It is a little surprising that in spite of the relatively high standard of excavation techniques current in Britain today so little attention has been paid by practical excavators to the processes of formation of the sites which they dig.

All of us recognize, of course, that a site consists of a sequence of deposits, some formed deliberately and usually rapidly by man, and others more slowly by nature; and that some processes of formation, such as erosion and filling by the plough, are still continuing today. But there seems to be a widespread assumption (though it is difficult to be sure of this, since such things are seldom discussed) that once a constituent layer of a site has been formed, and sealed by another layer above it, it becomes immediately fossilized and remains unchanged until examined by the excavator, perhaps several millennia later. It is equally widely supposed that once an object, large or small, has come to rest in or upon a deposit it will remain in that position for all time. In short, the tacit assumption is that once formed the nexus of finds and deposits which constitutes a site is almost wholly static, and that change, if it occurs at all, occurs only at the surface.

You will not find the name of the Philhellene George Fanshawe Chubb in the Dictionary of National Biography, although that does include a purely mythical Philhellene Kirkman Finlay. Though he lost his life in the cause of Greece, Chubb is never mentioned by Finlay, Trikoupes, Gordon, or by any other historian of the Greek Revolution. He appears, like Melchizedek, to have had no ancestors and no posterity, and whether he was really a native of Birmingham or not we cannot tell. We know nothing about his family or his education or his profession, or indeed anything at all about him till he became a Philhellene.

It has long been recognized that during the latter part of the 1st millennium B.C., as in other periods, there was contact between Spain and western Britain, and it has been claimed that there are structural resemblances between hill-forts in those areas. But although an excellent account of the Iron Age in northern Spain has been available for some time to English readers, it deals almost exclusively with the portable relics, and gives very little information about the forts themselves. Moreover, the original publications which deal with these remains are very scarce in Britain. It therefore seems worth while to give some account of four which the writer was able to visit during 1954. They were selected primarily because their defences incorporated chevaux-de-frise, which seem generally to be rare outside Spain, but which occur on two sites in Wales, and elsewhere in Britain.

In 1872 the name ‘Campigny’ appeared in archaeological literature for the first time, and the industry to which this site gave its name has been a subject of controversy ever since. At Campigny (Seine-Inférieure) were discovered pits containing worked flint and the remains of crude pottery. In a short time similar flintwork was discovered on other sites in north France. The typical implements were axes with the cutting edge formed by a transverse blow and heavy picks. Mortillet was the first to illustrate the analogy between French tranchet axes and those from Danish kitchen middens. In time typologically similar material was found from Britain to the Soviet Union.

The following narrative is translated from the Greek book of Philon of Byblos (the Biblical Gebal, modern Jebail), who wrote in the reign of Nero. The book is a history of early Phoenicia, down to the time of Solomon, which Philon claims to have edited from an old Phoenician chronicle by a scribe named Sanchuniathon and (as in this part) from other sources. Nineteenth-century scholars were inclined to disbelieve in the existence of Sanchuniathon, and to think that Philon's work was thus a forgery; but now that archaeology has produced actual fragments of early Phoenician literature, including references to a war with the Kerethites of Philistia, which Sanchuniathon also mentions, scholars, especially in Germany, are more disposed to take him seriously.

1. In the September number of ANTIQUITY (no. 123, pp. 124–130), I suggested that the language of Linear A was Semitic. I leaned toward narrowing down the probabilities to West Semitic, but indicated the possibility of East Semitic (= Akkadian or Assyro-Babylonian) too. The clue to the identification of the language proved to be ga-ba MAN 62 (= Akkadian gabba awîlū 62) ‘ all the men = 62 ’ (p. 128, n. 14aa). Subsequently I observed that the regular Mycenaean Greek totalling formula (e.g. to-so MAN 17 ‘ so many men: 17 ’) was as exact an equivalent of my Akkadian reading as one could expect in so different an idiom. From that moment on I approached Linear A with Akkadian in mind.