In an article in the Observer for 3 July, and again in the Listener for 27 October, 1960, Professor L. R. Palmer argues that the Linear B inscribed clay tablets found at Knossos date not from the end of the I 5th century B.C. but from a time some two hundred years or so later. These tablets according to the excavator of Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans, belonged to the age of what he called the ‘Last Palace’, destroyed about 1400 B.C. But after the destruction of the ‘Last Palace’ the site was not abandoned ; it was reoccupied and inhabited for another hundred years or so. Evans thought that this re-occupation was due to ‘squatters’ who had made dwellings for themselves among the ruins of the old palace. But the character of what Evans found dating from this ‘Re-occupation period’ (as he called it) fits better in some ways with the idea of a restored palace than with that of an occupation by ‘squatters’. Evans himself was not unaware of this, and once at least hinted at the possibility of a palatial reoccupation, although he subsequently veered away from the idea. In the domestic quarter of the palace he noted ‘signs of attempts at restoration on a large scale (i.e. after the destruction of the “Last Palace”) which make it probable that dynasts of the old stock still maintained a diminished state on the palace site.’ It is therefore possible that Professor Palmer is right in believing that there was another palace on the site of the earlier Palaces at Knossos during the ‘Re-occupation period’ of the 14th and 13th centuries B.C. But of this latest palace, if palace it was, owing to erosion and stone-plundering through the centuries, comparatively little had survived when Evans began to excavate. It was in any case almost certainly poor and mean compared with the other great palaces which had preceded it on the site. This was indeed a time, the 14th and 13th centuries B.C., of general impoverishment and decline throughout the civilized world including Egypt and the Near East.

To trace the rise of archaeology is practically to write the biography of one man, Flinders Petrie.

I first went to University College, London, as a student of Egyptology in January 1894. Petrie was then in Egypt, digging at Koptos, having in the previous year electrified the learned world by his discoveries at Tell el Amarna. Dr J. H. Walker was in charge of the Egyptology department (then and for years afterwards known as the Edwards Library), and Mr F. Ll. Griffith of the British Museum came twice a week to take a class in hieroglyphs. When Miss Amelia B. Edwards founded the Edwards Professorship of Egyptology, it was with the intention that it should be for the training of students in Egyptian archaeology as distinct from the Egyptian language. She had a small but well chosen collection of Egyptian antiquities which she bequeathed as a nucleus of a teaching collection, and with it her Egyptological library. One show case held the collection, and two bookcases held the library. There were also three ‘cradles’ which held the enormous tomes of Rosselini, La Description de Z’Egypte, and Lepsius’s Denkmäler. It is difficult for any modern archaeologist to realize how few books there were on any archaeological subject. For Egypt there were the early volumes of the ‘Egypt Exploration Fund (including the disastrous Bubastis) and Petrie’s early volumes, including Kahun, with its shattering suggestion that certain peculiar painted pottery found in a Middle Kingdom site (c. 2000 B.C.) came from the Aegean. Mariette and Heinrich Brugsch were well represented in the Edwards Library, and the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology was the chief journal in which to publish short articles. Erman’s Aegyptische Grammatik, with its English translation by Breasted had just appeared and was being carefully studied by all Orientalists. Egyptian history began at the 4th dynasty, nothing was known of anything beyond Khufu and the Great Pyramid, except the fragments of Manetho’s history, the lists of Kings, of which the Tablet of Abydos was one, Herodotus, Josephus, and a few scattered items in other ancient authors. The Biblical record concerning Egypt dates from Abraham’s visit, but as the ruler of that country is called Pharaoh without his personal name the exact date is uncertain, but is definitely after the Old Kingdom.

There are many Roman dams in the Tripolitanian province of Libya; only a few of them have received the attention they deserve. This article attempts to explain the variety of purposes served by some of the numerous barrages to be found in a small part of northern Tripolitania.

The earliest thorough study of ancient hydraulic works in north Africa was made by La Blanchère in the Enfida of Tunisia. More ambitious surveys have been organized by Gsell in Algeria and Gauckler in Tunisia; they were based on somewhat superficial observations made by local officials and soldiers. Air photography has made the objective recording and presentation of intricate irrigation systems easier, especially when it is in the hands of experienced and patient observers in low-flying aircraft; and this helps us to work out the function of barrages associated with the canals and ditches.

The ancients built dams in other parts of the dry zone lying south and east of the Mediterranean, in conjunction with schemes of irrigation or town water supply. A few of them are very old; while in places the Romans took over a perfected system of soil and water conservation, complete with dams that merely needed repair and maintenance.

Evidence has for long been accumulating to show that the shores of the Thames estuary now lie at least 15 ft. lower in relation to the sea than in early Romano-British times (summarized, e.g. Wheeler, 1928; Francis, 1932). Francis has suggested that this submergence began early in the 2nd century A.D., its effects being widely felt by the end of the century. Similar evidence has been noted both from the east and south coasts of England though, in the East Anglian ‘Great Estuary’ (Yare-Bure-Waveney) behind Yarmouth, it had formerly been assessed as about 2 ft. only.

Most writers, however, have been content to assume without confirmatory evidence that these changes took place in a simple progression, so that a graph of them from Roman times to the present day might be represented by a roughly straight line. Godwin, indeed, had sounded a warning note in his analysis of the Fenland deposits at Wiggenhall St German (Godwin and Edmunds, 1933; Godwin, 1940), Jennings had pointed to a ‘standstill’ or slight regression after the Romano-British transgression of the Broadland valleys (1952, 50) and a short note by Swinnerton (1955) discussing pottery found below marine clays at Chapel St Leonards, Lincs, came to confirm them. But now substantial evidence from the Yarmouth district has been adduced to show that, after the Iron Age—Romano-British marine transgression, represented by the Broadland ‘Upper Clay’, land emergence took place during the Saxon period to culminate about the time of the Norman Conquest or soon after, the ‘Saxo-Norman Marine Regression’ as it has been named (Green and Hutchinson, 1960). Under the South Denes at Yarmouth, a beach with its low water mark now at - 17.5 ft. O.D. has been dated by pottery finds to the 13th century, with a silt covering-layer also containing pottery, inferred to have been deposited by the great flood of A.D. 1287. Supported by a variety of other evidence, they have shown that, at that date, the coast here still stood some 13 ft. higher in relation to the sea than it does today. Thereafter a rapid submergence began which, by Tudor-Stuart times, was much retarded and which today has been reduced to the very low rate of some 1.6 mm. per annum.

Mr J. C. MANN holds that ‘each civitas of Gaul (and of Britain) was presumably a city, and like all true cities, each will have consisted of a single physical city surrounded by its territorium, the whole under the control of its magistrates, council and assembly, the last no doubt usually of little importance.’ I, on the other hand, following Jullian and Stevens, have suggested that the civitas was the whole tribal area, its capital (caput) normally ranking merely as a vicus where the government happened to have its seat. This, Mr Mann suggests, is a myth, which he doubts whether a Roman lawyer would understand.

The evidence admittedly is not all that it might be; yet as the question is important for a correct understanding of the development of local government in Roman Britain (and elsewhere), I may venture to take it up once more, especially as Mr Mann’s note appears to me to be erroneous in one or two particulars, and to exhibit the triple weaknesses of a too narrowly legalistic outlook, an inadequate account of historical development, and a neglect of some of the relevant facts.

The Antipodean archaeologist has more than passing interest in the opinions expressed in ANTIQUITY concerning the reliability of radio-carbon 14 age estimations. To him, objective prehistory seems unattainable without the combination of stratigraphy and radio-carbon. Other geochronological schemes remain to be devised and tested in Australia, while the material simplicity of aboriginal culture deprives the prehistorian of many customary ancillary aids, such as coinage, pottery or sophisticated typology. Even the ubiquitous faience bead has proved elusive. In the Polynesian world there is dispute concerning the value of genealogies and traditions, but even the most ardent critic must grant that they contain more apparent historicity and chronology than Australian concepts of ‘the dream time’. In this generation, therefore, carbon 14 is likely to provide the basic clues for the interpretation of the past. This brief article is intended to record a series of dates which, it would seem, neither physicist nor archaeologist can impugn.

Despite the pressing need for a carbon 14 chronology, few age estimations are available for aboriginal cultural material. However, some of them are subject to the qualifications stressed by previous contributors to this journal. The sites have been dated by estimations on single samples, collected under circumstances where controlled, stratified excavation was not possible. The artifacts and the source of the samples were first exposed by natural erosion. Unfortunately, in some instances, the artifacts are such generalized types that they are of doubtful utility for cultural analysis. In the writer’s opinion, the three oldest Australian stone assemblages, and the only Tasmanian midden deposit dated so far, all suffer from one or other of these limitations, and they are relevant to any assessment made of the evidence. The relevant sites and antiquity are as follows. (Dates B.C.)

At a classic meeting of the Prehistoric Society, held during April 1948 in the old home of the Institute of Archaeology of London University, V. G. Childe and C. F. C. Hawkes presented two papers, each complementary to the other, on the chronology of the Late Bronze Age in Europe. This joint approach was focussed on the relative and absolute dating of the Urnfields of the North Alpine foreland, whence Hawkes applied the results to the West, and pre-eminently to Britain; but, by arrangement, Childe approached the crucial area from Hither Asia by way of the Danube corridor, and from Greece through the Balkans, while Hawkes worked his way forward from the Aegean up the length of Italy, and so northwards over the Alps.

It is worth recollecting that this was the first time that British archaeologists had formally addressed themselves to this most difficult set of problems in detail, and on Central European territory. Furthermore both papers suffered, one feels, from being among the first essays in archaeological synthesis to be attempted in this country after the war, with all that is implied in that. At all events within a year of publication Childe was saying that he no longer had any confidence in his derivation of the flange-hilted bronze sword from Hither Asia; and he had also by then become less assured of some of his other Asiatic derivations. While in the course of the international discussion which followed, Hawkes felt obliged to revise a number of his dates, chiefly in the direction of a longer chronology. Nevertheless, both essays commanded a splendid range of material, and were fortified by a sufficient exposition of the history of research in this field to give a sound sense of perspective. If today they have been outmoded in many particulars by the work of a small army of scholars working in half a dozen countries, they remain for English-speaking students an indispensable starting-point, and an admirable introduction to their subject.

Exactly three centuries ago last year, Johan Picardt, parson of Coevorder in Drenthe and Adviser for Land-Reclamation, wrote in a regional study worthy of comparison with his contemporary John Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica: ‘Our fore-fathers had not pen, ink, nor paper, which had they possessed would have enabled us to learn of strange things. Howsomever, they have bequeathed us signs enough if only it were that we could read them.’ Each one of the three volumes from the second of which my quotation comes clearly shows the ways in which archaeological research in the Low Countries has vindicated Picardt’s statement. Today archaeology in the Netherlands is a matter of exemplary close-knit co-operation between State institutions, universities, local societies, and the private individual, while recently Belgium has taken important steps in the systemization of pre- and protohistoric studies.

Although the Low Countries can hardly be regarded as a primary area of development, their coastal position at the north-western limit of the transcontinental routes has made them a cultural entrepôt of particular significance for the British archaeologist. In this context Professor De Laet’s book in the ‘Ancient Peoples and Places’ series is all the more welcome in that it is the first English summary of the pre-Roman archaeology of the region.

De Voorgeschiedenis der Lage Landen is a much expanded and corrected version of De Laet’s volume, with Professor Glasbergen’s collaboration giving a more balanced account of the Dutch evidence. The third book, a double volume of Antiquity and Survival, offers a lavishly illustrated symposium of one hundred centuries of the Netherlands, and although the promised English language edition is not to be, the Trustees of the Prince Bernhard Foundation and the Rijksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek are to be warmly thanked for giving their support to Honderd Eeuwen Nederland.