In the winter seasons of 1924-5, and 1925-6 the British School of Archaeology in Egypt granted me generous facilities to go to the Fayum and conduct, on its behalf, a preliminary inquiry into the question of the significance of the obscure prehistoric period known there since many years by the quantities of fine and varied flint implements reported, and picked up, on the desert surface of the northern area, by explorers and dealers.

Very little work has so far been done on the Bronze Age in South-East Bulgaria. This is an area which is of the greatest importance in the prehistory of South-Eastern Europe, a fact which has been often stressed by archaeologists working in the Eastern Mediterranean [I]. Geographically linked closely to Asia Minor and the Mediterranean lands, and especially to the Troad, South-East Bulgaria should provide important data for the establishment of relations between these lands in the Bronze Age. With these aims in mind the village settlement of Ezero, a site which even before excavation was obviously one of many periods, presented itself clearly as a place for excavation. Ezero, also known as Dipsis, is 3 km. south-east of Nova Zagora: it is not far from the well-known settlement site of Karanovo and 24 km. from the Azmak mound described in a recent number of this journal [2]. Preliminary excavations carried out from 1952-8 at Ezero showed that the settlement had a great thickness of occupation levels dating from the Early Bronze Age. Systematic excavation was restarted in 1961 and continued in 1963 and 1964.

The site is bordered by swampy ground and large open water-meadows. The damp, easily worked soil was well suited to primitive agriculture, and the meadows to stock-rearing.

Communities which depend for their existence wholly or largely on food-gathering (agriophages)—hunting, fishing, and the gathering of wild vegetable products—use implements that differ somewhat from those used by food-producing peoples (trophogens) who live by agriculture and pastoralism. Actually it is seldom, if ever, possible to draw a hard-and-fast line between the two economies; we ourselves, for instance, with our highly industrialized food-production, still depend to a very large extent on an equally industrialized form of food-gathering, viz. fishing. This is because we have not yet learnt how to domesticate the herring. Archaeologically, however, the distinction can be made, as is now well known, between the food-gathering economy of the Mesolithic and earlier periods, and the food-producing economy of the Neolithic and later phases.

Three decades have elapsed since Williams-Hunt (1950) described the results of an aerial survey of archaeological sites in N.E. Thailand. He observed four site-types. The most abundant was a disposition of practically circular earthworks which looked like moats and ramparts. Williams-Hunt described them as small defended towns. There are also four ‘metropolis’ sites with a large gap between inner and outer ramparts, several sites located on rock outcrops, and a number of sites with an irregular layout and possible periods of enlargement. The sites concentrate in the valleys of the Mun and Chi rivers (FIG. I). Williams-Hunt had no clear information on the dates of the sites, although pioneer work by Prince Damrong in I904 and Quaritch-Wales (1936) just before the second war suggested occupation before the Khmer occupation of the Khorat Plateau in the eleventh century AD. ‘Further comment’, he concluded, ‘would be futile. The excavator’s spade alone will provide the final answer.’

The use of pairs of straight or curved timbcrs to support the ridge-pole of a primitive Td welling affords one of the most fundamental of all house types. In England, Scotland and Wales, it developed into the complex cruck framework which, although it has many close analogies in north-western Europe, is a unique feature of peasant architecture, Detailed studies of the cruck buildings of northern England have been made by Addy (1), Innocent (2) and, more recently, by the writer of the present paper (3)) whilst Sigurd Erixon has published an excellent comparative study of analagous types (4). The object of this paper is primarily to trace the evolutionary stages through which the cruck building and its allied forms passed.

Recent decades have seen remarkable finds of metal objects from Irish soil – and equally remarkable consequences when some of those objects have surfaced on the open antiquities market.

The Anthropocene is here, but do we need the Anthropocene, and if so, when do we want it to start? My responses are ‘no’ and ‘never’ if the answers to those questions require a discrete definition of the Anthropocene and a specific start date. In that regard, I agree generally with Braje's arguments. Particularly unsettling in Anthropocene discourse (in archaeology or geology) has been the search for discernable origins in the form of golden spikes, and I am suspicious of even setting the Holocene as an Anthropocene equivalent. That stated, archaeology can and should continue to contribute to interdisciplinary Anthropocene dialogues.

We thank the four commentators for adding new dimensions and important data relevant to interpreting the new Ingombe Ilede dates. These contribute to the recent wave of reassessments and critiques of earlier interpretations and frameworks for the development of trade and complexity in southern Africa. Such reconsiderations are made possible by more sophisticated and precise radiocarbon dating, expanded investigation of both new and previously excavated sites, and by the use of chemical analyses to identify differently sourced groups of glass beads and metals (e.g. Pikirayi 2009; Robertshaw et al. 2010; Chirikure et al. 2013, 2014, 2016; Koleini et al. 2016).

Archaeomagnetic dating has recently come of age. The creation of the British reference curve in 1988 allows the authors plausibly to link a north French site with a well-known historical event

‘Dear dead women, with such hair, too – what's become of all the gold’? ROBERT BROWNING, ‘A toccata of Galuppi's’ What became of most of the Classical gold and silver, argues Michael Vickers, is that it went into the melting pot, with exceptions like the Sevso treasure recently brought to public spectacle. Classical ceramics, more commonplace and with nil potential for recycling, have been luckier in their survival. Those accidents of later history need to be remembered as Classical Greece is envisaged; and it is perhaps even more important to bear in mind the reasons why many students of antiquity have until recently chosen to downplay the rôle of precious metal