation, so that to-day a large proportion are in a very ruined condition. The reports of excavations are to be found in various Breton periodicals and in the French archaeological journals, especially in the volumes of Matériaux pour l'histoire de l'homme. Du Chatellier also gives a summarized account of his work in Les Époques préhistoriques et gauloises dans le Finistère, second edition, Rennes 1907, which covers the whole of the department. The appendix at the end of this paper, which gives a summarized inventory of the monuments of the region, cites references where possible to the reports of excavations.

On the southern walls of many churches in England dials are to be found of a kind which is peculiar to this country. They take the form of a semicircle with lines radiating from the centre, at which there is a. hole for the style or gnomon. This is always missing. They are known as scratch dials, incised sundials, mass clocks, primitive sundials, or sexton's wheels. The earliest known is one on Bewcastle Cross, Cumberland. It is a perfect example of the type, and the date assigned to it is A.D. 675. A diagram of this dial is given in fig. 1.

At the end of April of last year the Rev. Charles Overy drew my attention to the presence of broken animal bones, flints, and sherds of pottery in a gravel-pit on the south side of the road from Abingdon to Radley, about a mile out of Abingdon (fig. 1).

The pit lies on the very boundary of the parish of Abingdon in a field at about 200 ft. O.D., just over half a mile north of the Thames and some 30 ft. above the river. On its eastern and southern sides it is bounded by the wide trenches which in the days of the splendour of Abingdon Abbey formed part of the Abbey's fish-ponds ; on the north is the road, and on the east the ground drops to a little brook.

The two daggers here illustrated (pl. xxvii) are of interest both on account of their traditional attribution, but more especially for their technical value as examples of a type which has persisted for over two hundred years. The popular name for this type is Kidney Dagger, Ballock Knife, Dague à Rognons, of course derived from the two excrescences which take the place of a cross-guard on the hilt.

The type, first appearing in the fourteenth century, became stabilized at the end of the fifteenth century, and seems to have been peculiarly English. The outstanding examples in public or private collections are the following:—

The earliest representation is on the brass of Sir William de Aldeburgh at Aldeburgh about 1360, and we find it later on the Arundel effigy of John Fitz-Alan, 1434.

The examination of nearly 10,000 coins from the surface layer of Richborough, and the provisional classification of some 5,000 more, make it possible to draw some definite conclusions from them. All the coins I have dealt with in this paper were obtained from the top three feet of soil in the excavations carried out within the Fort under the direction of Mr. J. P. Bushe-Fox.

That the art of gem- and seal-cutting persisted in Greece during the long and uncertain period of development that preceded the full flower of archaic Greek art has been acknowledged by the accepted classification of certain stones bearing intaglio designs as ‘geometric’. That such stones are not numerous in European collections is due chiefly to their extreme crudity and lack of artistic charm, which give them little worth in the eyes of collectors.

In the autumn of 1926 an urn-field (fig. 1) was discovered on the site of the war-time allotment gardens on the southern edge of Little Down Common, and about 500 yards NNE. of Pokesdown Station, lat. 50° 44·5′, long. 1° 49·13′. Its discovery was due to the finding of urns when a new road was driven through a long strip that had been sold for building plots. About nine cinerary urns, mostly of the globular type, were found within a small area by the roadmakers, and these have been preserved by Mr. Homewood, the borough surveyor. Several more were discovered on the adjoining plots when the overlying gravel was cleared away. Unfortunately many of these were destroyed, but two went to the Russell-Coates Art Gallery, one to the Bournemouth Natural Science Institute, and some fragments into private hands (figs. 2, 3, and 4).

By the term ‘Early Iron Age Pottery from Macedonia’ is here meant pottery of the type found by Casson in the cemetery at Chauchitza, by the French excavators at the Toumba and Table of Sedés, and at the Table of Gona—and which is known from surface-finds in many parts of Macedonia. Much of the pottery from Patelí on Lake Ostrovo seems to belong to this class, but is not yet accessible in any publication.

The following notes have been set down in response to the invitation contained in a foot-note to page 15 of Mr. Chas. H. Ashdown's excellent History of the Company, in the hope that they will prove of interest to those who are anxious that all details in connexion with one of the most interesting of medieval crafts shall be recorded.

Considerable interest attaches to the Car Dyke as it has been claimed as a Roman work by several authorities (Dr. Cyril Fox, Archaeology of the Cambridge Region, p. 179). In June of this year I attempted to make sure of the date by cutting a section through the fosse.

When a well was sunk through the bank of the dyke at the Lodge, Waterbeach, many years ago, the workmen cut through a boat of some kind. It seems reasonable to suppose that this boat dates from the time when the dyke was still full of water, and had been left moored in some little creek or dock probably near a settlement site. I therefore cut a section as near as possible to the well, that is, within a few yards of the south-east corner of the Lodge. It has not been possible to complete the section or reach the bottom of the ditch owing to the wet summer. The water-level was found at a depth of 4 ft. The section, however, cut through the middle of a small dwelling on the very lip of the ditch, debris from it forming a thin stratum separating different layers of silt. From the contents of the midden which formed the floor of the hut it was evident that the site was one of the Pagan Saxon Period.

The lower Thames, both below and more especially above the City of London, has yielded some hundreds of relics of the Bronze Age. In a few cases these may indicate the site of a ford, and at one point—Sion Reach—the association of exotic types suggests a local settlement of a somewhat special character. But for the most part these river-finds are of mixed type and period, and can only be referred to the general use of the river as a highway. They throw little or no light, incidentally, upon the vexed question of the origins of London.

Alchester is a flat site of some 26 acres, 11 miles from Oxford and 1½ from Bicester, in the parish of Wendlebury, on gravel over clay. Remains of a bank and ditch enclose it, forming approximately a square, the axis of which runs nearly N. 40 W. At the south-east corner is a mound 4 ft. 9 in. high, and remains of another at the north-east.

From south to north through the site passes the Roman road which comes from Dorchester over Shotover Hill and across Otmoor: it goes on past Bicester north by east towards Watling Street near Towcester. On entering Alchester this road deviates some thirty yards east from its direct course (with which the ramparts are aligned), to rejoin which at its exit on the north it runs askew across the site N. 10° W.—an unexplained peculiarity.

The slabs on which are carved the bas-reliefs with which this paper is concerned are fastened by iron clamps or holdfasts to the south wall of the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, which is the easternmost of the lateral chapels of the choir of the Benedictine abbey church of Fécamp, on its southern side, immediately next to the chord of the apse and the chapels of its chevet. This chapel, and indeed all those on the south of the choir, date from the early years of the fourteenth century, when a daring scheme of rebuilding on a very lofty scale was begun during the abbacy of Thomas de St. Benoist (1297–1307).