The first objective in this area was the Grotta Paglicci (FIG. I), a cave opening into the cretaceous limestone on the south side of the great karstic plateau, just below the village of Rignano. Here, in 1957, three of the author's colleagues, Professors A. Pasa and S. Ruffo, and Sig. Messena collected bone and stone artifacts of Palaeolithic date from the tip of a vast excavation which a mad treasure hunter had been carrying out in the cave for several years. When I visited the site in 1960 to make the preparations for a proper excavation, I discovered to my dismay that in the meantime this same treasure hunter, in spite of dissuasion, had been continuing his devastation with the help of explosives and had caused the fmal collapse of the entrance to the cave, completely obscuring its natural morphology. With meagre hopes of finding any part of the deposit intact, a start was made in the following April 1961 patiently to clear the mouth of the cave to see what could be saved. Fortunately an area of undisturbed deposit was found sealed below some large blocks of the fallen roof and furthermore a passage was cleared through the treasure hunter's debris towards the interior of the cave.

The stone crosses at Ruthwell in Dum- friesshire and at Bewcastle in Cumberland are probably the most discussed pieces of sculpture in the British Isles (PLS. XLI-XLII). It is right that they should be, for they have a artistic content that is high by any standards, they wholly outclass any possible contemporaries in Western Europe, and they are among the earliest examples of a notable and long-lasting form of Saxon art. Moreover, they are not only of importance to the art-historian but to the historian as well, for they have qualities that tell us a great deal about the culture, the religious feelings and even the political development of the society that erected them. It is therefore a matter of more than ordinary concern to establish, as firmly as the evidence allows, their date and their origin. All but one of the major critics of the last forty years-J. Br~ndsted, Sir Alfred Clapham, Sir Thomas Kendrick, Mr Lawrence Stone and Mr Ralegh Radford-are agreed that they are of the late 7th century, or at the latest of the first decade of the 8th. Only W. G. Collingwood has proposed a different date, in the mid-late 8th century, and he has had no supporters.

Although French archaeologists such as Pbre Poidebard in Syria, and Colonel Baradez in North Africa, have been using air photography very successfully for a long time in sub-desert regions overseas, this has not been so in Metropolitan France. In fact it was a mere ten years ago-a considerable time after systematic air photography had been going on in England-that French research workers began to use air photography, and even then as individual efforts each in his own region. In almost all cases they used, like the author, the aircraft of local aero-clubs, and small non-professional cameras, usually the simple 24 x 36mm. models. That these individual efforts have been far from negligible became more widely apparent in Paris, in August 1963, at the conference on, and exhibition of, air photography organized by M. Raymond Chevallier (ANTIQUITY, 1963, 296), under the auspices of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne where he has recently inaugurated the first university course in photo-interpretation in France.

We have been 50 bold as to call the LCbous site a ‘castle’ because, architecturally, it is in plan very like a medieval castle: it is trapeze-shaped, measuring 50 m. on two sides and 75 m. on the other two sides, and it is reinforced at its angles and along its walls with round towers. The enclosure is of dry stone walling about a metre thick, and the towers are about 2 m. 50 cm. in diameter inside, and spaced 24 m. apart from each other. On the north face a tower has been replaced by a rectangular entrance protected by two walls arranged like antennae (FIG. 2). The walls now stand only 60 to 80 cm. high, but one imagines that originally they rose to a height of 1½ m. (PL. XXVIII).

It is not suggested that we are dealing with a castle in the strict sense of that word: surely Ltbous is a fortified village site, and as such unique in the prehistory of western Europe and of very great importance. We need not concern ourselves here with the history of the discovery of the site, except to say that in the course of the excavation of seven Hallstatt barrows, tower no. 3 was found underneath them. As the towers and walls are all covered by Hallstatt and Bronze Age barrows, a late Roman wall, medieval. constructions, and even ploughed fields (surprising for garrigue country), it is not surprising that it took nearly seven years to discover the true nature of this fortified village.

The site is 1 km. south of the village of St-Mathieu and in the commune of St-Mathieu-de-Tréviers on the ridge known as the Ltbous [1]. Our excavations have already been published in France and Germany [2]; here we wish to summarize our work for English readers and to refer to the most recent excavations, hitherto unpublished.

The centuries between A.D. 400 and 800, which make the transition between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, are sparsely documented and have often been called by the English the ‘Dark Ages’, the dark centuries of Western European history. This paucity of written historical sources is greatly to be regretted, for these were decisive centuries for the formation of European society and in them occurred events whose results are to be seen even to the present day. The Roman Empire with its ancient civilisation collapsed; the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean went over to Islam; the Slavs settled in the Balkans, North-Central Europe, and the territory around the Danube as far as Austria; and these Danube-lands came under the domination of the Mongolian Avars.

The stone pillar of Bantry (PL. xLv a) stands on top of a rounded grassy hill one mile west of the old Bantry railway station in County Cork. Below it, just out of sight, is the comfortable Georgian red brick of Bantry House, whose demesne once included the pillar. Below that again are the waters of Bantry Bay, formerly one of the bases of the British Atlantic Fleet, and scene of the abortive landing attempt in 1798 of Wolfe Tone and the French invasion force.

At last the cards are on the table. Palmer's book was intended to present the testimonia in support of his theory about the date of the Knossos tablets. His case was a simple one, and if correct could have been presented simply. But the discussions of the last three and a half years, which have revealed so many shortcomings in his arguments, have necessitated advocacy, rather than a presentation of evidence which could stand by itself. And since the objections raised have seemed to most scholars fatal to his theory the core of the matter has been further overlaid by repetitious arguments and criticism. The present reviewer has suffered more than most since he had been alone in the position of being able to answer Palmer's unsupported arguments from knowledge of the unpublished material. From the Preface through every introduction to the quotations from the notebooks the reader is presented with Palmer's special pleading for his cause. He doth protest too much-and his anxiety leaves me, for one, with the impression that he is himself uneasy about a theory which requires so much dialectic in its support and attacks (however veiled) upon scholars who can no longer answer back.

The two photographs (PL. XXXVIIw) hich are the subject of this note were obtained during reconnaissance sponsored by the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge. Both photographs record monuments apparently unnoted before. The first lies on the chalk of the Yorkshire wolds, in Burton Fleming parish (TA 097707), 2 miles north of Rudston (PL. XXXVII (a)). An oval enclosure defined by a broad ditch (dark) and bank (light coloured) is seen by differential growth of barley. A visit to the site after the field had been reaped established that the enclosure is plainly visible on the surface. The bank is much spread by ploughing: but still rises to a height of nearly 4 ft. above the level platform that it encloses.