The Congress opened with a welcoming (plenary) reception in the Ashmolean Museum, with an exhibition of the Museum’s Celtic antiquities. The Ashmolean this same year celebrated the tercentenary of its foundation, with a Symposium ‘The Cabinet of Curiosities’, at the same time as the Celtic Congress.

Hembury is chiefly noted as the site of a neolithic settlement and one of the finest hillforts of the Iron Age in the South-West (PL. XXIV & FIG. I ) . These prehistoric works lie at the southern tip of a long, narrow promontory extending southwards from the Greensand mass of the Blackdown Hills and overlooking the broad valleys of the Otter and the Culm. Beyond these to the west lies the Exe valley and further west still (and visible in clear weather) the Haldon ridge and the eastern tors of Dartmoor. Excavations by Miss D. M. Liddell (Liddell, 1930; 1931; 1932; 1935) between 1930 and 1935 revealed the significance of Hembury for the south-western Neolithic in particular, the material culture of the early neolithic settlement being plainly related to that of Windmill Hill. Miss Liddell's examination of the iron age fort was centred upon the two fine gates, on the western side and at the north-west angle. Little work was devoted to the interior except to trace the ditch of the neolithic causewayed enclosure and to explore the extreme southern tip of the promontory.

In 1905 Francis Haverfield, Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, read, before the British Academy his now-famous paper, ‘The Romanization of Roman Britain’ (later published in the second volume of the Academy's Proceedings and in book form: second, enlarged, edition 1912). It was an elegant distillation of Haverfield's painstaking researches into the minutiae of Romano-British archaeology, presented against the background of the wider Empire. His vision was clear ‘. . . Romano- British life was on a small scale. It was, I think, normal in quality and indeed not very dissimilar from that of many parts of Gaul. But it was in any case defective in quantity. We find towns in Britain, as elsewhere, and farms or country-houses. But the towns are small and somewhat few, and the country-houses indicate comfort more often than wealth . . , We have before us a civilisation which, like a man whose constitution is sound rather than strong, might perish quickly from a violent shock.

Antiquity in 1957, in the midst of an ‘Evolution Number’, published a bold article by Professor Richard Atkinson on ‘Worms and weathering’. Often quoted since, but all too little absorbed, its message at the time was clear: ‘All of us recognize . . . 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 of the 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 . . .’ Professor Atkinson spoke of his own post-Darwinian observations as ‘shots in the dark’, which ‘may not always be very accurate; but at least they serve to wake sleepers from their beds’.

Peu-Richard is the name of a low hill in rollingchalkland overlooking the marshland which hasformed where the River Seugne meets the RiverCharente, a little way to the south of Saintes. It washere in 1882 that a farm labourer came across tracesof a fortified enclosure rich in prehistoric material.The landowner, Baron Eschasseriaux, was anamateur archaeologist and when told of the discoveryimmediately arranged an excavation. A totalof 106 trenches was opened in the course of thiswork, and a good idea of the complexity of the sitelayout, with its multiple ditches, was obtained (FIG.I). A recent aerial photograph has contributedsome further details (PL. va). Eschasseriaux describedthe discovery of rock-cut ditches, remains ofstone ramparts and traces of gateways. Potsherds,animal bones and flints were collected in abundanceand some examples were illustrated in the report,though few details were given (Eschasseriaux,1882). This material included quantities of decoratedsherds of the type which came to be known as'Peu-Richardien'.

The metal-detector is an electronic instrument; it is incapable of any independent act of free will. It is outside the reference of a system of good and evil : it is neither benign nor malign, ethical nor unethical, as neutral in such matters as a stone. It is capable merely of indicating the presence of certain objects on or below the soil. It bears no responsibility for human action consequent upon such indications. If this appears to be superfluous comment, it must be borne in mind that the very mention of the words ‘metal-detector’, with no reference at all to the machine's user, is guaranteed to raise the hackles of many archaeologists. Readers of this journal are surely aware of the wide range of archaeological opinion on metaldetecting; the issue of the relationship between orthodox archaeology and nietal-detecting has been aired at considerable length over the last few years and does not directly concern us here. Rather we intend to examine the practical application of the instrument to archaeological procedures.

‘ . . . the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.’ (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin, p. 31).

The relatively naturalistic representation of animals of the cervidae family has long been recognized as dominating much of the prehistoric art of Siberia. These animals are found in the petroglyphs which date from the Neolithic, but are, perhaps, better known in the bronze items that have been so much sought after in the last 1OO years. I t is my purpose here to examine these artistic products in an attempt to identify the species of animals the artists were intending to represent. In the analytical literature dealing with this subject one finds a noticeable lack of unanimity among the critics, who might be forgiven some biological imprecision, were they not frequently very confident in the ascriptions that they make. Identification of the species of cervidae will enable us better to understand the cultural background of the artists, and may lead to a greater understanding of the purpose underlying their creative activity. I can claim only one special qualification for this task, namely that I have spent almost two years of my life as a reindeer herder during anthropological fieldwork. This experience may, perhaps, better enable me to recognize the species of deer intended by the artist than can other scholars, whose acquaintance with the animal has been restricted to the museum.

No one could wish for a more auspicious initiation into the world of archaeology than Frederik Sehested (PL. LX). He was 20 when the greatest gold treasure in Denmark was found on the family estate of Broholm, and it was largely through the efforts of his mother and himself that the treasure was saved. It must have been a great moment when he accompanied his mother to Copenhagen and witnessed the handing over of the treasure into the hands of the by then famous C. J. Thomsen in the rooms in Christiansborg Castle which housed the still infant Museum of Northern Antiquities. Many years later Sehested (1878) wrote a sober account of the event but the excitement still remained with him and couldn’t be drained from the account. The reader gets a lively impression of the atmosphere on the estate during those spring days of 1838.

Nick Humphrey, of King’s College, Cambridge, in a recent broadcast on Human Evolution, made the following comments (slightly paraphrased from my notes of the radio broadcast): ‘Man, in comparison to the chimp is a forgetful ape. Chimps in experiments have a remarkable visual memory, recalling for example 25 complex patterns. Some humans can do the same, but rarely, and often where there is a brain malfunction as with epilepsy or damage to the parietal lobes. In effect it is characteristically pathological. Why was this facility suppressed? In order to replace this means of storing knowledge with a new way of thought. Not one of counting objects or observations as particular, but instead ordering such data into general models of things and situations, as with the Platonic Ideal forms. This was the birth of symbolic thought.’

The Italian resort of Bordighera, on the Riviera close by the French border, still has a little to show from the time, a century ago, when its British population-at least in the winter ‘invalid season’- ran to more than 3,000 and outnumbered the native Italians. The Hotel T. Windsor (‘T’ stands for tennis; the Bordighera tennis club, founded by the British, is the oldest in Italy) flourishes; prim municipal notices-‘A polite behaviour will be enjoyable for everybody’ and ‘Free bathing, clean holidays’-assert Edwardian proprieties. And tucked away in a side-street among the villas, its pink-washed facade frothing with wisteria, stands the Museo Bicknell, built in 1886 by an English amateur botanist, Clarence Bicknell. His foundation continues as the regional research institute, the Istituto lnternazionale di Studi Liguri. Clarence Bicknell (1842-1918) appears in none of the histories of archaeology, but his work deserves to be remembered. His study of the bronze age rockengravings of Mont BCgo, in the Maritime Alps above Bordighera, was the first adequate work on an Alpine rock-art tradition, and the forerunner of the astonishing discoveries over the last 30 years in Valcamonica (Anati, 1961; 1980), at Sion (Gallay, 1972) and now in the Aosta valley (Daniel, 1983). Bicknell's life and work, beyond its intrinsic interest, is an illuminating case-study in the history of the discipline, during that crucial late 19thcentury period when antiquarianism was everywhere giving way to the new science-based archaeology. Finally, Bicknell-though not in the major league with Buckland or Petrie-in his quiet way deserves a place in the gallery of archaeological characters.

Most of the Roman city of Viroconium Cornoviorum at Wroxeter (Shropshire) was purchased for the nation in 1973 to protect its remains, which mainly lay in arable land, from further damage by the plough. This part of the city, beyond the limits of the Department of the Environments's Guardianship site, is known very largely from crop-mark photography, tracing the lines of buried foundations by corresponding patterns in a growing cereal crop (Frere & St Joseph, 1983, 162–6). This technique continues to yield results, for ploughing at Wroxeter is regulated rather than prohibited, and never to better effect than in the dry summer of 1975, when excellent marks developed to west and north of the Baths (PLS. XIV, XVI), and in 1976, which afforded new details to south and east of them (PL. xv). At the request of the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings vertical photographs were taken by the University of Cambridge to form the basis of a new plan of the known remains. The potential of air photography for reconstructing such a plan had been shown by Webster and Stanley (1964), using the photographs of Mr Arnold Baker, but much more had been learnt about certain areas both by Mr Baker and by Cambridge University since then.

On 12 September 1940 Lascaux was discovered accidentally by four youths. They kept the secret for a few days, then decided to inform their former schoolmaster. Crowds of visitors came quickly: 1,500 during the first week. The abbC Breuil, who had moved to Brive because of the war, came on 21 September and drew up a report which was read to the AcadCmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on 10 October. From that point on, Lascaux received official recognition. It is quite a large cave, and the decoration starts about 25 m beyond the entrance. All of the chambers and the main galleries are decorated with figures of animals and symbols: over I 50 paintings and about 1,500 engravings are more or less well preserved, but the cave is particularly famous for the remarkable quality of the painted figures in the Hall of the Bulls and in the Painted Gallery (Diverticule Axial). Unlike most palaeolithic decorated caves, the sanctuary of Lascaux has been dated with precision. In fact, the cave was frequented in only one period, about 17,000 years ago. Its porch collapsed some time afterwards, thus sealing in the parietal figures and protecting the traces which the magdalenian artists and visitors had left behind.