Recent years have seen the publication of some sumptuous reports of the large scale excavations conducted by American enterprise in the years before the war. The sites of Megiddo and Beth-Shan, which can confidently be referred to by their historical and biblical names, are of outstanding importance, dominating as they do the Plain of Esdraelon and the great road from Egypt to North Syria and Mesopotamia. The publications here considered are the latest (but not, it is hoped, the last) of a series dealing with different aspects of the excavations. Both sites have been partially sounded to bed-rock, and show continuous occupation from thc chalcolithic period to the end of the first millennium B.C., and Beth-Shan beyond it. Tell en-Nasbeh is in a different category. It is possibly to be identified with the Biblical Mizpah, but this is not universally accepted. Like many Palestinian hill-country sites, it was occupied in the Early Bronze Age (the ascription of some groups to the chalcolithic period is unsatisfactory). Its main occupation is, however, confined to the Early Iron Age, from the time of the undivided Israelite Kingdom down to the post-exilic, Hellenistic and Roman periods.

The Late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic resettlement of northern Britain, as glacial conditions receded, has a n obvious local interest and raises wider questions for the region. Here is a significant new find from northwest England.

How do visitors make sense of displays? What should curators be trying to achieve with them? Some 70 experts and students spent a day on these and related issues at the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge University, on 23 September last, to celebrate the completed rearrangement of its Greek & Roman gallery. That project provoked much of the discussion but comparisons were drawn from the current development of Oxford Universitys Ashmolean Museum and from elsewhere in Britain and overseas (James 2009, 2010). Short lectures by Kate Cooper and Lucilla Burn, of the Fitzwilliam, and by Rick Mather, architect of the Ashmolean’s rearrangements, were followed by eight panellists’ remarks on technical and methodological issues; and the day was rounded off with the Museum’s Severis Lecture for 2011,Dimitrios Pandermalis on The new AcropolisMuseum: project and realization’ (Figure 1).

Although French archaeologists such as Pbre Poidebard in Syria, and Colonel Baradez in North Africa, have been using air photography very successfully for a long time in sub-desert regions overseas, this has not been so in Metropolitan France. In fact it was a mere ten years ago-a considerable time after systematic air photography had been going on in England-that French research workers began to use air photography, and even then as individual efforts each in his own region. In almost all cases they used, like the author, the aircraft of local aero-clubs, and small non-professional cameras, usually the simple 24 x 36mm. models. That these individual efforts have been far from negligible became more widely apparent in Paris, in August 1963, at the conference on, and exhibition of, air photography organized by M. Raymond Chevallier (ANTIQUITY, 1963, 296), under the auspices of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne where he has recently inaugurated the first university course in photo-interpretation in France.

Apparent deficiencies in Irish legislation for the protection of archaeology have been much commented on (e.g. ANTIQUITY 62: 4–5); here, the Keeper of Irish Antiquities at the National Museum points also to some of its strengths – for example, in protecting artefacts and non-artefactual material as well as sites and monuments – and explains the vigorous measures now taken to bring the law and the penalties up to date.

The results of the research carried out in these last years by the Istituto di Antichità Sarde e di Paletnologia of Cagliari University, particularly in Southern Sardinia, enable us to make a new and useful analysis of the stratigraphy of the cave of S. Bartolomeo, discovered and excavated by Orsoni in 1878 on the limestone promontory of Cape St. Elia at Cagliari, and re-explored by Patroni in 1901.

The cave, as Childe has already pointed out, is the only place in Sardinia which up till now has provided the possibility of stratigraphical observations which (though still under discussion) nevertheless provide us with some reliable and objective data concerning the prehistoric cultures of pre-nuraghic date.

Orsoni found a cavity measuring 5 m. × 4, completely filled from the roof to its rocky floor by an ancient deposit containing human and animal remains. The upper strata of this deposit were largely disturbed by modern graves, contained in a ditch walled in by ‘stones cemented with reddish mud’—and without any grave goods.

The evidence for Pompeian history has been furnished almost entirely by the use of the spade, and, while for the latest period its full and detailed character makes it difficult to pick out a unifying thread through it all, the further back, in time one goes the scantier direct testimony becomes ; until, in dealing with the earliest periods, we are, as it were, building up a case out of evidence which is largely ‘ circumstantial ’. This defect is inherent in the archaeological study of any site, since it is to be expected that what was built latest should be best preserved, but the defect has been aggravated at Pompeii by the way in which, until recently, the excavations have been carried out.