A new suggestion is made for early hominids' interest in stones, and thence for the origin of stone tools.

A salutary test of the advances made in the communication of archaeology to a non-specialist audience is to go into a children's bookshop and ask for books about prehistory. It can be an unsettling experience. This note looks at what was produced on a visit to a children's bookshop in Cambridge, as it indicates the sort of haphazard collection available to a casual buyer.

When I suggested, in commenting on this quotation, that an African cattle-thief would laugh at Beech Bottom dyke, Mr Crawford did not agree; and the idea that seems to prevail with regard to the stopping-power of a ditch and bank is responsible for these notes.

Cattle-defences may be considered under two heads: 1, Fences: 2, Dykes: the latter being actually of secondary importance when the object in view is to keep cattle in or out; and stockades without a ditch do occur in Britain.

This appreciation of George Grant MacCurdy does not purport to record either the main facts or the details of his long and fruitful life. It is merely the appraisal of the man, the teacher, and the scientist by one who was his junior friend and colleague for more than a third of a century. It is designed to supplement the admirable biographical sketch written by Dr Hugh Hencken for the Bulletin $16 of the American School of Prehistoric Research.

From a University of Copenhagen excavation in the United Arab Emirates come two fragments of sheet alabaster, from a large private house dated to the 1st century AD. They prompt consideration of alabaster's use for windows and of provision for natural lighting in the ancient buildings of the broad region, using ethnohistoric observations, medieval literary sources and ancient epigraphic evidence.

A YEAR before the first number of ANTIQUITY appeared, its founder reviewed a new publication for the Antiquaries Journal. ‘This book,’ he began, ‘is the most important of its kind that has hitherto been published…. Never before has the whole field of European origins been surveyed by a specialist who can also generalize, who writes clearly and intelligibly, and who is apparently familiar with all European languages. Its publication brings us appreciably nearer to the ultimate goal of our study.’

Crawford saw that Gordon Childe’s The Dawn of European Civilization, in its first edition of 1925, marked the beginning of a new era in archaeological studies in this country. I suspect that he was one of the very few British prehistorians at that time who realized the fact and appreciated the implications. More than thirty years later a revised sixth edition has been published, appearing almost simultaneously with the tragic news of the author’s death in his native Australia. For a full generation The Dawn, as we have all affectionately called it, has been with us, the indispensable reference-book for student, teacher and interested layman, our Ariadne-clue in the labyrinth of Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age Europe.