This is a story that will appeal to all scholars involved with the interpretation of rock art. Figures depicted on rock surfaces in jungle terrain patrolled by soldier ants were thought in the nineteenth century to record an otherwise unknown early episode of invasion and resistance – and were widely published as such. A recent survey by a Myanmar-Australian team has made more correct records of the earlier forms and now offers fresh interpretations: the carvings are due to fifteenth-nineteenth century artisans working at quarries producing objects for the town of Mrauk-U, and they evoke local creatures and architectural echoes of the town and temples on which they worked.

Another contribution to discovering the history and origin of words for ‘prehistory’ comes from Sweden, a critical land for 19th-century archaeological ideas.

I have grown increasingly allergic to arguments about analogies and origins in archaeology. Analogies are simply devices to stimulate the invention of ideas. The source of intuition is fairly irrelevant for the power of the ideas thus generated. The history of science is full of exciting hypotheses that had amusing sources, often far removed from the actual contexts to which the idea ultimately applied.

Northern Britain is one of the best known and most extensively resoarched frontier regions in the Roman Empire. The fluctuations of Roman occupation in the late 1st, mid 2nd and early 3rd centuries AD are quite well understood and emphasize the peripheral character of the area, which never completely succumbed to Roman conquest. It also offers the opportunity to study the processes of interaction between Rome and indigenous peoples at the limits of empire. Too often, however, these have been seen as incidental to the main action, as if the local people were only the supporting cast for the foreign stars. If separately considered at all, the indigenous population has tended to he relegated to discussion of the native background, but over the last decade or so research has moved them more strongly into the foreground.

A few years ago I was talking to a friend of mine in our club. It was obvious that he had, as we say, something on his mind. ‘Do you realize’, he said, ‘that in this technological age we still have no comprehensive history of technology?’ I paused for a moment, but before I could speak he had answered my thoughts. ‘I don't mean economic history—there are plenty of books about that; technology and economics are quite different’. I asked him to expand this. ‘Well, take any farm you know. An economic survey of it would cover everything on the farm—field-workers and their wages, birds, animals, dung, crops, carts, ploughs, reaping-machines, dairy utensils. But if it's to be a technological survey you concentrate on the carts and ploughs, how they're made, and how they work. What you are then concerned with is how things on the farm are done and made’. When he thus explained it the distinction became obvious. Seeing what was in his mind I murmured : ‘A History of Technology is going to be a big thing’. ‘It is’, he said, ‘for the world is my farm, the human race my farmers and field-workers, and the farm has been a going concern for many millennia’.

When we look back over the past century of archaeological discovery, about a dozen ancient cities loom large in the mind's eye, a gigantic sequence of silhouettes which in turn inform us of their distinctive civilizations. Mycenae, Troy, Boghaz Koi, and now Mohenjo Daro and Harappa are signal examples of cities at which the brave work of the early pioneers was followed by the activities of another generation. These later workers, with an evolved and perfected technique, probed anew and established a more solid and elaborate edifice of knowledge on foundations which their gallant predecessors had often left insecure. If scientific work continues to keep pace with public interest we should be about to enter on another phase. Then the consolidated work of the second generation which has left so many tempting points of attack for a third, will be illuminated by new discoveries no less rewarding. Indeed what lies under land and water is still an immense treasure, for the recovery of which we are now better equipped than ever.

During the seventeenth campaign of the Ras Shamra excavations (1953), we uncovered on the east side of the palace a block of private houses between two streets running parallel in an east-west direction. In one of the buildings (which is still not completely excavated) we found several bronze objects buried in a corner of the inner court in the middle of which were two troughs. Stratigraphically the building is assigned to the latest layer of Level I which dates from the 13th century B.C. Amongst the ceramic remains found is a female Mycenaean idol of poor workmanship and a bowl with wishbone-handle of Cypriot type, also plainly of late date.