The middest of this shire [Wiltshire] which for the most part lieth plain and even, is divided athwart from East to West, with a dyke of wonderful1 work, cast up for many miles together in length: the people dwelling thereabout call it Wansdyke, which upon an error generally received, they talk and tell to have been made by the Divell upon a Wednesday.’ So wrote John Aubrey in 1663 in his Monumenta Britannica and, since his day, Wansdyke, one of the two mightiest linear earthworks of ancient Britain—the other is Offa’s Dyke—has rightly attracted the admiration and speculation of innumerable antiquaries (PLATE X (a) ).

History has been studied and histories written for more than two millennia. From time to time attempts have been made to discern some pattern or design running through it. But they have usually failed because the data have been inadequate. You cannot see the pattern of a carpet when only a minute portion is uncovered, and you cannot discern the pattern of history until large portions of it are available for examination. It was not until the 19th century that really long vistas were opened up by archaeological exploration in the East. Here, in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Crete, there were found the remains of forgotten civilizations; and Sir Flinders Petrie, one of the pioneers in that work of epoch-making in the literal sense, has himself sketched an outline of the pattern he believes he can see emerging. The present essay is an attempt to interpret and explain that pattern.

Tom Greeves referred to conservation and archaeology in the Somerset Levels in his Green paper (Archaeology and the Green movement, ANTIQUITY 63 (December 1989): 659–65). John Coles, who has run the Somerest Levels Project since 1973, takes issue.

How has Turkey used archaeology to define itself and address political goals? How have these goals clashed with western Europeans in pursuit of the Hittites and ancient Greeks? The author analyses the context of her own work in the Black Sea coastal area of Turkey, and deconstructs its ethnic influences in the context of modern archaeology.

Classical archaeology has a bad name with many prehistorians, partly because of its preoccupation with aesthetics, partly because it regards matenal remains as subsidiary to literature. But even if the exponents of Greek archaeology appear amateurish, their subject has a theoretical value for prehistoric studies. Excavation has been extensive and written records often provide checks on conclusions that might be suggested by the material evidence. I give some examples.

The study of the archaeology of eastern Christendom is as yet still in its infancy and the students of east Christian and Byzantine art have been few and far between in England. But of recent years there has arisen a new and more general interest in the civilization which was so violently condemned by Gibbon, and work both of a theoretical and of a practical character has been undertaken on a wider scale. With the theoretical or purely scholastic aspect we are not here concerned; but it seems of interest to present a brief survey of the actual work which has been undertaken by British investigators at Constantinople, the very centre of the Byzantine civilization. During the last four years excavation on a larger or smalIer scale has been in progress, and six separate sites have been examined more or less elaborately as funds have permitted. In 1927 and 1928 a large Expedition, supported by the British Academy, was in the field. In 1929 and 1930 funds were raised in England for work of a more modest nature, but the results were none the less interesting and in one instance discoveries were made which can well be classed within the realms of the sensational.

It is useful to know that Joanna Close-Brooks, at Edinburgh in the National Museum of Antiquities, has found its only bronze double axe to be not from Co. Antrim, Ireland, but a nineteenth-century acquisition from Attica, Greece. Her information rightly opens the review of the claims for such axes in the West, by Stephen Briggs in ANTIQUITY last December (Briggs, 1973). Those in our museums with no such Aegean provenance he makes now five, since Anthony Harding informed him that in the British Museum's Card-catalogue (formerly British Association's) another is drawn and recorded as kept–at least in the 1920s—in the Farnham, Dorset (Pitt Rivers) Museum, without a provenance at all.

For natural reasons it is somewhat difficult to find remnants of prehistoric dwellings in Denmark. Our early forefathers utilized perishable materials in their house building, such as wood and straw. They made use also of clay and sod and, to a small extent, of natural stones. However, Denmark is one of the most intensely cultivated lands of Europe. The plough has been almost everywhere; and when the ploughshare has gone through the remnants of a hut of sod and clay the site is generally spoilt for the archaeologist. As a rule, we cannot expect to find any house-site intact unless it has been covered with a layer of soil, sufficient for protection against the plough.

While our knowledge of the prehistoric dwellings is, on the whole, very incomplete, we know something about the dwellings of the Iron Age for the cultural deposits are comparatively thick. It was probably not until the Early Iron Age—i.e. the La Tène and Roman periods—that agriculture reached such a stage of development that successive generations might dwell on the same site. Our best finds are from the northern part of Jutland. In Thy and Himmerland there are a number of deposits of Roman and the pre-Roman Iron Age with a depth of 1–2 m., containing several dwelling-sites above each other. Evidently, there existed in northern Jutland small village-sites, in the Roman period and probably somewhat earlier, of permanent habitation and occupied for several generations.

The great Syrian fortress of Le Krak des Chevaliers, the best known, as it is on the whole the finest and best preserved, of the Crusader castles, has recently been made the subject of a brilliant and exhaustive study by M. Paul Deschamps; taken in conjunction with earlier notices by Rey, Van Berchem, T. E. Lawrence and others, this has left archaeologists in an exceptionally favourable position with regard to their knowledge of this castle. A few objections on points of detail might be raised to Deschamps' conclusions, but it appears to me that there is only one important question on which further clarification of our existing knowledge is needed : the reconstruction of the siege and capture of the Krak by the great Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Bybars, in April 1271. The accounts given by the Arab historians of the period are not perfectly clear, and the explanations offered by Van Berchem and Deschamps do not appear to be the best possible, in view of the evidence of the fabric itself. In order to obtain a sounder idea of what occurred in the siege, it will first be necessary to consider the buildings and their history in brief.

The southern shore of the Caspian Sea is well known for its great potential in relation to sites of Mesolithic date (e.g. Coon 1951; Jayez & Vahdati Nasab 2016). Situated between two major geographic barriers—the Alborz Mountains to the south, and the Caspian Sea to the north—this area has been considered one of the major hominin dispersal corridors during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition (Vahdati Nasab et al. 2013). Furthermore, the relatively stable and mild climatic conditions, vast and lush temperate forests, and abundance of fauna and water resources have all made this region an attractive niche for human settlement.

Dr Jan Albert Bakker, of the Albert Egges van Giffen Instituut voor Prae-en Protohistorie, University of Amsterdam, presents us with what he has called, in a letter to the Editor, ‘an article on sixteenth-century Stonehenge drawings, partly well-known, partly not’. His main concern is with the Flemish painter Lucas de Heere's drawing and description of Stonehenge. Published in 1937 by two Dutchmen, it is perhaps fitting that it has taken a third, in Dr Bakker, to draw the attention of British archaeologists to what they have overlooked for more than 40 years. Dr Bakker, who has excavated and studied hunebeds and their contents in Drenthe, was stimulated by Professor Piggott's ‘Ruins in a landscape: essays on antiquarianism’ to study the authorship and the nature of the L.D.H. drawing of Stonehenge. Dr Bakker would like to express his gratitude to Miss Linda Therkorn, Amsterdam, for assistance in preparing this article in English.