Although new research suggests multi-directional trajectories in the development of the Zimbabwe Tradition (see Chirikure et al. 2016), regional population shifts need not be discounted, as some of these generated states (e.g. Vigneswaran & Quirk 2015). Oral-historical data from northern Zimbabwe counters persistent but often misleading views of pre-colonial states in south-central Africa as exercising power over static and stationary populations (Pikirayi 1993). Rather, human mobility shaped, among other things, the Zimbabwe Culture's spatial features, its strategies for accumulating power and managing resources, and the regional political, social and economic actors to which it was connected. This occurred with the demise of Great Zimbabwe from the second half of the fifteenth century and for much of the sixteenth. Ingombe Ilede attests to post mid fifteenth-century regional shifts in patterns of trade that would lure the Portuguese to south-central Africa from the early sixteenth century onwards. The Zambezi became the preferred inland route. Great Zimbabwe's expansionary thrusts to control this trade undermined its own political control over the southern Zimbabwe plateau, as this spawned new political formations like the Mwene Mutapa state and other polities, including Ingombe Ilede.

Many of the Grim's ditches and others of similar character in East and South England have been tentatively dated to the Late Roman or Saxon periods. The question of their date and purpose has frequently received attention in Antiquity, notably by Sir Cyril Fox and Mr O. G. S. Crawford.

But all these Grim's ditches need not be alike, and the group of linear earthworks known by this name in Cranborne Chase is especially distinctive. Parts of it can perhaps best be compared with the Grovely Grim's ditch, with which it is almost certainly associated, and which was described by Mr Crawford in his article on ‘Our Debt to Rome’ as being pre-Saxon. Since then Sir Charles Oman has suggested a later date for it, and put forward the view that Grim's dyke, and other ditches in the southeast of Wiltshire ‘were thrown up to mark the limit of the Saxon frontier’.

Empires produced some of the ancient world's grandest monuments. No doubt that helps to account for successive major exhibitions recently mounted at the British Museum. The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army closed in April 2008, having drawn more visitors than any other since Treasures of Tutankhamun in 1972 (British Museum 2008: 66). There followed, from July to October, impressive and intriguing pieces on Hadrian, the Roman Emperor of the second century AD. The attention to large political systems is timely (James 2008: 201). Twenty-five years ago, Donald Horne (1984: 252) went so far as to declare that 'in the popularisations … of the huge storehouse of … artifacts … that are such an extraordinary feature of our age. … we may find the only real potential for giving substance to human liberation'. Is this feasible in practice; and, if so, is a state museum with business sponsorship a likely place to find such enlightenment? Studying the archaeology in Hadrian, with The First Emperor as a foil, enabled us to assess these questions.

‘Observation not guided by ideas, even hypothetical ideas’, says Professor Wolf, ‘is blind ; just as ideas not tested by observation are empty’. The student of megalithic monuments has as constantly to regret that early antiquaries were not more aware of the necessity of making accurate plans and of recording morphological and constructional details of the monuments—many alas, now ruined or vanished—which they visited, as he has to deplore their delight in formulating theories which they never tested by fieldsurvey ; but he has also to cope with evils more dangerous even than these, namely observation so dominated by false or imprudent hypotheses that it results in a distorted vision worse by far than mere blind observation or empty ideas. Some of these hypotheses—like the Druids, the Ancient Egyptians, the metal-working Prospectors, the megalithic race, solstitial and clock-star alignments,—to mention only a few, have been disproved by research and flourish today only among perverse and illogical archaeologists. Others—such as the concept of the Montelius dolmen here examined in its relation to southern Britains—while just as inadequate and inaccurate, are the comrnonplaces of modem text-books.

The Victorians were great collectors. They fortified themselves by collecting other men's land and its products ; glorified themselves with collections of children, relations and pompous civic buildings ; and justified it all with a series of facts collected from the Family Bible, and from accounts of primitive men and Evolution. Their attitude to everything was captative ; and only in moments of extreme distraction were they oblative. Those who had recently ‘ arrived ’ loaded glass-fronted cabinets with sets of china—never used, for fear that they would be broken. They could fill their drawing-rooms with hideous statuettes, and cover their mantelpieces with stupid bric-àbrac and an occasional palaeolith—because there was at least one parlourmaid to dust them. Even more intelligent men, less anxious to impress their families and friends, were afflicted with the same disease : their motives were acquisitive rather than artistic or truly scientific; and if there was any philosophy other than that of mere gain, underlying their systematic collection of curios, it was the philosophy of Evolution, and with it the complacent belief in progress from Palaeolithic Man with his pathetic flint scrapers, to the Victorian Superman, with his eighty-bladed Sportsman's knife.

The late fifteenth- to early seventeenth-century dates reported by Susan McIntosh and Brian Fagan (above) for the richest burials at Ingombe Ilede challenge well-known narratives concerning trade and politics in greater Zambezia. For example, as the authors indicate, Ingombe Ilede now seems more an outcome of the destabilised politics of Great Zimbabwe than a cause of its demise. The role that the inhabitants of Ingombe Ilede played in the shifting competitions and alliances that characterised political and economic life in sixteenth-century Zambezia must now be addressed.

‘There is one straung thing seen ther that in certen Partes of the Ground withyn the Waulles, the Corne is mervelus faire to the Yee, and ready to show Perfecture, it decayith’.

This passage, written by John Leland (1503-1552) after his visit to Silchester in 1541, is perhaps the earliest recorded observation of a cropmark. His account of Silchester was used by most serious workers on the site for the next two hundred years, and treated with the respect it deserved. Willian Camden used it on his visit, and we are not surprised to read in Britannia:

‘The inhabitants of this place told me, it had been a constant observation of theirs, that though the soil here be fat and fertile, yet in a sort of baulks that cross one another, the corn never grows so thick as in the other parts of the field; and along these they imagine the streets of the old city to have run. Here are commonly dug up British Tiles and great plenty of Roman Coins’.

In 1925, Professor Dart of the Witwatersrand University described the well-known Taungs skull (Australopithecus). He pointed out that, in spite of the obviously ape-like proportions of the brain, there were certain features (particularly in the dentition) in which this fossil primate resembled Man more closely than do any of the known anthropoid apes. In general, other anatomists agreed that this certainly was so, but some regarded the resemblances as little more than interesting examples of parallelism having no particular reference to the origin of the human family (Hominidae). In 1936 and the following years, Dr R. Broom, F.R.S., of the Transvaal Museum, discovered many more remains of similar ape-like creatures, including teeth, portions of skulls and jaws, and parts of the limb skeleton. Incidentally, he believed these remains to represent two types closely related to Australopithecus but generically distinct, and he gave them the names Plesianthropus and Paranthropus. Whether this generic distinction will be accepted as valid is a subject of controversy. Actually, however, it is (for the moment) a matter of no great importance, for it is agreed that they all certainly belong to the same group, the Australopithecinae. Dr Broom's account of his discoveries (which were made at Sterkfontein and Kromdraai—not far from Johannesburg) was published in 1946. It became clear from his description and illustrations that the hominid traits of the Australopithecinae were even more remarkable than many anatomists had supposed. So much was this the case, indeed, that some of those who had shown a cautious reserve towards the Taungs skull now expressed their conviction that these extinct primates were by no means merely “ anthropoid apes ”. On the contrary, they agreed that they provided evidence of the utmost importance for problems of human evolution. But although this now became widely accepted, one or two critics continued to combat it with rather unusual (and also rather puzzling) vehemence. Meanwhile, unperturbed by these minor protests regarding his earlier discoveries, Dr Broom was quietly working away at his excavations at Sterkfontein, and in 1947 he came upon an astonishingly rich collection of Australopithecine remains closely packed together in a small and circumscribed locus of dense limestone. This new material proved to be much more complete and perfectly preserved than anything hitherto found in the area, and included several skulls or parts of skulls, many teeth, and an exceptionally fine specimen of a pelvic bone.

A comment, following Webb's paper in the last number, comes from another place where comparable issues have arisen about reburial.

Roman barrows have long been known on the Continent and in R this country, but until recent years they have hardly received the attention they deserve. In the forties and fifties of last century a number of Roman barrows suffered from the jaunty zeal of tophatted antiquaries and their attendant ladies who, as at the opening of the Holborough barrow in 1844, contrived to pass the time ‘at intervals between digging and pic-nicing, in games of various descriptions … and in other amusements’, but who were sometimes glad of the shelter ‘afforded by the hole we had ourselves dug … in which we managed so to interlace parasols and umbrellas … as to form a tolerably impenetrable roof over our heads’.

The Luzira head, a pottery figure discovered in a Ugandan prison compound in 1929, has remained curiously anonymous ever since. New archaeological work on the northern shores of (Lake) Victoria Nyanza has defined a formative period of political centralisation at the end of the first millennium AD. The authors show that this period of early to late Iron Age transition is where this remarkable object and related figurative material belongs. This has implications both for the formation of kingdoms in Uganda and for the story of African art more generally.