The site of the Thracian city of Seuthopolis lies about 8 km. to the west of Kazanluk, in the famous Valley of Roses, between the Balkan Range and the Sredna Gora Mountains. A spacious terraced area was formed by the erosion of the River Toundja (the ancient Thracian Tonsus); this is bounded to the north and east by a sloping plateau, on the site of the villages of Koprinka and Dounavtsi; and to the south, the steep slopes of the heights (site of the village of Morozovo (formerly Gorno Cherkovishté), the last of the Sredna Gora foothills, dropped down to the river banks. The last and lowest step of this terraced area projects deep into the bends of the Toundja to the south, forming a peninsula, or tongue of land, the banks of which are 4 to 5 m. in height; to the west and south it is bounded by the River Toundja, and to the east the Golyama Varovitsa or Chiflikchiiska River, a small, but always swiftly flowing tributary of the Toundja, guards its approaches. The Thracian city of Seuthopolis was situated precisely on this spot, called ‘Chiflika’ (The Farm), on the left bank of the River Toundja, defended from the west, south and east by natural barriers of water (PLATE IX).

For its Exhibition of Forgeries and Deceptive Copies, on view in the Department of Prints and Drawings since February, the British Museum has produced many fascinating objects which normally it keeps hidden away: with the passage of time, it can afford to indulge its sense of humour. As Sir Thomas Kendrick is reputed to have said when viewing the exhibits: ‘What fun it is when someone takes an immense amount of trouble to be really naughty.’

Contributions from the various Departments and from borrowed sources include Antiquities of all kinds, Ethnographical material, drawings and other examples of the Graphic Arts, Manuscripts and Printed Books, Music, Coins and Medals, and Postage Stamps. The Natural History Museum has also contributed a very popular section.

The only criticism of this entertaining and enlightening venture is that it would have been improved by concentrating on Forgeries and leaving out the Deceptive Copies. Few of us, except the specialist, can avoid boredom when confronted with rows of water-colours after Turner, or drawings after Canaletto. Works of the innocent copyist, or the conscientious restorer, even though exploited later by unscrupulous dealers, are in quite a different category to the productions of any forger worthy of the name. We may marvel at the technical skill of copyists, but it is the original and imaginative fakes that are interesting.

It is a curious reflection that although palaeolithic art has been known and recognized as such for over a century, and despite the fact that during this time an enormous volume of literature has accumulated on the subject, yet the publications consist almost exclusively of articles dealing with limited aspects. These comprise descriptions of individual finds, or particular sites, but there are virtually no works on any scale to present the art as a whole in its so-called ‘mobiliary’ manifestations (that is to say, the decoration of loose and individual objects), together with the decorations found on the walls of caves. There have of course been many contributions of significance to certain general issues, such as chronology and correlation with the cultural succession; among the most important early works on the mobiliary art for instance is Piette’s L’art pendant l’âge du renne of 1906. Again, in his magnificent pioneering studies on the sites of Altamira, Font de Gaume, and Les Combarelles, the Abbé Breuil devoted a number of chapters to general discussion of fundamental importance; many of these deal with all sides of the evidence in connexion with different problems, such as representation of different types of animals. But in no case has the archaeological public been rewarded with a full-scale work on the art as a whole by the greatest living authority. Although in his introduction the author of the work under review disclaims any intention to provide either a treatise or a complete corpus of the artistic achievements of the Palaeolithic, and describes his work rather as a ‘panoramic view of that prodigious phenomenon which is the birth and development of the most ancient art in the history of man‘, yet he has in fact gone some considerable way to fill this important gap.

This new sword comes from the collection of Mr Evangelos Loizou of Famagusta, and has been brought to my attention by my former colleague Dr Vassos Karageorghis of the Cyprus Museum. The sword (PLATE XVI (a)) was given to Mr Loizou’s father by a villager of Enkomi some years ago, and almost certainly comes from the famous Late Bronze Age city and cemetery site a few hundred metres west of the village. It could well have come from a grave. The sword lacks the extreme tip; one edge is chipped. Apart from superficial corrosion it is in excellent condition.

The preserved length is 0.47 m.; the handguard is 0.05 m. wide, and the length of the hilt, 0.10 m. The greatest width of blade (below handguard) is 0.035 m. The rivets diminish in length from pommel to handguard in the range 0.023–0.018 m. There are two rivets in the handgrip and six in the handguard. The pommel ears are prominent, but there is no spur. The hiltplates were made of some perishable material, but, as often, their outline can be restored from the ‘shadow‘ left by the corrosion pattern on the handguard. The junction of blade and handguard is more angular than on any other Mediterranean example known to me; also unusual is the even taper of the blade from handguard to tip in place of edges normally either parallel, or even slightly swelling.

The wildness and desolation of moorland, even when seen on a fine summer’s day, can give an overpowering impression of land untamed by man, land in which man is the interloper and not the master. The word primaeval usually comes to mind and, indeed, even modern geography books sometimes describe these areas as the last strongholds of wild nature. It is recognized, of course, that man burns the moor at intervals to facilitate turf-cutting or to provide better conditions for his animals whether sheep or grouse, but as this practice has been going on from time immemorial and the moorland still looks the same, it is tacitly assumed that it has always been the same.

How far from the truth this assumption can be has recently been shown by an investigation into some archaeological sites on the watershed of the Cleveland Hills. Such sites contain organic remains, particularly pollen and charcoal, which reflect the contemporary ecological conditions. The conclusions reached here do not necessarily apply to all moorland areas, of course; the Cleveland Hills receive less rain than moorlands further west, so their early history may have been different. Today this relative dryness is reflected in the predominance of heather (Calluna) rather than the plants of blanket bog. Nevertheless, these North Yorkshire Moors today have as strong an atmosphere of wilderness as anywhere in the North of England. To anyone who knows them the old name of Blackamore graphically expresses their present character.

Ideas about the prehistoric past have for long been based upon pieces dug from the mounds and hollows which are the remains of man’s activities. Only recently has it been clearly realized that monuments are continually being modified by nature and that evidence of weathering, denudation and silting can be as informative as the artifacts sometimes found in them. A recent conference showed that there was relatively little exact knowledge of how such processes take place and, in particular, of their quantitative aspects. As has been recently emphasized archaeological excavation is a means of investigating the truth of an hypothesis by destructive analysis. It thus emerges that any study of the action and interaction of natural processes affecting a prehistoric monument must clearly involve the converse, i.e. a monument must be built and studied, in all its component parts, under controlled conditions. Today an impressive and substantial ditch and bank, cut into and heaped upon the chalk of Overton Down in Wiltshire, stands a shining witness to the execution of this principle.

The work of construction was undertaken with hand tools, but not all of these were modern picks and shovels. A part of the bank was dug and heaped with primitive tools and appliances—antler picks, shoulder-blade shovels and wicker carrying-baskets. It has long been known (from the not infrequent discovery of examples apparently discarded) that antler picks were the primary digging tools of those who dug the ditches and heaped the long and round barrows, the causewayed camps, the henges and the cursuses, but precise appreciation of the real potentialities of antler picks was slight. Greenwell and Pitt Rivers commented upon the use of such implements, while the subject was pursued in some detail by Horace Sandars in his paper On the Deer Horn Pick in the Mining Operations of the Ancients, among others. Curwen’s accounts of the Sussex flint mines further stimulated such studies as did Clark and Piggott’s classic paper. From Sandars’s, Curwen’s initial and subsequent study and from summaries of the past two decades the view emerged that the antler picks were almost invariably used as punches and levers to break up chalk. Thus, such thought as has been given to prehistoric mining and digging has been to some extent inhibited by acceptance of that notion.

MR S. Hood’s article on the date of the Knossos tablets (Antiquity 1961, 4) is much to be welcomed as providing a further opportunity of removing mis- conceptions. In view of the magnitude and the contentiousness of the issues it is fortunate that the question can be reduced to one of simple physical location. No scholar can date a tablet from its physical appearance. There is no such thing as an LM II tablet. This is a pottery classification. The chronology is determined by the ceramic associations. Thus we simply ask where and in conjunction with which particular pieces of pottery these inscribed lumps of clay were found. A simple pattern of enquiry is imposed, which, I hope, will be followed by future contributors to the discussion. I first identify the particular deposit by their Scripta Minoa II numbers and then quote my sources for their location.