The main purposes of the excavations conducted on the summit of this mountain were three-fold: to check the commonly accepted equation of Umm el-Biyara with the Biblical Sela' of the Edomites; to determine the character, extent and duration of the Edomite settlement, and to obtain, through stratigraphic excavation, a well-dated series of Edomite pottery and other artifacts.

As general reports on the excavations have been published elsewhere and a preliminary report appeared in the Revue Biblique, it is sufficient in this paper to give only a summary of the findings.

Ideas and theories in prehistory often seem to have a life of their own, surviving and flourishing quite independently of the evidence upon which they might be supposed to rest. The biblical Lost Tribes, the Etruscan migrations of Herodotus, and the Phoenician merchants of Strabo, for example, served for centuries as a model for the explanation of Europe's remote past, unsupported in many cases by any evidence whatsoever.

The discovery in a long pollen diagram from East Anglia of a substantial curve for a pollen-grain referable to Cannabis sativa, L., the Indian hemp, raised the hope that we might, through palynology, have the means of tracing the history of cultivation of this important and sinister economic plant in England and in Western Europe. It was clearly essential that pollen-analytic evidence should be related fully to existing historical and archaeological knowledge, and aided by a notice in this journal (ANTIQUITY, 1964, 287), and by the notable kindness of a great many academic colleagues, I have put together a condensed historical account of the plant in antiquity as preface to a description of the pollen-analytic data.

Lefkandi in Euboea, possibly the site of the Homeric Eretria, was again the scene of the School's principal excavations. In a summer and an autumn campaign, in the first of which Mr L. H. Sackett participated, Mr M. R. Popham, Assistant Director, aided by many of the students, completed the present programme. The initial Early Helladic levels were reached in a substantial area and the succeeding occupations down to the abandonment of the site in the late 8th century B.C. were greatly clarified.

The archaeology of early agriculture in Britain was succinctly summarized five years ago (Bowen, 1961). Since then, and largely stimulated by that publication, further work has produced some useful results, not only in the new and continuing field surveys which the author sought mainly to encourage but also by experiment and excavation. Our concern here is primarily with the application of excavation techniques and subsequent molluscan analysis to the study of early fields (cf. Tubbs and Dimbleby, 1965), our discussion arising largely from work carried out since 1961 and in particular from our own excavations in 1966.

The collection of over 1,100 cylinder seals and impressions on clay, now housed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, is, after that of the British Museum, the richest of the kind in England. Here we have memories of Oxford Worthies beginning with the Reverend Greville Chester, who a hundred years ago travelled afar and brought home many antiquities. But it is appropriate that the first seal to be illustrated in this comprehensive catalogue is a boldly carved, prehistoric specimen purchased in Aleppo, in 1913, by T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, friend and protCgC of D. G. Hogarth who was then Keeper of the Museum. To these two men we must add a third, no less famous, namely Leonard Woolley who was then directing the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish: the extensive travels of this trio not only in north Syria, but also throughout the Levant, enabled them to acquire from the peasantry these delectable little souvenirs of personal identity. Carved cylinder seals, sometimes worn as amulets, were often made for the purpose of registering ownership to property. There must have been much competition to acquire them, for Lawrence writing from Carchemish in a letter dated ‘End of February [1913]’ says to Hogarth: ‘Seriously, this last half-dozen, bought by me on the fringe of Abu Galgal, is very good. I rushed back, and have not been down again, because some villains began a dig at Deve Hüyük.… I got some good fibulae which are yours, and not Kenyon's this time at all events…’. Nonetheless, the British Museum was not forgotten and was moreover acquiring some share of the spoils from Carchemish (PL. XXXII).