Little more than thirty years ago, when a writer was invited to contribute an article to an encyclopaedia on the Stone Age in the Philippines, it was possible for the American Museum of Natural History to inform him that, so far as was known, there was no Stone Age in the Philippines. That the position has so greatly altered during the last three decades is largely due to the indefatigable efforts of an American collector and ethnologist, Professor H. Otley Beyer, to whom we chiefly owe such systematic archaeological surveys as have been carried out in the archipelago. Much of his work, however, remains unpublished or is not generally available, so there may be some value in a short summary of what archaeology has revealed of the cultural history of the Philippines during these three decades.

EVER since, in 1893, Paolo Orsi published and described a group of these objects from the necropolis of Cava della Signora, Castelluccio, they have E been generally regarded as of the highest importance for the study of W. Mediterranean prehistory. Orsi himself immediately recognized the parallel with those which had then been recently unearthed by Schliemann at Troy, and since his time the validity of this parallel has been generally admitted by archaeologists. All who have since then treated of the chronological problems of Sicily and the Western Mediterranean lands have accepted them as imports from Troy and a basis for synchronisms between the cultures of the Eastern and Western basins. Despite this, however, no study has as yet been published of these objects in which the Trojan and Sicilian groups have been treated together and closely compared. In 1939 a useful critical analysis of the evidence relative to the three Trojan plaques was published by Bittel, but he did not go on to make a similar study of the Sicilian ones.

‘Although the Greeks seem to have undertaken the founding of their cities most successfully looking for beauty and security of position, harbours, and fertile country, the [Romans] planned best those matters which the Greeks made light of, laying down roads, and bringing in water … They laid a network of roads over the countryside, adding cuttings over the hills and embankments along the valleys, so that their wagons can accommodate whole shiploads’

So says Strabo (v. 3.8), stating concisely a great deal that has since been written contrasting the beauty-loving Greeks with the practical Romans. S The justly admired roads of the Romans have long been a symbol of Rome at her best. The Greeks come off very poorly indeed when contrasted with Rome in the matter of roadbuilding—so poorly that their apologists have often felt constrained to explain it away : the mountain-terrain, and the division into unco-operative city-states were hostile to the development of road-building. Yet both these excuses are groundless, for under certain circumstances the Greeks did build roads over difficult terrain and across state boundaries. Roads from quarries to temple-sites are good examples of the first difficulty overcome, sacred roads of the second. The truth is that the Greeks could build good roads if the need for them was sufficiently compelling, but they had no sense of the ROAD, as the Romans did, and as we do to-day.

THE high carboniferous sandstone formation named Landek, on the left bank of the order at Ostrava-Petřkovice, is the site of the most important palaeolithic settlement at present known in Silesia. The exploratory excavations carried out there in 1952, by the Brno Archaeological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, were continued systematically the following year, particularly to determine whether coal had been intentionally used as fuel by the palaeolithic hunters.

The second season’s excavations brought to light numerous particles of coke and coal in the ash layers which had resulted from the dispersal of hearths by solifluxion. Fragments of coal unaffected by heat were rare in comparison with the coke particles, indicating that the coal had been almost completely converted into the ash which colours the whole cultural stratum grey, especially near the hearths. While the discovery of coal is not, by itself, decisive evidence of its use as fuel, it is corroborated by the fact that the coal is found in various forms, and it may be concluded as a result of the 1953 excavations that 30,000 years ago, in the Ostrava-Petřkovice region, man used coal as a source of heat. This remarkable conclusion is more easily acceptable if it is borne in mind that the Ostrava coal-measures rise to the surface in the immediate neighbourhood of the site, and that the use of coal, though only as a material for ornaments, is known in other instances, e.g. at Kesslerloch, and at Kniegrotte. That the coal-fed fires reached high temperatures is shown by the considerable degree of incineration of the animal bone fragments (strongly resembling charcoal), which occur, together with particles of mammoth ivory, in the ash.

Flying across Africa to attend the Pan-African Congress on Prehistory in Livingstone in July of last year I was frequently reminded of how characteristic of man is his continual use of fire, not only in cities but in the primitive open spaces. There were few moments in the course of the whole journey when signs of fire or artificial light were not somewhere visible. As we passed over the sparsely inhabited bush and savannah country of south-central Africa one could sometimes count up to a dozen columns of smoke rising from the landscape spread out below. Some of these were deliberate bush-fires which the native farmers start early in the dry season as a safeguard against the disastrous spread of uncontrolled fire at the end of that season when the vegetation is like tinder.

At the Livingstone Congress there were several communications bearing directly or indirectly on the question of how long has man, particularly in Africa, had fire at his disposal.