The five seasons of excavations which had taken place up to 1956 had very greatly extended the knowledge of the Neolithic of Jericho which had been obtained by Professor Garstang’s excavations of 1935-6. The type of well-built houses with rectangular rooms and burnished plaster floors had been found to extend all over the mound in a settlement at least the equal in size of the successive Bronze Age towns, and to have been defended, at a stage midway through its existence, by a massive stone wall. A Carbon-14 dating of c. 5850 B.C. ± was suggested by material from the immediately preceding fill. Earlier than this settlement, which it is claimed is worthy of the title of a town, was another, also of urban character, separated from the later by a complete stratigraphical break, with houses of a curvilinear plan, and with associated flint and bone industries of an entirely different type.

Until 1951,th e great archaeological site we now call Surkh Kotal had completely escaped notice. In the autumn of that year, a friend of mine, Sarwar Nasher Khān, informed me that some stones bearing Greek letters had just been found in Northern Afghanistan by a team of workers engaged in building a new road. A few weeks later, we visited the site. It lay some 15 km. to the north-west of Pul-i Khumri, and some 12 km. to the south of Baghlān, two modem industrial centres in the valley of the Kunduz River. Having asked for the find spot, we were shown a ruined structure bordering the new road, at the bottom of a hill (henceforth called ‘ the acropolis ’) projecting like a promontory into the valley, and we could see at once that this structure was but a part of a large fortified enclosure of irregular shape following the contours of the hill-area. Inside this enclosure could be seen a smaller rectangular enclosure, the centre of which was occupied by a large flat-topped mound. Several architectural fragments were lying about. They were made of the local limestone. They included two big column-bases, and what appeared to be the remains of a mighty stele in alto-relievo, 2.20 m. high. Inquiring about the name of the place, we got several contradictory answers, two things only being clear : (1) that the place was a ‘ Kafir Kala ’, a ‘ Heathen’s Castle ’; and (2) that the saddle or pass connecting the hill with the mountains further west was called Surkh Kotal, ‘ The Red Pass ’. In fact the ruin was anonymous, but ‘ Heathen’s Castle, of the Red Pass ’ could be considered a suitable name. We shortened it into ‘ Surkh Kotal ’, ‘ The Red Pass ’.

The great silver cauldron from Gundestrup is one of the most fascinating exhibits in the National Museum of Copenhagen. It was imported into Denmark in antiquity and, since its discovery in 1891, has been the subject of considerable discussion. Although most scholars have agreed in assigning it to a 1st-century B.C. Gallic context, this identification is by no means universally accepted. Other suggested areas of origin have ranged from the eastern Danubian countries and South Russia to Denmark and even to northern India; similarly, estimations of the date of the object have varied from the 1st century B.C. to the 5th century A.D.

Although the Gundestrup cauldron is a unique object differences in style between the various plates that make up the body of the vessel point to the fact that several artists were involved in its manufacture. In the centre of each of the seven (originally eight) outer plates are placed human busts, with minor figures occupying secondary positions, while the five, long, inner plates, and the bottom plate, bear varied motifs. From a technical point of view it is an outstanding specimen of the silversmith’s art; particularly fine is the bull on the bottom plate, which is executed with boldness and great skill, The cauldron must certainly be regarded as a product of a vigorous school of craftsmanship.

The decipherment in 1952 by Michael Ventris of the prehistoric script known as Minoan Linear B at once suggested that here lay the key to the earlier Cretan script called Linear A. Linear B was proved to be a syllabic script which represented, imperfectly but just adequately, the Greek language in a form more archaic than any other surviving records. At an early stage in our short-lived partnership I discussed with Ventris the possibility of applying the results to the older script, and we both made certain experiments; but we concluded that the situation did not allow any easy progress, and being deeply committed to the development of his Linear B theory, we decided to leave this field to others, at any rate for the time being. Since then a great deal of work on Linear A has been published by other scholars, almost all of it based upon the decipherment of Linear B, and equally inspired by the success which attended the solution of the major problem. It is not, perhaps, too soon to review some of these attempts and appraise the progress made so far. We are clearly far from an agreed solution; but there are encouraging signs that the true solution is not too far beyond our grasp, though I for one doubt whether it can be achieved by mere ingenuity. I should like to emphasize at the outset that I am completely neutral in the controversies which are raging, and this account is intended to be quite impartial.

This article is something both more and less than the lecture that it represents. The lecture was given in London last December to open the Conference on the Southern British Iron Age which is reported here below by Mr Frere (p. 183). But it had the disadvantage of all introductory lectures to conferences, that they cannot anticipate what the other speakers will be saying later. And in this case, what the others said later was sometimes so new and striking as to leave the introductory lecture rather far behind. Of course, that was the measure of the conference’s success; yet I was gratified to find that what had happened, by the end, was that the others had not so much contradicted as carried further, in their various special fields, much of what was suggested in my more general talk. This surely means—and I think we can be gratified all round—that in the dozen years since the Council for British Archaeology last caused a general survey to be put forward, or the twenty years since Childe was writing in Prehistoric Communities, we have taken our Iron Age studies through a process of expansion, and of revaluation, and yet have emerged still pretty well together.

These milestones in their history are worth remembering. Horae Ferales, in which Kemble and Franks first brought our Iron Age metalwork to recognition, appeared in 1863, and John Evans’s Coins of the Ancient Britons in 1864; Arthur Evans’s monograph on the Aylesford cemetery, with both metalwork and pottery shown for the first time in their European setting, in 1890; Canon Greenwell’s on the Yorkshire chariot-burials in 1906.

The problem of Roman windows and their furnishings has never been studied seriously in this country as so little evidence is usually forthcoming. Window glass is found in fair quantities on most sites and, where the pieces are large enough to indicate size, they would appear to be no more than g to 12 in. square, but there is little indication of how they were fastened into the window. Such technical details have unfortunately escaped attention in those countries where sufficient remains have been found to attempt reconstruction. While R. Herbig has discussed windows generally: the most detailed treatment has been that by Vittorio Spinazzola in his survey of the excavations of Via dell’ Abbondanza at Pompeii. As he indicates, while houses were only of one story, the window openings tended to be very small slits but, as soon as an upper floor was built, more light could be obtained without sacrificing safety or privacy. Once the advantages of this became apparent, new and larger windows were inserted on the ground floor, architectural ingenuity being displayed in directing the light to particular parts of a room where it was needed. He touches upon the question of the infilling without adding much detail. Some of the smaller windows appear to have been openings in the wall with wooden, sliding shutters on the inside. The larger ones were filled with iron gratings in a form of a simple grille which has been reconstructed as horizontal flat bars, through which round vertical bars passed, a piece of construction which seems to be unnecessarily difficult. A grille, merely of crossbars, has also been found at Herculaneum.

Throughout the Neolithic Period the inhabitants of what nowadays is Denmark profited from the country's wealth of flint for implements and weapons. T There were quantities of large and small nodules to be picked up along the shores, but even the most plentiful supplies were not always ample for their needs. In the early part of the Late Stone Age, when numbers of large stone axes were required for forest clearance, and at the close of the Neolithic Period when the idea was adopted of making daggers of extraordinary dimensions, while simultaneously a considerable export trade was started of implements to the flintless regions of the rest of Scandinavia, surface flint no.longer sufficed. There had also to be a rational exploitation of the occurrences of excellent pure flint in chalk deposits that were undisturbed and relatively easy of access.

The last few years have seen a rapid advance in our knowledge of the early inhabitants of America, not of their bones, which are still elusive, but of the ways in which they lived and the things they made and used. The appearance of two important publications gives occasion for a brief review of the present state of the problem and how it appears from outside.

Dr Wormington’s book is a new edition of an old friend, which is, like its predecessors, indispensable to anyone who wants to keep up with the material. It gives concise factual accounts of a large number of finds ; it aims at inclusiveness rather than selection, and the material is becoming rather overwhelming in volume, but the evidence, or lack of it, for dating a site is always clearly set out and the reader has no difficulty in picking out those which are really significant. Wormington can now divide her material into Palaeoeastern and Palaeowestern Traditions, of which more will be said below, as well as a Palaeonorthern one which has not yet been proved to be so early in date. Professor Jennings’ monograph had not been published when her book appeared, but she had an idea of its significance from progress reports. It describes the excavation of three caves in western Utah, of which by far the most important is Danger Cave ; the evidence is fully but rather naïvely set out, and it would have gained by being more concisely expressed.

It is perhaps axiomatic that archaeological research in Baluchistan should raise as many questions as it answers, and the fieldwork carried out in Kalat in 1957 was no exception. Gradually, however, the nature of these problems is changing.

Prior to 1950 a superfluity of unrelated wares confronted the prehistorian and obscured the wider issues. Much of this pottery had been collected by the late Sir Aurel Stein from the numerous wind-eroded dambs which represent the mudbrick walls of ancient settlements. In the absence of any scientific excavation in this region it was difficult to relate the different painted wares or to group them into cultural assemblages, and the emphasis lay firmly on decorated pottery, since there was even less hope of sorting out unstratified plain wares.

‘There is one straung thing seen ther that in certen Partes of the Ground withyn the Waulles, the Corne is mervelus faire to the Yee, and ready to show Perfecture, it decayith’.

This passage, written by John Leland (1503-1552) after his visit to Silchester in 1541, is perhaps the earliest recorded observation of a cropmark. His account of Silchester was used by most serious workers on the site for the next two hundred years, and treated with the respect it deserved. Willian Camden used it on his visit, and we are not surprised to read in Britannia:

‘The inhabitants of this place told me, it had been a constant observation of theirs, that though the soil here be fat and fertile, yet in a sort of baulks that cross one another, the corn never grows so thick as in the other parts of the field; and along these they imagine the streets of the old city to have run. Here are commonly dug up British Tiles and great plenty of Roman Coins’.

The Iron Age and Roman Research Committee of the Council for British Archaelogy organized a conference on ‘Problems relating to the Iron Age in Southern Britain’, which was held at the Institute of Archaeology from 12 to 14 December, 1958. A full report on this Conference is to be issued by the C.B.A. in the form of an Occasional Paper of the Institute of Archaeology; all that is here attempted is a short summary of the main points made.

The Conference began on the evening of Friday, 12 December with a brilliant introductory lecture in his best manner by Professor C. F. C. Hawkes entitled The A B C of the British Iron Age. This lecture is represented by the paper printed here above (pp. 170-82), and thus no summary is necessary, though it would be difficult to overestimate its stimulating influence on the remainder of the Conference’s proceedings.