The Roman road from Legioliuna (Castleford) to Calcaria (Tadcaster), and its modern descendant, the Great North Road, cross the Cock Beck at Aberford, eight miles north-east of Leeds, Yorkshire (FIG. I). The crossing is defended by a triple system of southward facing banks and ditches which total some 4½ miles in length. The main bank, distinguished by the steepness of its scarp, still rises to 25 feet above the bottom of its ditch, and shows in places the stonework which originally revetted it.

Andrew Fleming's 1987 paper identified coaxial field systems in the British landscapes that could be dated over a long time-period, from Neolithic to Roman. What does that time-span imply and amount to?

The pilgrimage to Mecca made on foot across Africa from west to east between the desert and the tropical forest keeps many West Africans in close touch with the valley of the Nile. The pilgrims follow a route along which culture must from the earliest times have been spread by refugees, traders, military expeditions and the like. (In these latter days motorized convoys of West African troops and aerial reinforcements for the Middle East have followed the same route).

Over twenty years’ service in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (of which twelve years were spent in Darfur, where the cultural and political influence of West Africa was strong in medieval times, and is still felt today), has left me much interested in West Africa, although I have never been there.

Since taking his PhD at the University of Sheffield Dr Stephen Pierpoint has been working as ‘Archaeologist’ for the North Derbyshire Archaeological Committee. During his research he obtained three radiocarbon determinations (financed by Shffield University) for the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Yorkshire of considerable interest.

Any traveller in South Italy who finds himself in that tract of bleak and desolate country which is intersected by the Bari-Brindisi railroad, will not fail to observe many odd-looking structures in the fields. At a distance they appear to be quaint little conical-shaped huts, some 8 or 9 feet in height, fashioned after the manner of round bee-hives, and composed of flat stones, loosely piled together. They are used, so the natives will explain, as shelters for the cattle, as barns, or as store-houses for the fishermen’s nets.

But further enquiry will elicit some stranger information about them—to the effect that these structures date from time immemorial, and that they are called ‘trulli’, although nobody seems to know the reason why, or what the term really means. The traveller will also be told that if he is enterprising enough to make the adventure into the remoter parts of Apulia, he may see a whole city of ‘trulli’, a city of some 12,000 souls, who live in what must surely be regarded as among the strangest human habitations on earth.

In early 1988 my grandfather, Robert Barron Kerr Stevenson (1913—1992), former Keeper of the National Antiquities of Scotland, was asked about his recollections of his former teacher and colleague Vere Gordon Childe. “There is”, he wrote in reply, “very little that I can say of use to you”. The reason for such a statement seems to be that my grandfather felt that his contacts with Childe had never been concerned with the broad historical and philosophical concepts that scholars were so interested in, believing rather that his own academic perspectives were more from the “worm's eye than the bird's eye view”. Yet what my grandfather knew was a more personal side to Childe that does not come across in his published works.