At the end of the last century, when I was a student at the seminary of S. Sulpice in Paris, and was studying the Bronze Age in the Somme basin, a Monsieur Boulanger, a notary of Peronne, who was then unknown to me, sent me some books unasked, and also a nice water-colour drawing (by Pilloy) of a palstave found in that region. Then later on I received a curious letter from his chief excavator of the Merovingian graves near S. Quentin. It was addressed to ‘M. l'Abbé Breuil, Superior of the S. Sulpice Seminary’ (where of course I was merely a pupil) and asking me, as being supposed to have correspondents in Rome who were members of the fraternity of S. Sulpice, to put him in touch with them so that he might buy, at a good price, a fish of Roman glass of the Christian period like one of which he had sent me a photographic print with no provenance given. This seemed to me to be suspect.

When we look back over the past century of archaeological discovery, about a dozen ancient cities loom large in the mind's eye, a gigantic sequence of silhouettes which in turn inform us of their distinctive civilizations. Mycenae, Troy, Boghaz Koi, and now Mohenjo Daro and Harappa are signal examples of cities at which the brave work of the early pioneers was followed by the activities of another generation. These later workers, with an evolved and perfected technique, probed anew and established a more solid and elaborate edifice of knowledge on foundations which their gallant predecessors had often left insecure. If scientific work continues to keep pace with public interest we should be about to enter on another phase. Then the consolidated work of the second generation which has left so many tempting points of attack for a third, will be illuminated by new discoveries no less rewarding. Indeed what lies under land and water is still an immense treasure, for the recovery of which we are now better equipped than ever.

Probably every one of the hundred or so delegates who attended the Third Pan-African Congress on Prehistory would agree that it would be hard to imagine a more successful meeting. The organization was perfect, the papers read were mostly of an exceptionally high standard, and throughout the congress and excursions an atmosphere of good humour prevailed. We have returned rather bewildered from the number of sites visited and the amount of new knowledge gained, but with the satisfactory feeling that African prehistory has made enormous strides since we last met in Algiers in 1952.

In November 1954 the French Prehistoric Society celebrated its fiftieth jubilee with a séance solennelle extraordinaire in the cinema of the Musée de L'Homme in Paris. The séance was presided over by the Abbé Breuil, doyen of French if not of all European prehistorians, and attended by most French prehistoric archaeologists of importance. Guy Gaudron, the Secretary General of the Society, gave a brief history of the society's inception and development; the Abbé Breuil spoke on ‘La Perspective préhistorique et ses progrés’; messages of congratulation were sent to the Ćount Henri Begouen, who, with Gaudron, were made Honorary Presidents; messages were read from prehistorians and prehistoric organizations in other countries, and a small group of foreign representatives spoke in person—Sauter from Geneva, Kühn from Mainz, Frank Mitchell from Dublin, and Lacaille and myself from Great Britain.

During the seventeenth campaign of the Ras Shamra excavations (1953), we uncovered on the east side of the palace a block of private houses between two streets running parallel in an east-west direction. In one of the buildings (which is still not completely excavated) we found several bronze objects buried in a corner of the inner court in the middle of which were two troughs. Stratigraphically the building is assigned to the latest layer of Level I which dates from the 13th century B.C. Amongst the ceramic remains found is a female Mycenaean idol of poor workmanship and a bowl with wishbone-handle of Cypriot type, also plainly of late date.