Peculiar to the red clay plain of northwest Syria are the ‘beehive’ villages called ‘Campo di Melle’ by the early Venetian and Genoese traders. The characteristic beehive name and shape is a purely Western concept as the local beehive is a small mud cube. These village houses, built of mud brick, are ideally adapted to their environment ; they are warm in winter and cool in summer. The villages cluster about ancient ‘tells’ or dot the plains from Aleppo south to Homs, occupying a total area of roughly thirty by one hundred and fifty miles (PLATES v and VI). To the north and east this distinctive type of building gives way to the square mud brick house with flat mud roof supported on poles and brush, while to the west the rocky outcrops of the Lebanon range provide an easily worked stone for houses and barns.

A few years ago I was talking to a friend of mine in our club. It was obvious that he had, as we say, something on his mind. ‘Do you realize’, he said, ‘that in this technological age we still have no comprehensive history of technology?’ I paused for a moment, but before I could speak he had answered my thoughts. ‘I don't mean economic history—there are plenty of books about that; technology and economics are quite different’. I asked him to expand this. ‘Well, take any farm you know. An economic survey of it would cover everything on the farm—field-workers and their wages, birds, animals, dung, crops, carts, ploughs, reaping-machines, dairy utensils. But if it's to be a technological survey you concentrate on the carts and ploughs, how they're made, and how they work. What you are then concerned with is how things on the farm are done and made’. When he thus explained it the distinction became obvious. Seeing what was in his mind I murmured : ‘A History of Technology is going to be a big thing’. ‘It is’, he said, ‘for the world is my farm, the human race my farmers and field-workers, and the farm has been a going concern for many millennia’.

The aim of this note is to bring to the attention of English readers a Roman building of large size, whose impressive ruins are well preserved, but whose purpose is uncertain and existence little known.

The Roman road from Tours to Bourges ran along the north bank of the river Cher and for much of its length is followed by the modern N76. Two settlements or posting-stations lying on this road and marked on the Peutinger map under the names Gabris and Tasciaca can be located at the villages of Giévres and Thésée respectively. At this latter place, otherwise called Thézée or Tézée, 31 miles east of Tours, the main road, following the course of the Roman route, runs close beside the river, with the railway line separating them and low, bare hills rising immediately to the north. The towns of Montrichard to the west and St. Aignan on the east are respectively 4 and 5 miles away, and the village lies in the Loir-et-Cher département.

During the seventeenth campaign of the Ras Shamra excavations (1953), we uncovered on the east side of the palace a block of private houses between two streets running parallel in an east-west direction. In one of the buildings (which is still not completely excavated) we found several bronze objects buried in a corner of the inner court in the middle of which were two troughs. Stratigraphically the building is assigned to the latest layer of Level I which dates from the 13th century B.C. Amongst the ceramic remains found is a female Mycenaean idol of poor workmanship and a bowl with wishbone-handle of Cypriot type, also plainly of late date.

Sir Walter Scott ’, Andrew Lang once remarked, ‘ entered literature through the ruined gateway of archaeology ’. The influence of Scott’s poetry, and of the Waverley Novels, upon the growing antiquarian and romantic taste of the early 19th century is a commonplace which needs no enlargement here, but it should have a particular interest to us as Fellows of a Society founded for the study of Scottish antiquities when young Walter was nine years old, and to which he was elected in 1796. That one of his novels should be called The Antiquary is no mere chance, and in Jonathan Oldbuck of Monkbarns, who plays the title-r6le, Scott produced a character whom he acknowledged as in part a humorous caricature of himself. As a crumbling pilaster, or mouldering gargoyle, of Lang's ruined gateway, I should like tonight to direct your attention to The Antiquary’s, and The Shirra’s, archaeological ancestors : what was the climate of antiquarian thought in which Scott had been brought up and how is it reflected in his work ? I do not promise anything new in this brief enquiry, but there are points of interest which may not have been brought together before.

Like many other spectacular monuments, Zimbabwe Ruins has attracted more attention through speculation than through research. Many of the so-called ‘archaeological excavations’ in the early days were little more than licensed treasure hunts, whilst the amount of unauthorized fossicking for gold which went on until 1902 (when the ruins were protected by legislation) destroyed acres of archaeological deposits. Two people only have published reports of widespread excavations on scientific lines at Zimbabwe: the late Dr D. Randall-Maclver, who dug there for a few weeks in 1905 and Miss G. Caton-Thompson, whose careful work during the dry season of 1929 forms the basis of our present archaeological knowledge of this site. Considering the great area involved—about 100 acres of actual buildings—and the obvious importance of the site, surprisingly little is really known about it. For the past 18 years the site has been under the protection of the Southern Rhodesian Monuments Commission and excavation has been very wisely discouraged, although on the other hand the exploration and excavation of other sites has proceeded apace. Both Maclver and Caton-Thompson agreed that the building was African. Maclver dated the ‘Temple’ (the principal single structure) as ‘not earlier than the 14th or 15th century’, but admitted that an earlier settlement prior to the present buildings was a possibility. Miss Caton-Thompson gave as her earliest date for the whole complex the 9th century A.D., or possibly a little earlier, and also considered a pre-ruin culture not unlikely. Wieschhoff after reviewing all the preceding evidence and undertaking excavations at a number of other sites found himself fully in agreement with Maclver as regards dating whilst the present writer, with still more field evidence from other Rhodesian sites, felt inclined to shorten Wieschhoff's dating still more.