Archaeological fieldwork in the central Helmand Valley of modern-day Afghanistan has been sparse as a result of the region's remoteness and lack of security; the work that has been done suggests that the area has been occupied since prehistoric times. The Central Helmand Archaeological Study (CHAS) is the most recent archaeological field research to be conducted in the valley. It was launched in 2011 with the support of the US Marine Corps and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, to locate and record archaeological sites in the region and to report any evidence of looting or damage (Abramiuk & Wong 2015). This paper reports on some early findings in the course of continuing analysis and provides a preliminary assessment.

Recent investigations at the Lateran by the present writers, with the indispensable collaboration of Professor Enrico Josi, and under the auspices of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology, have added considerably to our knowledge of the Constantinian basilica. The 4th-century foundation walls of this church are easily identifiable. They consist of massive baulks of concrete made principally with big fragments of grey-white marble which are obviously the product of the breaking-up of some quite important building, since pieces of architectural mouldings, capitals, ashlar, etc., frequently appear. During the past century (the first significant excavations date from 1851) such foundation walls have been exposed in many places, and an extensive system of vaults has been formed beneath the floor of the church as one investigation after another has added to our knowledge of the Constantinian building; to say nothing of the earlier structures on top of which the basilica was built, namely the Castra Nova Equitum Singularium of the early 3rd century, and certain rich private mansions which lie at a still lower level.

In his classic work on the Bronze Age pottery of Britain the late Lord Abercromby adopted the old division of the class of beaker pottery into three types originally proposed by Dr Thurnam as far back as 1871. In order that Abercromby may not be misrepresented I propose to quote the essential portions of his definitions. In type A, the ‘ high-brimmed globose beaker ’, ‘ the body is more or less globular ; the upper part, separated from the body by a constriction, frequently very defined, spreads out like the calyx of a flower and forms a brim or neck that almost equals the body in height. The sides of the neck or rim . . . are straight and not recurved at the lip ’. In type B, the ‘ ovoid beaker with recurved rim ’, ‘ there is no distinct demarca- tion between the body and the rim, but the one glides into the other by a gradual curve ’. Finally type C, the ‘ low-brimmed beaker ’, ‘ may be regarded ’, in Abercromby's own words, ‘ as a debased variety of our first type ’.

It should be clear already I think that in labelling his types A, B, and C Abercromby has given the false impression that we have three types of beákers, whereas what we really have are two types, of which one has a ‘debased variety’. We therefore suggest that a less misleading classification would be, for instance, A(x), A(Y), and B. This may seem a trifling point but we believe it has helped to obscure the proper recognition of the true dual character of the Beaker invasion of this country. We propose to substantiate the validity of our suggestion in the course of this short paper.

Introduction

From the Parliamentary Union with England of 1707 until the establishment of the new devolved parliament (although still within the Union) in Edinburgh in 1999 under the terms of the Scotland Act 1998, Scotland was a nation with a ‘capital’ and its own legal system; neither a colony nor sovereign: an active participant in rather than a victim of 19th-century imperialism (Davidson 2000). Since the Union the writing of the history of Britain has been a more or less political process (Ash 1980: 34), the viewpoint of the historian depending on the individual’s position on the meaning and consequences of the Union and on the process of securing the creation of ‘North Britain’ and ‘South Britain’ — ‘the wider experiment to construct a new genuine British identity which would be formed from the two nations of Scotland and England’ [Finlay 1998). A small country sharing a small island with a world power will never have a quiet life (as Pierre Trudeau described Canada’s relationship with the USA — ‘being in bed with an elephant’).

The White Horses cut in the turf of the Wessex Downs are familiar to most people who have wandered over the hills of western England, and many have no doubt paused to look at one or another of them and perhaps to ‘hazard a wide solution’ as to its antiquity or origin. But of the fifteen White Horses in Wiltshire and the adjoining counties, only one can be attributed to a date before the eighteenth century. This, the sire of them all, is cut on the north slope of the Berkshire Downs, above the village of Uffington, and gives its name to the fertile plain of mid-Berkshire-the Vale of the White Horse. Camden in writing of the Vale was wholly contemptuous of the Horse, saying that the inhabitants named the district ‘I wotte not from what shape of a white horse, imagined to appeare in a whitish chalky hill’. But despite Camden's scepticism, the Uffington White Horse very definitely exists, and has been cited as a landmark since the eleventh century, when the cartulary of Abingdon abbey records that one Godfric was possessed of Sparsholt juxta locum qui vulgo mons Albi Equi nuncupatur. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Horse is several times mentioned in connexion with the tenure of lands near it. Mr T. H. Ravenhill has recently drawn attention to an early fourteenth century manuscript in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, entitled Tractatus de mirabizibus Britanniae, in which the White Horse is given second place among the Marvels, Stonehenge being first.

During the 19th century conclusions of great value concerning the origin and diffusion of the megalithic tombs of Europe were arrived at by the study of a few tombs in various regions : Montelius’s Orienten och Europa marks the culmination of research on these lines. In the last twenty-five years it has been gradually realized that before we can speak with assurance of the many problems which the megalithic tombs involve, before we can disperse what has aptly been called ‘the murky fog surrounding the megalith question’, we must have accurate and detailed regional surveys of the prehistoric burial-chambers of south-western, western and northern Europe. As is well known, such surveys have already been produced in many regions; for example those in Iberia by Obermaier, Vergileio Correia and Pericot y Garcia, and in Brittany by le Rouzic and Forde. In the British Isles we have been exceptionally fortunate in this respect: the work of Crawford and Hencken in England, of Hemp and Grimes in Wales, of Childe in Scotland, and of Estyn Evans in northern Ireland, has made the megalithic tombs of the British Isles better known than those of any comparable region in Europe.

The underlying theme of Foraging in the past is how archaeology can be used to identify the full range of diversity among hunter-gatherers in the absence of ethnographic analogues. In the introduction, Ashley Lemke argues that forager diversity must have been greater in the past than is suggested by comparison with the spatially and temporally restricted ethnographic record of modern hunter-gatherer societies. The deep prehistoric past covers timeframes with no modern environmental analogue, and the subjects of our study include a broader range of human ancestors than just anatomically modern humans. Consequently, archaeologists must use models and hypotheses to identify novel forager adaptations that lack any modern ethnographic equivalent.

The Deccan Chalcolithic and its sites

Systematic archaeological research began in the Deccan after 1950 when a Chalcolithic settlement was discovered at Jorwe near Sangamner in Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra state. The Deccan, which includes the present states of Maharashtra, (except for the western coast and some parts of Vidarbha in the east) and northern Karnataka, falls in a semi-arid zone with a precipitation ranging between 400 and 900 mm. There are three major river valleys in the Deccan, the Tapi in the north, the Godavari in the centre and the Bhima in the south. Microecological variations in each valley have considerably affected the settlement patterns of the early farmers. Altogether 150 Chalcolithic settlements have so far been discovered in this part of India. The Tapi valley in the north, considered to be one of the most fertile tracts in the country and well watered by the Tapi and several of its perennial tributaries, was extensively occupied, for over 100 Chalcolithic settlements have so far been discovered there (Shinde in press). It was also observed that there was a general tendency to locate a settlement away from the main river because of the danger posed by the severe monsoon floodings. Most of the settlements were located along the banks of its tributaries, which are safe. In the Godavari and Bhima basins, on the other hand, because of the inadequate perennial water supply and limited availability of fertile soil, there were sporadic settlements (Shinde 1989) (FIGURE1 ). On the basis of environmental studies, surface finds, site location, the extent and thickness of habitation deposits, the Chalcolithic sites in the Deccan have been divided into different categories such as a regional centre, a farming village, a farmstead, a herding unit, and a camp to exploit localized resources (Shinde in press).