The ability to recognize the traces of ancient cultivation is essential to all students of earthworks and field-workers. The scope of our study is being widened, so that we are interested not merely in fortifications but in any kind of interference with the surface soil resulting from man’s activities in the past. It would be purely an arbitrary distinction to be interested in a hill-fort and not in the surface traces of an agricultural village of the same date, and these same surface traces consist very largely in lynchets, or cultivation terraces, the presence of which is often the sole clue to the site of the settlement.

It is a matter of observation that agricultural processes at different periods may leave quite distinct and separate kinds of traces on the ground. This depends on the kind of plough used, and on different habits with regard to the shape, size, and outlay of the fields. The one feature that is common to most ancient fields is the tendency to form terraces on sloping ground, due to the way in which the soil creeps downhill under the influence of ploughing and rain-wash, forming an accumulation along the lower edges of the plot.

The two fortifications, which I propose to describe are together unique in the history of military architecture. They are very like each other, but nothing else like them exists. The first of them, Euryalus at Syracuse, has been carefully planned and published by a professional engineer, Signore Luigi Mauceri, in an excellent monograph (Il Castello Eurialo, Roma, 1928) ; but this is difficult to procure-I only know of it, and have seen it, thanks to the kindness of Sig. Dott. Giacomo Caputo, of the Syracuse museum-and there is no other adequate description of the place, though no doubt Pauly-Wissowa's article on Syracuse will contain one when it appears. Moreover, in examining the remains I seemed to see evidences of afterthoughts and changes of plan which Sig. Mauceri has missed or interpreted in ways that I find hard to accept; and therefore, though my hasty inspection and rough plans are far inferior to his careful and skilful work, it ma be worth while to place my surmises on record.

The evidence for Pompeian history has been furnished almost entirely by the use of the spade, and, while for the latest period its full and detailed character makes it difficult to pick out a unifying thread through it all, the further back, in time one goes the scantier direct testimony becomes ; until, in dealing with the earliest periods, we are, as it were, building up a case out of evidence which is largely ‘ circumstantial ’. This defect is inherent in the archaeological study of any site, since it is to be expected that what was built latest should be best preserved, but the defect has been aggravated at Pompeii by the way in which, until recently, the excavations have been carried out.

Westward across the valley from St. Albans, the horizon is today fringed by a tract of secluded woodland. A part of this woodland has acquired the name of Prae Wood from a small medieval nunnery, dedicated to St. Mary de Pré, that once stood half-a-mile away beside the derelict Watling Street. The nunnery is now a patch of nettles in the meadows by the Ver, and the Street is a channel from which the metalling has been torn; but both are better known to the historian and the antiquary than are the banks and ditches which lie hidden beneath the summer-jungle of Prae Wood. For all that, these banks and ditches are relics of a city which was at one time no less than the metropolis of a considerable part of Britain. It is nearly nineteen centuries since they passed into oblivion, and there is something of ironical irrelevance in the words of a Georgian milestone which chance has set up in their midst: ‘I mile from Gorhambury, 20 miles from Hyde Park Corner The shade of Sir Thomas Browne might find a happy perch upon that milestone.

About the year 30 B.c., king Tasciovanus, suzerain (it would seem) of a large region in central and eastern Britain, struck coins which bear upon them, in one form or another, the name of Verulamium and are, incidentally, amongst the first inscribed coins minted in these islands. His predecessor, Cassivelaunus, had been the elected leader of the British tribes against Julius Caesar in 54 B.c.; and it is unnecessary here to discuss again in detail the plausible identification of Verulamium with the unnamed stronghold of Cassivelaunus which Caesar's legions stormed in that year.

It is a great help to the understanding of a piece of country, a town or a building to get to some high point in the vicinity and look down upon it, and the more nearly vertical one's point of view the more accurate is one's impression. In the ‘nineties, as a boy, I used to spend hours at the top of the spire of Rouen Cathedral gazing down upon the city below, and it was only a step from this to record such a view photographically; but it was some time before I took my first truly vertical photograph.

About 1904, a friend who was engineer on the construction of the Rothesay Dock near Glasgow asked me to photograph for him the concrete foundations of a part of this dock: I could not get a proper view of these from anywhere on the ground, so I asked if I might utilize a great crane which stood nearby. It was probably against all the rules of the Clyde Trust, but I was thereupon swung high in the air over my subject, and plate 1 shows the result obtained with a no. 2 Bullseye Kodak.

Any traveller in South Italy who finds himself in that tract of bleak and desolate country which is intersected by the Bari-Brindisi railroad, will not fail to observe many odd-looking structures in the fields. At a distance they appear to be quaint little conical-shaped huts, some 8 or 9 feet in height, fashioned after the manner of round bee-hives, and composed of flat stones, loosely piled together. They are used, so the natives will explain, as shelters for the cattle, as barns, or as store-houses for the fishermen’s nets.

But further enquiry will elicit some stranger information about them—to the effect that these structures date from time immemorial, and that they are called ‘trulli’, although nobody seems to know the reason why, or what the term really means. The traveller will also be told that if he is enterprising enough to make the adventure into the remoter parts of Apulia, he may see a whole city of ‘trulli’, a city of some 12,000 souls, who live in what must surely be regarded as among the strangest human habitations on earth.

Short cross-dykes are found on ridges or more rarely in valley bottoms. Their essential characteristics are that they run across a narrow strip of open ground, their ends resting on obstacles which in primitive times would have been naturally impassable :— in the case of cross-ridge dykes from scarp to scarp or scarp to forest, and of cross-valley dykes across the hard gravelly bottoms between impenetrable woods. In every case that I have seen they cross the line of a primitive road.

The present age, as far as archaeology is concerned, may well be termed that of excavations, and Mesopotamia is more than any other country the centre of such activity. It is work on the most ancient sites that has come most before the public eye ; but later ruins too have received some attention, both before and since the war. Samarra stands and must long stand as the classical example of an excavation of the later eriod, but the recent work at Ctesiphon is no going investigation by the Baghdad school and the Michigan University expedition and the ancient city of Kish has produced a Sasanian palace. Our work at Hira, some 50 miles to the south of ancient Babylon, now adds another name to this list, and though we made but preliminary soundings they served to show that the town of Hira was definitely an important and interesting place, the further examination of which will be without doubt well repaid. The work which we did was undertaken on behalf of Oxford University and was carried out under the joint direction of Mr Gerald Reitlinger and of the author of this paper. Most sincere thanks are due to Mr Reitlinger, who bore the entire cost of the expedition, and to Professor Langdon of Oxford, who greatly simplified our work by allowing us to become a branch of the Oxford-Field Museum expedition to Kish.

Sir John Rhŷs, whose name is justly honoured by all students of the history of Britain, is nevertheless indirectly responsible for much vague conjecture concerning the Keltic problem by English archaeologists. I write ‘English’ advisedly, for Irish archaeologists—with a profound knowledge of Keltic philology—have definitely refuted the theories propounded by Rhys and maintained in various modified forms by subsequent archaeologists in England. In Wales, the other Keltic country concerned, archaeology unfortunately remained up to recent times the happy hunting-ground of antiquaries whose knowledge of both archaeology and philology was very restricted. Her professional archaeologists, in more recent years, have been hampered by an ignorance of the philological problem and have therefore naturally subscribed to the point of view of the modern English school of thought. On the other hand, some Welsh philologists, often with little or no knowledge of the archaeological evidence, have ridiculed the theories advanced by Rhŷs and the later English writers on the subject. My present purpose is to submit to the readers of ANTIQUITY a case for relinquishing entirely the generally accepted attitude of modern English archaeology towards the Keltic problem.

Sculptured stone crosses are simply a local and temporary fashion in gravestones. They came into vogue when the northern English church-builders learned stone-carving, and their use spread in every direction through the British Isles, where it lingered on the Celtic fringe after the fashion had gone out in its first home, and afterwards it wandered farther afield. But by Anglian crosses is meant here only those set up under the influence of the Angles of Northern England before the Danish invasion, and those in which the same influence survived in parts not dominated by Danish or Norse settlement.

In the June number of ANTIQUITY, Mr T. D. Kendrick sketched what in another sphere of art might be called a Conversation Piece. His subject was the family of hanging-bowls, and he assembled it with skill and daring in a new setting. His method was frankly impressionistic, and was proportionately stimulating. With the aid of a partly theoretical chronology, he inferred ‘that in origin these bowls are really Romano-British; that many of them had been made and were in use before the Romans left this country; that others were made after the Romans had gone, and belong to the almost unknown archaeology of the Arthurian period’. To these conclusions it might at once be objected that, amongst the bowls, no dated example is of Romano-British period, and that they hardly occur in Arthurian Britain. But rather than press these objections, let us explore an alternative interpretation. Let us first state the problems and the relevant facts; then attempt to reconcile the latter with the former.

I do not intend in this paper to give a complete history of the dog, but simply to discuss certain problems connected with it, and in particular to describe a number of types belonging to different periods and countries.

Our evidence is for the most part pictorial; .yet it must be used with caution, for difficulties are bound to arise if anmals are represented alone, with no clue to their size. For example, figure 3 shows representations of dogs on coins from Panormus of the 4th century B.c.; artistically they are excellent, but nothing can be inferred as to breed, for this depends on the size, of which we know nothing. On the other hand, figure I, although artistically crude, not only tells us the size of the dog relative to the man beside him, but also that the animal is of Maltese breed (MEAITAIE). This is in fact the only instance in antiquity where a breed can be definitely ascertained, for even when descriptions are given of classical breeds, they are as a rule thoroughly unsatisfactory and establish no certain conclusion.

The discovery of America by the Norsemen in the early years of the eleventh century is now one of the accepted facts of history. While considerable difference of opinion still exists as to the measure of reliance to be placed, in points of detail, upon the documents in which the discovery is recorded, and the precise localities visited are still the subject of controversy, no one who has devoted any attention to the subject entertains any doubt that the broad fact of the discovery is established. But, though this is so, the evidence has hitherto been exclusively confined to the historical narratives of the sagas, and the attempts which have been made from time to time to supplement their testimony by the production of traces of Norse occupation discovered in America itself have not only broken down, but have excited so large a measure of ridicule and suspicion that they have, rather paradoxically, been the principal reason why general acceptance of the basic fact was unduly delayed. As a natural and justifiable result, the first reaction of students of the subject to alleged discoveries of Norse remains or inscriptions in the West is one of extremely cautious scepticism.

The first person to introduce these bowls to the archaeological world as a group, and with appropriate comment, was that profound student of Celtic art, the late Mr J. Romilly Allen; subsequently, Mr Reginald Smith set himself the task of making a complete list of all the bowls, or parts of bowls, that were known, and he has since placed us further in his debt by the care he has taken in seeing that every new example, as it came to light, was adequately recorded. Since Mr Allen wrote his paper, however, we have not made very much headway with the main problem of deciding their position in the cultural history of this country; even the recent discovery of the beautiful Winchester bowl, that excited us so much in 1930, was allowed to pass without any revision and revaluation of the really astonishing material that had been collected by Mr Smith, and it seemed that the chief interest aroused by the bowls was for ever to be focussed on the apparently insoluble problem of their use. But last year my friend Mr J. D. Cowen published a paper that constitutes in many respects a very important advance; it was the stimulating kind of article that often provokes other people into rival activities, and I hope it will not be counted against him if I admit that one of his results was an immediate decision on my part to put into print the notes I had collected on this same subject. It is Mr Cowen's distinction that he is the first to isolate and appreciate the ‘heater’ group of bowls, to which I shall refer below, and there are several other points in his very vigorous paper that strike me as being valuable and sagacious observations. But what I have to say here and now is that if Mr Cowen is right throughout, much that I am going to say below is completely wrong.

‘It is better to dig than to dance’, said St. Augustine. This sober choice between two difficult alternatives is one which, I freely confess, had always appealed to me as that of a balanced and discerning mind. Today I am a little shaken in my confidence. It has been brought home to me, with something of a shock, that this obiter dictum might in a certain sense be cited as a justification of the (to my thinking) distorted outlook of the modern archaeologist. At the present moment, for good or for ill, digging has, it seems, become to a large extent the basis of archaeological research. I say ‘ for good or for ill ’ advisedly. To those of us who may be classed as Antiquaries of the Older Generation, there is something indecorous, almost irreverent, in all this hot and untidy pick-and-shovel work. It is so hearty, so vocal, so undergraduate. Besides, it is so easy. Next to committing a murder, the easiest step to fame nowadays is to dig up a potsherd. And the more ignorant the excavator, the greater the kudos. ‘Potsherd dated 543 B.C. found in Kent’ may not be a hundred-per-cent. news-item ; but ‘ Mystery potsherd in Medway midden : experts baffled ’ is a main-page headline, sure thing. It is hardly to be wondered that, in our sound-proof studies, surrounded by our genealogies, our heraldry and our armour, we slippered veterans move uneasily in our chairs. It is as though a fist had been thrust rudely through our window-pane and let a draught of cold, oxygenladen air into our hitherto inviolate sancta.

Rom very ancient times the church and the churchyard have afforde'd refuge to villagers in time of war. For this reason, wherever practicable, churches have been built on heights, to be the more easily defended. The church served not only as a house of prayer but also as a protecting citadel, defending the lives and property of its children. Already in the 4th century the Armenians had made strong citadels of their churches. The Franks in Merovingian times (481-751) built fortified churches of which that of St. Jean at Poitiers still stands, as well as the church at Remainmontier. After the Saracen invasion most of the churches in the south of France were surrounded with defence works, whereas in northern France they were not defended before the English wars in the fourteenth century. In the Middle Ages most of the churches in the strip of land between the Rhine and the Nahe, called the Gau, were fortified. Osthofen had defence works as early as 1241. In the Middle Ages, too, fortified churches were built in Alsace and Lorraine, or else the existing ones were greatly strengthened. An especially characteristic example is Chazelles in Lorraine, built in the 12th century, in which we are first struck by the placing of the church-tower between the choir and the nave and then by the loop-holes and machicolations.