A POST-ROMAN inscription at Penmachno, Caernarvonshire, (Macalister's number 396) reads, in part:

The comment of Macalister is: ‘As Rhys, followed by Nash-Williams … has shown, this inscription dates the stone to A.D. 540, the year of the consulate of Justinus’. Whether this date is that of the ‘son of Avitorius’ commemorated at right angles to the words cited is uncertain, and for our present purpose unimportant. The point is that here we have evidence for the contemporary use of consular dates in Dark Age Britain.

Archaeology as a branch of historical science has made new headway in the thirteen years since the founding of the Chinese People's Republic. The scale of its work has expanded and methods of research have been improved. Large numbers of young archaeological workers have been trained. In the course of the nation's gigantic economic construction, remains of ancient settlements and tombs have been uncovered in many places, yielding numerous important relics which have provided abundant data for archaeological research. Throughout the country, hosts of archaeological workers from research institutes, universities, museums and institutions for the preservation of ancient monuments are carrying out both field work and academic study and have already attained considerable success in their efforts to explore the history of ancient China on the basis of archaeological finds. All this has given further impetus to the advance of Chinese archaeology.

Archaeological finds made in New China are so rich that the present article can attempt to discuss only some of the most important problems.

Beatrice de Cardi has been a figure in British archaeological life for much longer than most of us can remember. Less well-known outside Asia are her achievements as an explorer of the archaeology of the countries of the lower Persian Gulf. Here she offers a brief mémoire for us, penned at the age of 93. It is a story of pottery, peoples and vast tracts of ancient lands, then little known.

The study of Geoffrey's book and of the allied Welsh texts is a subject of such complexity, and has produced such a mass of technical literature, that the intrusion of a newcomer into these jealously guarded preserves of recondite scholarship is naturally liable to direct at once the cold stare of disapproval, or at best the wan smile of tolerance upon one so rash. I am not unmindful that in a previous world-conflict Sir (Emeritus Professor) Flinders Petrie put forward views on the Historia from an outsider's standpoint which were instantly demolished in a few quietly incisive notes by Professor R. W. Chambers. But, despite the vast tangle of adherent commentary which now envelops Geoffrey's book to an extent that all too often dwarfs the actual text, it seems likely that certain basic questions—is it a work of fiction or of fact, or if both, in what proportions—should be answerable to some extent by enquiring whether certain passages read convincingly as sheer invention, and if not, what prevented the author from making them so. I hope to show that one can trace in the Historia a use of certain documentary sources which to the best of my knowledge have not been recognized in full before. I venture therefore to put forward these tentative ideas in the hope that they may be followed up or refuted by those more qualified for the task than myself, examining the problem for the first time and from the outside, and in those enforced circumstances in which the only really accessible works of reference are the King's Regulations and the Manual of Military Law. As a contrast it is a pleasure to record my thanks to those who have aided me, notably Professor Ifor Williams, who has given me invaluable advice and helped to eradicate the more egregious errors from my argument.

British archaeology and British archaeologists now live in a fast-changing world. There are new administrative agencies and frameworks, major reviews of monument protection (above, this issue) and of university archaeology (last issue), a fundamental shift in the economics of the countryside (current issues passim), and a new mood in which an entrepreneurial ‘heritage industry’ has become conspicuous.

In 1986 the Environment Select Committee of the House of Commons investigated historic buildings and ancient monuments. Peter Fowler here reports the attitudes it brought to its study of archaeology and history, and the assessments of their value that it made.

Sir Walter Scott ’, Andrew Lang once remarked, ‘ entered literature through the ruined gateway of archaeology ’. The influence of Scott’s poetry, and of the Waverley Novels, upon the growing antiquarian and romantic taste of the early 19th century is a commonplace which needs no enlargement here, but it should have a particular interest to us as Fellows of a Society founded for the study of Scottish antiquities when young Walter was nine years old, and to which he was elected in 1796. That one of his novels should be called The Antiquary is no mere chance, and in Jonathan Oldbuck of Monkbarns, who plays the title-r6le, Scott produced a character whom he acknowledged as in part a humorous caricature of himself. As a crumbling pilaster, or mouldering gargoyle, of Lang's ruined gateway, I should like tonight to direct your attention to The Antiquary’s, and The Shirra’s, archaeological ancestors : what was the climate of antiquarian thought in which Scott had been brought up and how is it reflected in his work ? I do not promise anything new in this brief enquiry, but there are points of interest which may not have been brought together before.

A little bow — at less than half a metre long too small to be a practical tool — comes from the later prehistoric Fenland of east England. Along with the wristguards, fine arrowheads and smoothing stones of the British Bronze Age, it tells of the special meaning of archery in later prehistory — whether in the animal chase or in human combat.

In response to increased international collaboration in archaeological research of the South Caucases, a recent workshop has addressed important issues in applying GIS to the study of heavily modified landscapes in the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

A further statistical study of the weights of distinctive objects from the Scandinavian Bronze Age finds, again, a system of standardized units, and looks as far as Egypt for an identity of pattern.

At the time when Darwin published his Descent of Man comparatively little was known of the fossil remains either of men or apes, so that the discussion of the evidence of palaeontology played an altogether insignificant part in his argument. Apart from the discoveries that had been made in the Neanderthal cave and at Gibraltar, nothing was known of fossil man, and what little was known was puzzling rather than helpful. Little more had then been recovered of the fossil remains of apes than a few fragments of Pliopithecus and Dryopithecus.

Coppergate, one of the many York streets with a name of Scandinavian derivation, runs through the heart of modern York, though it lies some way outside the Roman legionary fortress. Evidently the Roman Ouse Bridge had, by the Viking Age, been replaced by another, further downstream, and this had caused the city centre to shift. In the mid-1970s York City Council decided to clear and develop five of the long narrow properties which run back from Coppergate towards the nearby River Foss. York Archaeological Trust carried out preliminary investigations which showed that well-preserved Anglo-Scandinavian buildings were to be found on the site, with organic remains excellently preserved in the waterlogged deposits. The Trust therefore chose to excavate four of the tenements before development began. Five years of continuous work on the site produced an occupation sequence which began with timber buildings of the first century AD, canabae outside the Roman fortress.