At the moment when Attila was preparing to attack the Western Empire a priest named Salvian, driven by the invasions from the Rhineland to Marseilles, published his tract De Gubernatione Dei, one of the strangest amongst the off spring of declining Latin literature.

It is well known that in geologically recent times the British Isles have been affected by vertical movements, both upwards as shown by raised beaches and downwards as proved by submerged land surfaces and drowned valleys. There are still differences of opinion whether these movements result from changes in the level of the ocean surface or are due to real upward or downward movements of the land area. In the former case a change of sea level might be expected to produce within small limits the same amount of apparent elevation or depression of the land area, whereas in the latter case the amount of movement might vary at different parts of the coastline.

The famous lakeside sites of Switzerland have long been known for their pile dwellings and their massive quantities of Late Bronze Age metalwork. On the most recent excavations, the bronzes have been mapped in situ, allowing comparison with assemblages from dryland sites and rivers, as well as providing a context for the nineteenth-century collections. The pile dwellings emerge as special places where depositions of selected bronze objects in groups or as single discards, comparable to those usually found in dryland deposits or in rivers, accumulated in the shallow water during a unique 250-year spell of ritual practice.

As noted by Geoffrey Chamberlain, the two baby girls found in Tutankhamen's tomb were probably his stillborn heirs. More controversially he suggested that they were twins, although one appeared to be larger than the other. Here new research on estimating the age of a fetus is shown to support the twin hypothesis, while recent work on Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome explains why they could be such different sizes.

During and immediately after the 1939-45 war archaeology in China was practically at a standstill. With the world quietening down once more, the study of the human past began again to make a tremendous spurt forward. From Siberia through Western Asia and Africa to Central America excavation began everywhere. China, where the culture of Eastern Asia was born, was no exception. Before the war there was only a handful of archaeologists in the Chinese field. They were either enthusiasts from abroad or graduates of Harvard or London who worked on a few limited sites or some ancient tombs which had been discovered by accident. In the last fifteen years the situation has been greatly altered. Hundreds of young archaeologists have been trained in the universities as well as in permanent quarters erected close to the important sites under the direction of the Institute of Archaeology. They are organized into field teams that can be sent to any part of the country to co-operate with local workers. They work in the field and produce their reports by group discussion.

One of the outstanding problems of British archaeology and perhaps the most important of those which still await solution, is that involved in the revival of Celtic and La T h e motives in 7th century art. This question has been discussed in various recent publications by Dr Mahr, Mr Kendrick and Dr Wheeler. So far however there is no sign of ultimate agreement. With this question is bound up the origins of that Irish Christian art which had so spectacular a blooming in such objects as the Books of Durrow and Kells, the high crosses of Monasterbois and Clonmacnoise and the Tara brooch.

The main centre of literary activity was transferred from Athens to Alexandria about 250 B.c., and this city, which had been founded by Alexander in 332 B.C., under Ptolemy Philadelphus became a great book mart.

As far as the history of libraries is concerned, the Alexandrian library was comparatively late. The East had known libraries thousands of years earlier. The Greeks themselves had founded their first state library about one hundred years earlier ; this was established by the Greek government at Heracleia, on the southern shore of the Black Sea, some time before 350 B.C., in the days when the great Alexander was a little boy.

Professor Renfrew, who holds the Chair of Archaeology in the University of Southampton, has prepared for us an account of the sanctuary at the important site of Phylakopi in the Cycladic island of Melos, excavated by the British School of Archaeology at Athens from 1896 to 1899. The publication (Atkinson et al., 1904) was a landmark in the study of European prehistory. The person in day-to-day charge (although not nominally Director) was Duncan Mackenzie, who later assisted Evans at Knossos. Mackenzie's Daybooks have been preserved and are a useful source of stratigraphic information.

Excavation was resumed in 1974–7, directed by Professor Renfrew, for the British School of Archaeology at Athens, with the authority of the Greek Archaeological Service. The most important and altogether unexpected result has been the discovery of a sanctuary of the Mycenaean period, with a number of very beautiful finds (cf. Frontispiece)* as well as some highly unusual ones (male figurines). The only well-preserved Mycenaean shrine previously excavated is that at Mycenae itself, discovered by Lord William Taylour and first published in this journal (Taylour, 1969 and 1970).

The Phylakopi shrine is of great importance for the Mycenaean period in the Cyclades, for the understanding of Mycenaean cult and religion, and for the several works of art which it has yielded, including the Lady of Phylakopi, perhaps the most beautiful of the ceramic cult figures known from the Mycenaean world.

A recent study of the Quranwala Zone (QZ) of the north-west sub-Himalayas, India, presents evidence for anthropic activity during the Pliocene that includes a number of stone tools found in association with fossil animal bones with cut marks. Based on the date of the Pliocene rock outcrop, the tools and bones are suggested to date from 2.6 Ma (Gaillard et al. 2016). There is, however, a question mark over the context of these tools within an outcrop of Pliocene rocks and, hence, over the date of these tools and the fossil bones. The trench from which they were excavated at Masol 2 (Gaillard et al.2016: fig. 3) lies in a depression at the bottom of a slope; the description provided in section 2 of the paper by Gaillard et al. (2016) suggests that the stone tools may not have been in situ within the Pliocene levels, but had accumulated there and were mixed with the fragments of fossil bone due to geological processes. Moreover, many of the stone tools, such as the ‘simple choppers’ found in association with the fossil animal bones (Gaillard et al.2016: figs 6, 8, 9), are usually found on much more recent sites and are therefore unlikely to date from 2.6 Ma.

This is not the occasion to discourse of the Art of Lying in general. The subject is too wide for any essay, and the present writer can claim no special competence. Yet, contrary to much generally received opinion, mankind for the most part are extremely bad liars,—not for want of practice, but because of inherent deficiency. This proposition is accepted as axiomatic in the practice of law and in the science of history. Few witnesses can survive a really skilled crossexamination unless they are speaking the truth or a fairly close approximation to it, and the historical witness is in little better case. The difficulties inherent in testimony are immense, but deliberate untruthfulness seldom prevails.

There is little doubt that the small lithic assemblage from the Isles of Scilly is totally different to that from any other Mesolithic site in Britain. As the authors correctly state, the general resemblances to trapeze-dominated assemblages from the continent, in particular to the Late and Final Mesolithic industries from northern France, Belgium and the southern Netherlands, are very obvious. Typologically, the majority of armatures relate to continental rhombic trapezes, called ‘trapèzes à bases décalées’. Upon closer examination, however, several armatures display morphological or technical features that deviate from continental trapezes, making the Scilly assemblage both unique and enigmatic within north-west Europe. In particular, the presence of a dorsally or ventrally retouched base between both truncations on at least 20 of the armatures (p. 962, fig. 5) is remarkable. This is a feature that does not occur on continental trapezes, not even on the evolved rhombic trapezes known as flèches de Dreuil. The latter are particularly numerous in assemblages from the Somme valley (Ducrocq 1991), near the coast where the Channel crossing is narrowest. The combination of a length–width ratio typically <1 and the general use of flakes as blanks prompts us to interpret these implements as transverse arrowheads rather than standard trapezes. Pursuing this interpretation, the basal retouch might have been applied in order to facilitate their hafting, while the irregular small ‘splinters’ on the unretouched opposite end, visible on several of the drawings, might correspond to damage resulting from use.