The last two decades have seen an exponential rise in scholarly interest and research into childhood, and children, in the past (e.g. Scheuer & Black 2000; Baxter 2005; Lewis 2007; Finlay 2013; Halcrow et al. 2018). Multiple publications have explored the scholarly origins of the field, detailing its complex and multidisciplinary development (Prout 2005; Halcrow & Tayles 2008; Lillehammer 2015; Mays et al. 2017). Several authors (e.g. Lillehammer 2015; Mays et al. 2017) have also, very successfully, synthesised extant research themes and investigations, and proposed future research directions. Consequently, although this field is in its relative infancy, its voice is louder than ever as the importance of studies of childhood and children in the past is realised.

Nearly two years have passed since Dr L.S.B. Leakey announced the first of a series of remarkable discoveries at Olduvai Gorge, Tanganyika. The great importance of this region as a palaeontological hunting ground has been appreciated since 1911 when, by chance, a German entomologist picked up a number of fossil bones which had been eroded on to the surface of the slopes of this East African Pleistocene canyon. Since 1931 Dr Leakey has made repeated visits to the Gorge where steadily he has been building up the evidence of an early stone-age cultural sequence.

In July, 1959, Dr and Mrs Leakey discovered a hominid skull which was lying partly exposed on the slopes, 22 ft. below the upper limit of Bed I, the lowest stratum of the Pleistocene sequence at Olduvai. Excavation of the site revealed that the skull was fragmented but almost complete and was lying on a living floor containing tools of a recognized culture (Oldowan) as well as waste flakes and unworked stones, all foreign to the site; in addition there were a number of broken and splintered bones of small animals which had apparently constituted part of the diet of the incumbents. Subsequently, a tibia and fibula were recovered from the same living floor. Dr Leakey named the skull Zinjanthropus boisei (PLATE x (a)). During 1960, excavations were started at a slightly lower level of Bed I and in December, 1960, Dr Leakey reported the discovery of a number of adult and juvenile bones of the hand and foot, two clavicles and some skull (parietal) fragments. This was rapidly followed by the important discovery of a juvenile mandible from the same level (PLATE XI). A number of stone artifacts of an Oldowan culture have also come to light from the juvenile site.

It has long been obvious that a new policy is wanted for our museums and their buildings. The need, often discussed, now takes on a new urgency. The second world war has visited our cities with insensate destruction on a scale which we have hitherto associated only with Acts of God. Some of our museums have already suffered —and as yet we cannot say when or where more will be damaged or destroyed. Replanning schemes will see old museums rebuilt, new museums established in many places; and now, while such schemes are being blocked out, is the time to see that individually and as a body the museums are planned and developed to the best advantage. The necessary driving force must come from a comparatively small body of people. For as a nation we can hardly be called museum conscious: we have no official museum policy, and the local efforts which are the substitute for it operate so unevenly that a large part of the population is quite without a service which ought to be of great educational and cultural value to all.

As I shall, if I live till mid- July, complete a century of life, the Editor has asked me to write some of my views on archaeology, for I have seen the growth of that subject A practically from its beginning. There was no study of the past unless heavily documented, and the Bible was implicitly believed from 'cover to cover'. Curiously enough the discovery in France of early stone tools could be easily accepted if they were called antediluvian, for then they were the remains of the wicked people who were drowned in Noah's flood. Darwin and Huxley were out-and-out atheists. Fortunately for me my parents were interested in these new ideas, and long residence in Calcutta, where my father was in business, had given them sympathy with non-Christian religions. They had equally free-thinking ideas as to education, which according to them should be a training of the child's mind to think. This of course applied to girls as well as boys. Ordinary subjects, such as arithmetic, geography, history I learnt at home, but specialist subjects like music, drawing, French and German, I learnt from specialists. I had no illusions as to my ignorance or my want of brains. This had been well drummed into me, for when we sat for exams my elder sister always passed among the highest, whereas I never once succeeded in getting enough marks to obtain even a pass. But my family had always been very tactful about my invariable failures and I never was allowed to feel my deficiency. So that when on a day in early January, 1894, I made my way to the Edwards Library at University College to join F. L1. Griffith's class on hieroglyphs, I was as full of enthusiasm for a new subject as if I had always been successful.

Except for some trenches dug in 1865-6, when the Thirsk and Malton railway was constructed, no systematic excavation of the Roman station at Malton has ever been made until 1927. Although casual Roman finds have been plentiful, few of them have been published and little is definitely known about the site and its history, the current Ordnance Survey map merely marking the Fortress as ‘Supposed Roman Camp’. Many of the statements made about it in the past have been purely conjectural. As a result of recent investigations, the writers believe that the time has come when some general statement can profitably be made as to the extent of the site, its importance in Roman times, and the nature of the occupation of the neighbourhood.

Amongst those who have written of the antiquities of Malton in the past, one writer, Rev Dr Young (History of Whitby, 1817) shows unusual judgment and penetration in an age when antiquaries were only too ready to repeat the guesses of their predecessors. The exact position and extent of the Malton fort were unknown before 1927, and few finds are recorded before the 19th century, yet Dr Young recognized it as a place of importance and guessed its position correctly.

When did upper Palaeolithic cave art come to be thought of as religious? The author shows an origin rooted in the intellectual movements of the later nineteenth century, and in particular in the personage and thought of Salomon Reinach.

The site of the Thracian city of Seuthopolis lies about 8 km. to the west of Kazanluk, in the famous Valley of Roses, between the Balkan Range and the Sredna Gora Mountains. A spacious terraced area was formed by the erosion of the River Toundja (the ancient Thracian Tonsus); this is bounded to the north and east by a sloping plateau, on the site of the villages of Koprinka and Dounavtsi; and to the south, the steep slopes of the heights (site of the village of Morozovo (formerly Gorno Cherkovishté), the last of the Sredna Gora foothills, dropped down to the river banks. The last and lowest step of this terraced area projects deep into the bends of the Toundja to the south, forming a peninsula, or tongue of land, the banks of which are 4 to 5 m. in height; to the west and south it is bounded by the River Toundja, and to the east the Golyama Varovitsa or Chiflikchiiska River, a small, but always swiftly flowing tributary of the Toundja, guards its approaches. The Thracian city of Seuthopolis was situated precisely on this spot, called ‘Chiflika’ (The Farm), on the left bank of the River Toundja, defended from the west, south and east by natural barriers of water (PLATE IX).

In this note on Saxon London I am not concerned in detail with the wearisome question whether London did or did not survive through the Dark Ages of the 5th and 6th centuries. Were it not for the vague generalities of an obsessed 6th-century ‘Welshman’, writing a moral thesis probably in Brittany under difficulties which he himself deplores, no one would ever have suggested that London ceased to exist at the time of the Saxon invasions. Yet, it may be recalled, Gildas does not so much as mention London; he was not concerned with London; he was not indeed concerned with history save in so far as it could be subordinated to his propaganda against the sinners of western Britain. Whatever may have happened to the cities of the west, there is in truth no valid historical reason for supposing that London perished after the Roman period, to be born all over again in a Saxon England.

In 1960 there appeared two important studies devoted to the Neolithic gallery graves of Ireland, hitherto considered to be part of the Clyde–Carlingford culture, as defined by Childe and Piggott. The first, by Professor de Valera, is of unique importance: it records and discusses a mass of new evidence for the Irish gallery graves, and advances an entirely fresh theory for their origin and evolution. Dr Corcoran defines and isolates the elements of the Carlingford culture, and argues for its acceptance in its own right, as distinct from the Clyde-Solway culture.

De Valera's paper contains an inventory of 269 sites. No fewer than 152 are planned, of which 97 are new surveys. All the plans are to a small but uniform scale of 3/1000, which greatly simplifies comparisons. Most of the hitherto unrecorded sites are in Connaught, Sligo and Mayo, where de Valera has worked as Archaeology Officer to the Ordnance Survey.

The State Antiquary of Iceland, Kristján Eldjárn, M.A., published in January this year a fine volume containing a report of his recent excavations of pagan graves, and other contributions to early Icelandic history, under the title of Gengidh á Reika, Akureyri, 1948. It is very important that we have got here reliable accounts of systematically explored Viking burials, with diagrams and photographs, all very well done, as Iceland had produced, till now, very little of similar publications. But really exciting is undeniably the news of the discovery of three Roman coins in Iceland.

The place of discovery was at the farm Bragdhavellir, at the head of Hamarsfjord, in the district of Sudhur Mulasyssel, on the southeast coast of Iceland. In a small valley called Djupibotn the gales had partially denuded the ground leaving only the hard stony gravel subsoil. In this place the remains of two primitive houses came to light, certainly representing an ancient farm which had been deserted for long ages. A peasant of the vicinity Jón Sigfusson started searching the site for antiquities and collected a lot of such poor objects as are generally left in country dwellings of the early Middle-Ages, nails and fragments of iron, broken pots of soapstone, stone whorls, some teeth of horse and cow, bits of charcoal, etc. The only object of a more distinct character was a bead of variegated glass, reddish-brown with black and white, possibly dating from the Viking Period. Subsequently a number of the antiquities were sent to the National Museum in Reykjavik, including two Roman coins said to have been found on the same site and under same conditions as the other articles.

The origin of the British coinage has in recent years broken loose from the tradition of an early 2nd century date. Its date is necessarily dependent upon the dating of the Gaulish coinage from which it is derived ; the link with Gaul has militated against the simpler view of the British coinage which would result from bringing the earliest issues into closer relation with those that bear names of princes known to history. The coinage of Gaul has lost perspective by the attempt to make it span the wide gap between Philip 11 of Macedon and the Roman conquest ; a very slow development of type has been assumed, and devious trade routes have been created to bring the gold stater from Macedon into Gaul.