The tenth season of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania began work in the field on 25 November 1931, and closed down on 19 March 1932. In addition to my wife, my staff included Mr. J. C. Rose, who came out as architect for his second season, and Mr. R. P. Ross-Williamson, who acted as general archaeological assistant; Mr. F. L. W. Richardson of Boston, Massachusetts, was also attached to the Expedition to make a contoured survey of the site (pl. LVIII). NO epigraphist was engaged, for the work contemplated was not expected to produce much in the way of inscriptions; but an arrangement was made whereby Dr. Cyrus B.Gordon, epigraphist on the Tell Billah Expedition of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, could be called upon to give his services when required; actually a single visit enabled him to do all that was essential. To each of these I am very much indebted. As usual, Hamoudi was head foreman, with his sons Yahia, Ibrahim and Alawi acting under him, and as usual was invaluable; Yahia also was responsible for all the photographic work of the season. The average number of men employed was 180. This relatively small number of workmen, and the shortness of the season, were dictated partly by reasons of finance but more by the nature of our programme, which envisaged not any new departure in excavation but the clearing up of various points still in doubt and the further probing of sites already excavated, with a view to the final publication of the results of former seasons; the work was therefore rather scattered, five different areas being investigated in turn.

Our 225th Anniversary finds the Society making steady progress with the undertakings to which we have set our hands, and in no lack of material for future enterprise. Our financial position, through the care and foresight of our Treasurer, may be considered sound, though we have all too little to devote to the various researches on which we are engaged. Of our normal and permanent activities it is not necessary for me to speak: the session with its round of papers and exhibitions has brought many valuable contributions to our journals, and if we have no single objects this year quite in the same class as the Easby crossshaft and the Winchester bowl, we have nothing to complain of. Our capital enterprises, the excavations at Richborough and the joint excavations at Colchester and St. Albans, have fully maintained their standard of accomplishment, and the watching of recently exposed sites in London has preserved records of the earlier levels which now from year to year are being entirely obliterated by modern processes of building. I am particularly glad to see, in Mr. Dunning's work under the Esher Studentship and in the researches of Dr. Fox and Mr. Radford atKidwelly, the notable progress made in our knowledge of the dates and provenance of medieval pottery. The next few years should mark a substantial advance in what has hitherto been a neglected subject.

The examination of the prehistoric hill-fort known as Hollingbury was undertaken during March and April, 1931, by the Brighton and Hove Archaeological Club, with the permission of the Brighton Corporation and with the sanction of Mr. B. H. Maclaren, Superintendent of Parks and Gardens. We also have to express our great gratitude to those Societies and individuals whose generous contributions made the undertaking possible, and to others who rendered valuable help by their own labour.

The Cathedral Church of Norwich is remarkable for several features which rarely or never occur elsewhere. Among these the form of the two surviving eastern chapels may be mentioned. They may be described as bulbous in shape, and were clearly a part of the original work of Herbert de Losinga, the bishop of Norwich who transferred his seat from Thetford to Norwich in 1094. His great church was begun in 1096, and was sufficiently forward for consecration on 24th September 1101. The northern chapel has been called the Jesus chapel since the end of the fifteenth century, but before it had been the chapel of the Martyrs and later the chapel of St. Stephen. The south chapel is St. Luke's, used since the reign of Elizabeth as a parish church in lieu of St. Mary's in the Marsh, which stood on the south side of the Close and was then pulled down.

The mound lies on the south bank of the Haliakmon at the point where the modern road from Macedonia to Thessaly crosses the river by an iron bridge built by the Turks in 1912 (figs. 1 and 2). Except for slight traces of occupation in Byzantine and Turkish times the site seems to have been derelict since the early Bronze Age, its strategic equivalent being at one time the fortress (of uncertain date) that crowns the hill immediately north of the bridge, and, at another, the Byzantine castle above Sérvia that commands the entrance to the Sarardáporo pass and the road to the south. East-west communications past the site cannot have been considerable at any time, since north-eastwards the river, after flowing past the mound, soon enters a rocky and impassable gorge, from which it emerges only at Verria some forty kilometres distant.

It has long been understood that if any definite connexion could be proved between Stonehenge and the barrows of admittedly Bronze Age date which surround it, an approximate dating would be possible of Stonehenge itself. The common, first-sight belief that the barrows and the monument represent a necropolis encircling its sanctuary has been opposed on the ground of the irregular grouping and distances of the barrows. It may, however, be suggested in passing that if the Plain was parcelled out among clans or families into territories nearer and further and of varying sizes, and if the known custom obtained of burying the important dead where they had lived, this irregularity is explicable.

In Archaeologia, vol. lxxvi, a number of rock-cut tombs in Mallorca, dating from the Bronze Age, were described by the present writer, and attention was called to the general resemblance of their plans to those of the megalithic tombs known as navetas. These buildings occur both in Mallorca and in Menorca, but the better known and better preserved examples are to be found in the smaller and less highly cultivated island. In 1892, M. Émile Cartailhac published excellent photographs, and less satisfactory plans, of some of the Menorcan examples in Monuments Primitifs des Îies Baléares, and a recent examination suggested that certain additional details were worth placing on record, as they serve to link the built-up structures more closely with the rock-cut tombs, and indicate a definite relation of both to the long barrows of Britain.

The fact that the examples of Medieval Painting surviving in England are but a fraction of the pictorial production of this country during the period in question, is, of course, a commonplace among all students of the subject; and whenever you follow up a special line of investigation in this connexion you inevitably get a fresh and vivid illustration of this fact.

The existence of ancient pottery sites between the tide lines on the Lincolnshire Coast, north of Skegness, has long been known, but references to them in literature are scanty. The lack of detailed knowledge about them is due to the unusual difficulties which confront the would-be investigator. In the first place they lie buried under six or eight feet of marshland clay. Away from the coast itself they are to be seen only where drains dug to this or to greater depths happen to cut through them. This is naturally a rare occurrence. Along the coast, however, exposures are more common, for there the erosive action of the sea is slowly removing the clays and bringing the pottery sites to view at mid-tide level. The same process unfortunately also removes the material of the sites. Opportunities for investigations are therefore fleeting.

The alabaster reliefs which I have the privilege of laying before the Society this evening are a miscellaneous collection, arbitrarily grouped together on three slabs of slate painted a deep blue. There is no reason to suppose that any of the tables or images, altogether nine in number, had any original connexion with one another. They have been for many years fastened to the walls of the chapel of Naworth Castle in Cumberland, where they were noticed last year by our President, who was good enough to call my attention to them. Lady Carlisle very obligingly brought them up to London, and I undertook to have the modern paint in which they were smothered removed at the Victoria and Albert Museum; it is to Lady Carlisle's kindness in allowing them to remain in my charge for some months that we owe the opportunity of looking at them this evening. So far as I know, no facts as to their previous history are ascertainable.

In a paper read in May 1924, and subsequently printed in Archaeologia, I discussed the somewhat uncommon representations of the crucified Christ attached to a lily-plant, either directly or through an interjacent cross identified with the plant. In that paper I cited eight such representations—one carved in alabaster, two in other stones, and one in wood; one painted on a wooden panel; and three in glass windows. All of these were clearly English in origin. Since it was published, three further examples of this curious flower of English iconography have come to my notice.

The majority of the helmets suspended over monuments in English churches are of mediocre quality, and were probably supplied by the undertaker for the funeral. Their interest lies in their being relics of a once widespread custom. But among them are a few specimens of great value as examples of the armourer's craft.

It is generally accepted that the invasion of Britain by the Belgae, alluded to by Caesar, is represented archaeologically by the Aylesford-Swarling-Welwyn type of pedestalled urns and their associated objects. These urns are found in a pretty well defined area of south-eastern England, including the counties of Essex, Kent, Middlesex, Hertford, Buckingham, and parts of Bedford and Cambridge.

I visited the briquetage sites of the Lincolnshire coast, described by Professor Swinnerton, on many occasions during the years 1906 to 1909. On one visit, which was in September 1907, I chanced to see, in a hollow of the shifting sands, the remains of a group of timber structures on the northern side of Ingoldmells Point. There was a considerable number of what appeared to be wooden hut-circles, and I thought that it might be the prehistoric village connected with the briquetage industry.

On Mull or Meayll Hill, a mile north-east of the Calf Sound, Isle of Man, is the remarkable megalithic monument known as the Mull Hill Circle. It is not a stone circle of normal type but consists of six T-shaped structures, each comprising two rectangular cists averaging 5 ft. 9 in. by 2 ft. 8 in., placed end to end with the inner end of each open and forming the head of the T, and approached by a short passage about 7 ft. long at right angles (the upright of the T). These pairs of cists are arranged in a circle some 50 ft. in diameter; each group distinct, with the cists placed tangentially and the passages leading radially outwards. They are so spaced as to leave a larger interval between the groups on the north and south to form two opposite ‘entrances ’. Apparently the entire circle of cists had originally been covered by a ring of stones and earth, the whole forming a ‘disc-barrow’, the bank of which contained chambers. There are vague indications of a central chamber or cist. The stone used in the construction of the monument was a local slate. No capstones remain to any cists or passages, but all appear to have been paved with flat slabs.

‘Was there’, asks Mrs. Cunnington in the January number of this Journal, ‘a Second Belgic Invasion (represented by bead-rim pottery)?’ The answer on her last page is that it ‘remains extremely doubtful’. Her article is in fact a vigorous challenge to belief in this invasion, as maintained by us in a paper published last year, entitled ‘The Belgae of Gaul and Britain’. To this paper she does not indeed allude by name, for her notice is confined to one or its six sections only. In bringing the issue here once more under discussion, we feel bound to restore this section to its context, if only to give it no more importance than its due, for there are sundry points that have thus lain outside the scope of Mrs. Cunnington's article which may nevertheless perhaps prove important in estimating the matter as a whole. We will follow her arguments in order.

The primary object of the work of 1928 was to follow up the discovery in 1927 of the unexpectedly strong and heavy foundation underlying the north-east corner mound. As a result of this year's work it is evident that this corner mound represents some heavy structure which is best explained as a circular corner tower built into the town walls at their northeast angle; but even its foundations were so broken up that it was impossible to discover any outline or recover a complete ground plan. Oh the outside, instead of extending beyond the walls themselves, the circumference of the structure lay flush with the curved external angle of the walls, while on the inside its circumference projected slightly beyond the angle of the walls proper. It was thus rather an internal than an external tower, a fact which it is important to bear in mind.

Recently, Mr. Roger Notcutt of Woodbridge showed me a beautiful flint implement (figs, 1, 1 a, and 1 b), and it is through his kindness that I am able to describe it. The specimen was found when spreading out a large mass of material carted to the seaplane station at Felixstowe for making a football ground, and this material was derived from the making of a new road in the eastern part of the town. The flint blade contains in its interstices, on both faces, remains of an easily recognizable reddish sandy loam, and this loam is present over a wide area beneath the thin surface humus in the district of Felixstowe where Looe Road is situated. I have visited the site of this highway, and have compared the loam there exposed with that attached to the implement. This comparison shows that the deposits are, so far as an examination with a high-power lens is concerned, identical. The flint blade has attached to its surfaces small patches of what appears to be manganese, and the sandy loam present at Looe Road contains similar small inclusions. There cannot therefore remain much doubt that the implement was derived from the sandy loam. This deposit represents, probably, the upper part of the Red Crag, relaid by wind action. The loam rests upon the latter bed, and the site of the find is on a low plateau bordering the North Sea and lying at a height of about 50 ft. above O.D.

The type here discussed is a common feature of most collections of surface flints from this country, but little serious study has been devoted to it ; and though it has frequently been found in datable associations, no one seems to have attached it to any particular culture. Collectors in East Anglia have long called specimens of the type ‘slugs ’, a term unfortunately employed in other areas, for instance Sussex, to describe flint fabricators. In view of this confusion the author suggests the use of the term ‘plano-convex-knife ’ which accurately describes the section of the implement. The type is characterized by pressure or scale flaking on the slightly convex upper face, the under surface retaining the flake surface, usually with the bulb and sometimes with the striking platform intact. As a general rule the flake from which the knife is made shows a distinct curve in its longitudinal axis. As a result of the fine pressure technique employed, the convex surface of the implement commonly gives a glossy or soapy feel to the touch. In the finer and more typical specimens the whole of this upper surface shows the characteristic secondary flaking, though in some cases the central area of the flake is allowed to retain its primary character. In plan the commonest form is elongated oval of varying width (nos. 1 and 2), which is in a few examples (e.g. one from Bishop's Burton, barr. CCLV) serrated round the entire edge save for the buttend. The point is normally obtuse, if not rounded, and in a few cases (no. 3) is trimmed to a scraping edge. Finally we have to note rather a distinct variety with a straight chisel-like extremity (no. 4) from which flakes have been removed in the main line of the implement. This particular specimen has lateral notches as though for hafting.