This letter had its origin in an after-dinner discussion with fellow-scientists, in which the trials of working with archaeologists were ruefully compared in full and horrendous detail. Being the only one present with formal training in archaeology as well as in science, I found myself to some extent playing the role of devil’s advocate, but it still seemed to me regrettable that while the scientists were making genuine efforts to understand and illuminate archaeological problems, many archaeologists make little effort to understand the limitations and difficulties of scientific techniques.

This monumental volume consists of eighty-six separate papers (including an ‘Introduction’ and a ‘Conclusion’) and represents the work of about that many individual authors. (Some participants presented more than one paper, but this is balanced by a few instances of joint authorship.)

Even before Manching first graced the pages of ANTIQUITY it had achieved the status of a key-site in the prehistory of Europe. The small La Téne B-C cemeteries of Steinbichel and Hundsrücken, the latter within the area enclosed by the ramparts of the later oppidum, have become the type-sites for their period in Southern Germany, but more important they could be seen to overlap chronologically in La Téne C with the beginning of the Late La Téne settlement that has been the subject of the recent excavations. With this continuity of occupation Manching offers a unique opportunity to study the origin and development of one of those settlements whose size, trade and industry justify their claim to be the earliest truly urban settlements in Temperate Europe.

When the Anglo-Saxons invaded England, about the middle of the fifth century, they came as barbarians in the proper and Roman sense of the word, illiterate and unpolished. At the beginning, too, their religion was a paganism at variance with imperial Christianity. Yet they cannot have been the blundering creatures they are sometimes taken for: within a few generations this assortment of tribes had produced scholarship of European standing, in the persons of Aldhelm and Bede, and as to the decorative arts their jewelry and illumination of manuscripts—not forgetting Irish influence—were a match for anyone in the western world. Fierce and warlike at first, guilty of unprovoked aggression, most of them soon settled down to become peaceful farmers.