In this publication the Director of the National Museum of Wales describes in detail a highly important find of Early Iron Age objects, made on a remote site in Anglesey in 1943 during wartime building operations. As its significance deserved, the discovery was given a good press at the time and readers of ANTIQUITY will already be familiar with it from the article reprinted in the June, 1944, number. But the title records that this too is an interim report: the final account, in which presumably will appear additional objects, one at least of which is of astounding quality, will be awaited with interest.

The well-protected walls and floors of deep caves are some of the few places where human markings on soft materials — sands, muds, clays — survive archaeologically. Since 1979, a special group of caves in the eastern United States has been reported with ‘mud-glyphs’ or prehistoric drawings etched in wet mud. Here, the seventh of these mud-glyph caves is described; once again, its iconography connects it to the ‘Southern Cult’ or ‘Southeast Ceremonial Complex’ of the Mississippian period.

The plates facing pages 385 and 452 of this number represent the culminating point of archaeological air-photography. They were taken by Pilot Officer Jonas, R.A.F., between I I and 12 o'clock on the 16th of May 1929, using a K.Z filter. The sites lie half a mile apart on the hill called Woodbury, less than a mile south of Salisbury Cathedral, between the Blandford and Bournemouth roads. Woodbury is three miles south of the aerodrome at Old Sarum, from which they were taken and where I found them when taking over obsolete negatives on behalf of the Ordnance Survey (where they now are). They were taken during pin-pointing, as part of the ordinary routine of training; but that these particular sites were selected for practice is due to the keenness of the photographic section at Old Sarum, which has been closely associated with the development of this branch of air-photography from its birth. (It was the Old Sarum section that obtained many of the first archaeological air-photographs ever taken, including those of the Stonehenge Avenue, in 1921, and of the Celtic fields round Winchester, in 1922). Regarded merely photographs, from a technical standpoint the negatives are as nearly perfect as possible. The wonderful definition of the crop-marks is probably due partly to the use of a K.2 filter, partly to the dry spell during the first half of 1929.

One of the most widely-known narratives contained in Judaeo-Christian literature is that of ‘Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood’. The version best known to most English readers is derived from the translation of Genesis VI-VIII contained in the 1611 King James Version of the Bible and its subsequent revisions. According to this account, near the end of the Biblical Deluge, the Ark rested ‘upon the mountains of Ararat’. From this locality, according to the story, the ancestral stock of all terrestrial life, including mankind, left the Ark with the order that they ‘be fruitful and multiply upon the earth’. The Hebrew word which has been transliterated as Ararat in English texts may have been ultimately derived from an expression meaning ‘highlands’, and apparently referred to a region at the headwaters of the Tigris River which lay within the ancient boundaries of the Urartu of Assyrian records (Mellick, 1962).

In June this year, we published Geoffrey Wainwright's paper on ‘The Stonehenge we deserve'. This paper aimed to provide a review of progress towards sorting out the many problems of management, presentation and conservation of this World Heritage site and its landscape. As readers of ANTIQUITY are well aware, the fortunes of Stonehenge are intimately linked with politics, money and public opinion, and the long saga of possible solutions to make the site a better place for the future rest on these changing variables. Dr Wainwright outlined past strategies and the hope of future solutions as they were early this year. Already things have changed and the invited responses which we publish here discuss the recent changes of plan for Stonehenge. Baxter & Chippindale review the difficulties of the ‘current’ scheme and its incompatibility with visitor numbers. Fielden exposes the incompatibility of the A303 proposals for Stonehenge with legislation and planning; and Kennet & Young raise the problems of the various Plans and politics.

We sent these responses to Dr Wainwright for his current view of the situation.

N a recent article in the English Historical Review (vol. LII, pp. 193 ff.) Mr C. E. Stevens has examined the question of the ‘Twenty-Eight Cities of Britain’ which are spoken of by Gildas (‘De Excidio’, chap. III) ; and, on the basis that Gildas knew of some Romano-British Notitia Britanniarum, has attempted with considerable success to discover what cities these must have been. Bede (Hist. Eccl. I, I) and Nennius (Hist. Britt., ed. Mommsen, pp. 147 ff.) both repeat Gildas' remark in much the same words ; and in Section VI of the Historia Brittonum their names are given, with the heading Haec sunt nomina omniurn civitatum quae sunt in tota Brittania, quarurn numerus est xxviii. They are in Old Welsh of about the eighth or ninth centuries, and can therefore be contemporary with the compilation of the Historia Brittonum. Each is described as Cair, the Welsh equivalent of civitas in the late Latin sense. Another version of the Historia Brittonum has made the number into thirty-three, no doubt by misreading XXVIII as XXXIII ; the deficiency is filled up with five extra names also in Old Welsh. Some of the forms are however rather younger than in the first version (e.g. Cair Lion for Cair Legion), and the Expanded List may be a century or so later than the original.

Neolithic societies were defined by the development of agricultural economies not only because part of their diet was obtained from cultivated plants, but also because crop-husbandry practices strongly affected people's lifestyles in a variety of ways. It is therefore unsurprising that the development and diffusion of agriculture can be studied from diverse perspectives and with different approaches, by analysing, for example, the macro- and micro-botanical remains of fruits and grains for morphometric and taxonomic variation (Colledge & Conolly 2007) and genetic history (Mascher et al.2016). Conversely, agriculture can be indirectly assessed through its impact on the environment and subsequent landscape modifications (Zanchetta et al.2013; Mercuri 2014). Yet another approach explores crop-husbandry practices as reflected in changing technology. New agricultural tasks required the adaptation of existing technologies and the adoption of new tools and practices, including querns, millstones and other grain-grinding equipment, as well as artefacts and structures for grain storage, cooking and processing.

Earlier fieldwork by the University of Manchester (see ANTIQUITY 64:51–8) identified the important early medieval port of Quentovic. This note reports on the final two seasons of work, which clarified the phasing and extent of this major wic settlement, and on the radiocarbon dates from key features.

The plain of Argos is roughly triangular in shape. The base lies along the sea coast from Lerna to Nauplia and the apex is at Mycenae, which thus overlooks the Argive plain as Deceleia overlooks the Attic. The traveller, who, like Pausanias, approaches Argolis from the northeast by way of Corinth and Nemea and sees, as he emerges from the Tretos defile, the Argive plain opening before him to the southeast, will notice among the foothills to his left a rather inconspicuous, but isolated hill standing out between two steep and rocky conical peaks. This is the citadel of Mycenae. It owes its strength to its natural position, which is easily defensible, and it has an ample supply of fresh water from the spring Perseia running into an underground cistern reached by a secret passage. There were also three wells within the walls and at least one rain-water cistern. No enemy can hope to approach its walls in any force without being observed, and its distance from the coast precludes any danger of surprise from the sea. As a seat of power it is admirably placed. It dominates the Argive plain and it controls the routes that lead northeast to Corinth and the rich districts easily accessible thence, the fertile littoral of Achaia or the Boeotian coast with the central Greek plain behind. The site was thus naturally inhabited early in the Bronze Age, probably from the very beginning of that age on the Mainland of Greece about 2800 B.C., and round it on the outlying hills were neighbouring settlements so that the district even then must have been fairly well populated.

Olive wood is difficult to date for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is that one cannot tell visually what is an annual growth increment (usually referred to as a ‘ring’) and what is a sub-annual growth flush of which there may be any number in one growing season. (I have been able to count a dozen or more flushes in olive wood where the end of the growing season was somewhat more clearly marked than usual.) If one cannot determine the ring boundaries with certainty, one cannot do tree-ring dating, period. For Egyptologists reading this note, acacia is just as bad, and for the same reason. For 25 years I had a couple of sections of olive wood in my dendrochronology lab. Every term I would challenge students to tell me how many rings there were on them. No two students ever came up with the same answer and neither could I. An inspection of two different radii on the same piece also yielded widely varying results. (A side issue, not relevant here, is that the size of the ring in an olive tree does not necessarily reflect climatic conditions but rather the energies of the farmer or gardener who brings water to it. Thus olive is useless for purely dendrochronological cross-dating purposes.

I do not intend in this paper to give a complete history of the dog, but simply to discuss certain problems connected with it, and in particular to describe a number of types belonging to different periods and countries.

Our evidence is for the most part pictorial; .yet it must be used with caution, for difficulties are bound to arise if anmals are represented alone, with no clue to their size. For example, figure 3 shows representations of dogs on coins from Panormus of the 4th century B.c.; artistically they are excellent, but nothing can be inferred as to breed, for this depends on the size, of which we know nothing. On the other hand, figure I, although artistically crude, not only tells us the size of the dog relative to the man beside him, but also that the animal is of Maltese breed (MEAITAIE). This is in fact the only instance in antiquity where a breed can be definitely ascertained, for even when descriptions are given of classical breeds, they are as a rule thoroughly unsatisfactory and establish no certain conclusion.

Paolo Cherubini and colleagues have demonstrated convincingly that the identification of olive wood tree-rings from Santorini is ‘practically impossible’. Thus, the single piece of evidence that might have persuaded some archaeologists to support the ‘high’ 1613±13 BC date for the Theran eruption is hors de combat. The Theran olive-tree branch has gone the way of the Greenland Ice Core results of similar date and which enjoyed a similar devoted following until shown to be from a different eruption. Taken with Malcolm Wiener's explicit exposé of the myriad shortcomings of 14C dating, especially for this time period and event, these results take us back to where we were before the ‘radiocarbon revolution‘, when the largest Holocene eruption in the ancient world happened as Minoan Crete enjoyed wideranging influence, perhaps even control, over the Aegean, when Late Minoan IA pottery styles proliferated, and Egypt was in the early stages of its New Kingdom period (Wiener 2012, 2013).