In the Geographical journal for August 1940 I published a brief summary of the ‘Evidence for Ancient Mining’, one illustration for which was taken from a Japanese colour-print by Hiroshigi of the interior of a gold mine. As a result of reading this article, Dr H. J. Osborne White, a well-known geologist, sent me the scroll which forms the subject of the present paper. It is about 22 feet long and I foot broad and illustrates, in a series of attractively coloured drawings, every process from the extraction of gold-ore in the mine on Sado Island to the minting of refined gold. Mr Matsumoto of the Japanese Embassy kindly examined the scroll and was able to translate most of the captions to the pictures and other writings. Though the archaic script sometimes puzzled him, the fact that his family had been connected with mining for several generations was a compensating advantage.

As purveyors of honey and wax, substances rated high by early man, bees would seem to deserve more attention from archaeologists than they have in fact received. In this respect they serve to point a moral. The tendency has all too frequently been to concentrate on those aspects of ancient cultures which lend themselves most easily to classification, to the neglect of those which promise the closest insight into the working of the societies under review, thus inverting the true outlook of the archaeologist and turning him away from the activities of human beings towards a world of abstractions. The thesis one would like to urge is that the prime concern of archaeology is the study of how men have lived in society, of how within the social frame-work they have striven to satisfy and multiply their wants. From such a standpoint the means adopted to gratify the taste for sweet things, a taste shared by man and beast and physiological in its basis, merits at least as much attention as current fashions in safety-pins and other topics beloved of ‘museologists’

The youthful adventures of Sigurd the Volsung, before his fateful meetings with Brynhild and the sons of Gjuki, have given plenty of opportunities for argument and the weaving of contradictory theories. To some it has seemed that here we find ourselves with the tangled remains of a myth; to others that we are dealing with the elaborated version of a widespread folk-tale. The complex series of hypothetical lays and sagas traced out by scholars to form the ancestry of the Old Norse version of the story has become a spider’s web of bewildering possibilities, a rather depressing prologue to what at first sight seems merely a rousing story of a young hero who kills a dragon. The question of literary antecedents and the problems of textual history have been fully and ably followed up, particularly by Heusler and Schneider; in this brief study I intend to approach the subject from a different direction.

The Book of Aneirin, which contains all the verses that go to make up the Gododdin, is a manuscript written on vellum about the year 1250. It is incomplete, ending at the bottom of folio 38 and at least three or four folios are missing. The condition of the manuscript suggests that the existing folios have been re-arranged. The various later copies of the poem on paper are not worth further study, for they are not evidence of better texts, but of the carelessness of copyists. The manuscript is in two different handwritings, which may be called-A and B. The body of the work is in A and was written first. As well as the Gododdin verses, it contains four other poems, the last of which is attributed to Taliesin. The verses in the second handwriting B were added afterwards on the empty pages of the manuscript, and are nearly all variant versions of ones already given in A.

The inhabitants of the wooded plain of northern Europe that in early post-glacial times extended almost uninterrupted from the Pennines to the Urals were distinguished from their meso-lithic contemporaries, the Azilians and Tardenoisians, as well as from their best-known palaeolithic precursors, by the possession of a kit of heavy tools suitable for wood-working. This distinctive equipment was an adaptation and response to the dominant feature of the northern environment of those days—the great Boreal forest. So I have termed the cultures characterized thereby (Duvensee, Maglemose, Kunda, Broxbourne, etc.) the Forest Cultures. From this point of view the most significant diagnostic traits in all of them are not their fishing and hunting tackle that form the most spectacular among their relics, but their heavy tools of bone, antler and stone. In 19311 I discussed the development of this heavy industry in the central area round the Baltic as an adaptation to the forest environment, a manifestation of a distinctively woodland culture-pattern, to use an American expression. In 1937, thanks to fresh discoveries in England, Esthonia and the U.S.S.R. I was able to trace the same wood-working equipment throughout the whole woodland-zone from Russia to England. But all these studies of adaptation were in fact inspired by a hint from Dr Schwantes (then of Hamburg); for to him belongs the credit of first recognizing the antler objects I discussed as wood-worker’s implements.

British scholars have tended to believe in a single author of the Iliad and Odyssey more perhaps from right feeling than on a sound basis of argument. In his article Mr Casson frankly begins by ‘begging two separate questions’—that Homer wrote the Odyssey and that he was a single poet. The first is not so welcome an answer as the second. Mr Casson is not of course concerned to argue about either and only mentions in passing one argument-the oblique method of description in ‘both’ the Iliad and the Odyssey. Examples of it he calls ‘hints’ that make it easy for him to disregard half the contro-versy about Homer. The purpose of his article is, however, different, to show that Homer visited Ithaka. The aim of the present one is not primarily to reply to his main thesis except by the way, but rather to supplement it and suggest in outline another point of view than that implied by him.