Kristian Kristiansen, cogent critic though he may be, commits a category error of a depressingly familiar kind. It is a confusion which has led distinguished scholars such as Dumézil into error, and which, by allowing the conflation of such categories as language, ethnicity, race and institution, worked to the detriment of many groups and nations during the twentieth century, and now, no doubt, also in the twenty-first.

Nowhere does he define precisely what he imagines the term ‘Indo-European’ to mean. Following the perspective agreed by most historical linguists I take it to be a linguistic term, pertaining therefore to languages, members of the language family first recognised by Sir William Jones in 1786, and then further analysed and defined by subsequent generations of linguists. Through examination of the phonology, the morphology and the lexicon, all of which are well-defined and well-understood, it can readily be decided and demonstrated whether a specific language belongs to this family or not. So that when Hittite emerged in the early twentieth century from the archives of Hattusa, and later when documents in Tocharian were discovered and deciphered, the place of both those languages within that family could readily be agreed. Such a methodology is clearly not applicable to social institutions: it only works with words.

In the American journal Science for 1920 mention was made of my plan for investigating certain laminated clays in North America. During a previous visit to that country in 1891 I had noticed, in several places, laminated clays, similar to late glacial melting sediments in Sweden ; these I had found, by long continued investigations, to represent the annual deposit from the melting water along the border of the retreating ice-edge. (Plate I). With the aid of a graphic method for the comparison of the sharply marked annual layers or varves, I had succeeded in identifying such varves from one point to another, and ultimately worked out a systematic plan for the elaboration of a continuous time-scale. (See page 309). This was mainly carried out in 1905-6 on the basis of field measurements made with the assistance of a number of able young geologists. During the following year this standard scale was completed at many points. I thus succeeded in tracing, step by step, the recession of the ice-edge and the immediately following progress of the clay varves over one region after the other, until the whole line from the south to the centre of Sweden had been traced.

The authors deconstruct the fictional image of Neanderthals, showing why we see them in the way we do.

The discovery of the cave art of France and Spain did more than anything else to make the ordinary man aware of the immense significance of the discoveries made in the field of pleistocene man during the nineteenth century. In many ways the superior of the conventionally accepted ‘art’ of the day, the paintings and engravings captured the imagination of people to whom flints and bones meant little. They made real the existence of man in the ice age, and through them men could look into a primitive world, situated not in the distant places of the earth, but close to the centres of modern civilization.

In ANTIQUITY 1948, p. 35, a brief account was given of the first season’s work on a Bronze Age sanctuary and burial site on Cairnpapple Hill, near Torphichen in West Lothian. With the co-operation of the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works, excavations were continued in the summer of 1948. The site was completely stripped, and revealed a complex series of structures indicated by the sockets of once-standing stones or by stones still extant. It will be laid out and conserved by the Department as an Ancient Monument under guardianship. The following account of the main results of the 1947–8 excavations is intended as a preliminary to the full excavation report, which will appear in due course in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, who financed the first season’s work.

Cairnpapple Hill, the summit of which is within the 1000 feet contour, is a part of the Bathgate Hills, which form a compact block of high land between the main road to Stirling on the north and from Glasgow to Edinburgh on the south. On the summit, the site before excavation was chiefly distinguished by the grass-grown cairn which gives its name to the hill, but most maps and the earlier antiquarian literature indicated a ‘fort’ on the same site. Field-work in 1946 had shown that the cairn stood eccentrically within a low roughly circular earthwork (the ‘fort’) which on surface showing was almost certainly a member of the ‘Henge Monument’ class of structure. The site was confused by an octagonal turf dyke which had been made round the cairn in the late 18th or early 19th century to enclose a plantation of trees, now vanished.

It is but rarely that we light upon any trace of those articles of furniture which must have been in daily use in every Romano-British home. The purpose of this article is to call attention to a series of objects which contribute something to our scanty knowledge of this subject, namely the carved fragments of Kimmeridge shale occasionally found during the excavation of Romano-British sites. Of these no less than seven are on view in the Dorchester Museum. All were found at or near Dorchester, and there seems no reason to doubt that they were made locally, as a shale industry is known to have existed in Dorset since Neolithic times.

The best known piece is probably the one discovered at Colliton Park, Dorchester, in a rubbish pit 16 feet deep, lying beneath the hypocaust of one of the houses of the Roman town of Durnovaria (PLATE I, I) . It consists of the leg of a piece of furniture with a tenon top made to fit into a mortise in some flat surface. The upper part of the leg is carved to represent an animal’s head with an open mouth and a lolling tongue, the latter being extended in an unrealistic manner to join the leg, which swells out to meet it. Below the animal’s head the leg is cut away in a semi-circle at the back and shows in front a fluted band which may perhaps be a reminiscence of some form of foliate ornamentation. Behind the animal’s head is a small notch. The leg itself terminates in a claw foot. Part of another leg of this type, a little smaller in size, was found on the villa site at Frampton near Dorchester (PLATE I, 2). This is carved with a head resembling that on the Colliton Park leg, but here a space has been hollowed out between the elongated tongue and the animal’s neck, and the band of fluted ornamentation is missing. A third example was discovered during the excavation of the villa at Preston, near Weymouth (PLATE 1, 3) . Of this fragment only the left-hand side is intact, the right-hand side having split away in an almost straight line. The head survives, but the tenon has been broken off, and most of the animal’s tongue has disappeared. On the fragment of a fourth leg which comes from South Street, Dorchester, the extended tongue survives, although the carved head itself has unfortunately been destroyed. The lower parts of two legs ending in claw feet were also found in South Street, and another foot of the same type was recovered from the Roman level at Maiden Castle .

The public will not allow us to deal exclusively with things that are facile, amusing, curious, bizarre, passé, things that present no danger, because they concern societies which are either extinct or remote from our own. The public wants studies with conclusions relevant for the present [. . .] let us not be weary of bringing [scientific] facts into the debate. And if our practical conclusions will turn out to be meagre and hardly topical? All the more reason for us to propagate them liberally and energetically. (Marcel Mauss 1927, cited in Schlanger 2006: 15)

The early Neolithic rondel is a large curvilinear ditched and palisaded enclosure found in increasing numbers in Central Europe. It has close links with the tells of the Danube region, themselves highly suggestive instruments of the earliest Neolithic. Here the authors extend the distribution of rondels further to the north-east, with the discovery and verification of the first example in Poland. As they point out, it is aerial photography that made this advance possible and we can expect many more discoveries, given appropriate investment in the art.

Dr Marshall McKusick is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, USA. He and others have been concerned with the rise of antiquarian speculation in the United States, which is historically comparable to mound-builder theories of a century ago that gained great popular currency. Professor McKusick's book on the subject of the various speculations Atlantic voyages to prehistoric America, will be published early next year by the Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale.

Since about 1870, when a Dr Leitner, of the Punjab service, brought from north-western India a small collection of Buddhist ‘Indo-Scythian’ sculptures to England, the literature of the so-called Gandhāra art has not ceased to grow, and the last decade has added rather more than its quota. Dr H. Buchtal has re-emphasized and re-illustrated the affinities between this Buddhist art and that of the Roman Empire (1). Dr L. Bachhofer has recognized the emergence of a Partho-Buddhist art based on secular Hellenistic imports into Gandhāra in the 1st century A.D. (2) Entrenched behind the formidable ramparts of his unpublished Taxila, that great veteran Sir John Marshall has machine-gunned both the learned doctors with a vigour most happily unimpaired by the ills to which he lightly refers (3). And, since I do not always find myself in agreement with Sir John, I may at once say this : that, had Drs Buchtal and Bachhofer done no more than draw his fire, they would have deserved sufficiently well of us.

A key to the understanding of ancient iconography is knowing just what the pictures are pictures of. That is not always an easy question: in this case, a classic collection of Peruvian depictions, it is at least clear the pictures are of birds. But what kind of bird, and why?