The credit for the discovery of the great antiquity of Jericho belongs to Professor John Garstang, who excavated there between 1930 and 1936. In those days our picture of man's emergence from Palaeolithic and Mesolithic savagery through Neolithic barbarism to the civilization of the metal ages was a neat and tidv one. The nomadic hunters of the first stage discovered agricultuer and stock-breedkg and were thus assured of enough subsistence to become settled villagers, self-sufficient and unprogressive, but at least no longer savages. After long years of this unprogressiveness the eventual discovery of the uses of metal led to trade, specialization, the need for surplus food to feed the traders and specialists, the growth in importance of favoured areas such as the great river valleys and the development of the villages there into towns through the accumulation of surpluses and the consequent need for organized rule to control them. The theory was reasonable, and what was then known about the early village settlements in Western Asia and the rise of towns and states in the river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia seemed to fit the facts. A chronology of early villages in the later fifth millennium and the growth of towns in the later fourth, leading to states in the third, seemed to cover what was known.

Little more than thirty years ago, when a writer was invited to contribute an article to an encyclopaedia on the Stone Age in the Philippines, it was possible for the American Museum of Natural History to inform him that, so far as was known, there was no Stone Age in the Philippines. That the position has so greatly altered during the last three decades is largely due to the indefatigable efforts of an American collector and ethnologist, Professor H. Otley Beyer, to whom we chiefly owe such systematic archaeological surveys as have been carried out in the archipelago. Much of his work, however, remains unpublished or is not generally available, so there may be some value in a short summary of what archaeology has revealed of the cultural history of the Philippines during these three decades.

Man has been defined in many ways, as the talking animal, the religious animal, and so on, but the most satisfactory definition from the scientific point of view is probably Man the Tool-maker. One might ask, why bother to define man, considering his uniqueness and self-evident characteristics? But from the standpoint of students of evolution, particularly those concerned with the interpretation of fossil remains of early man and his possible ancestors, to define man is of practical importance.

‘Gunpowder, Printing and the Protestant Religion’, said Thomas Carlyle in 1827, are ‘the three great elements of modern civilization’. I wish we could be as contentedly concise about the more ancient varieties. What indeed are the primary qualities of urbanity? At what definable point did Man step across that thin borderline between rus and urbs ? The question matters; the moment at which Man first became something more than a brigand or a hind (without necessarily losing either of those characters) was a climactic one. It counts for a great deal in our estimate of human achievement.

An up-to-date book on Stonehenge by Mr Atkinson is indeed a great acquisition; it is a book for the intelligent reader as well as for the archaeologist, and is by far the best book on the subject that has so far been written.

The author explains how a potsherd or stone, when carelessly thrown away, will gradually sink owing to the action of earth worms, through the earthy top-soil till it reaches an impermeable layer, so that where, as here, the soil is shallow a layer is formed containing objects of all periods. Such a statement made in the 1920’s was laughed at. Further, he goes on to say (p. 168) : ‘The one thing about Stonehenge upon which everyone is agreed is that it is primarily a “temple,” a structure in which it was possible for man to establish contact and communication with extra-mundane forces or beings’. No one in the nineteen-twenties could have made such a statement and survived. Abercromby said it in his book (Bronze Age Pottery, 1912), and his chapter on Stonehenge is still well worth reading, but it is never quoted or referred to. It was Abercromby, not the present reviewer, who first pointed out the importance of the south-westem end of the axis. The only obvious error noticed (p. 195) is the statement that Colonel Hawley was Director of the Society of Antiquaries. However, this slight error is amply made up for by the forty photographs, all but six of which reveal some feature never before published and probably not even photographed; one of them (plate II : Stonehenge from the north) has an artistic quality that no other photograph I can recall has ever had. The effect of light and shade is most beautiful.

EVER since, in 1893, Paolo Orsi published and described a group of these objects from the necropolis of Cava della Signora, Castelluccio, they have E been generally regarded as of the highest importance for the study of W. Mediterranean prehistory. Orsi himself immediately recognized the parallel with those which had then been recently unearthed by Schliemann at Troy, and since his time the validity of this parallel has been generally admitted by archaeologists. All who have since then treated of the chronological problems of Sicily and the Western Mediterranean lands have accepted them as imports from Troy and a basis for synchronisms between the cultures of the Eastern and Western basins. Despite this, however, no study has as yet been published of these objects in which the Trojan and Sicilian groups have been treated together and closely compared. In 1939 a useful critical analysis of the evidence relative to the three Trojan plaques was published by Bittel, but he did not go on to make a similar study of the Sicilian ones.

The Athenians of the classical era were deeply conscious of the fact that the history of their city was different from that of the rest of Greece. They were the autochthonous settlers of the land, and their orators and writers kept forever reminding them that Athens and Attica were not subdued when the Dorian invaders gained possession of most of the Peloponnesus at the end of the Bronze Age. Was this an empty boast, the kind of historical error that Thucydides (1, 20) attributes to a people's readiness to accept uncritically the old traditions about their own country or those of others? The historian (1, 2) makes it clear that he himself believed in the tradition that Attica was the original home of the Athenians of his day, and he found an explanation for this phenomenon in the poverty of the soil which made the conquerors pass by Attica for richer sections of the country. Archaeological research has confirmed Thucydides' conclusions.

In A.D. 69 the peace of Tripolitania was broken by war between the neighbouring cities of Oea and Lepcis Magna and the re-emergence of the Garamantes in opposition to Rome. The Garamantes, convinced that if worsted in battle they had only to scuttle back into the desert and fill in the wells behind them to stop pursuit, as they had in the past, and confident in their immunity from attack in Fezzan, had responded to an appeal for aid from the people of Oea and, together with these new allies, they were laying siege to Lepcis. This brought the legate of Numidia, Valerius Festus, hurrying down the coast to restore order. He freed Lepcis, defeated the Garamantes, and pursued them into the desert. In doing so he achieved something remarkable. He found, Plinyl tells us, a new and shorter road across the desert, known as the Praeter Caput Saxi. It was probably the road running due south from Oea through Garian, Mizda and El Gheria el Garbia which later on, in the reign of Caracalla, was marked with milestones. The inference is that Valerius Festus discovered a road unknown to the Garamantes. This is incredible for he was operating in the Garamantes' own country which they must have known far better than the Romans and at least as well as any tribe from whom the latter could have obtained guides.

The difficulty of building in mountainous country has resulted in similar solutions over a very wide area, and certain houses and farm buildings in western Britain have many features in common with those in Scandinavia, the Vosges, the Black Forest, Switzerland, Spain, Macedonia and even in the Himalayas. The most obvious method of building in hilly terrain is to create a level platform either entirely by excavation or by excavating the upper portion and using the earth removed to build up the lower part of the platform. A single-storeyed building on such a levelled site may then be identical with any lowland type.

Primitive ‘platform’ sites dating from the Dark Ages have been recorded from several parts of Wales, notably those excavated by Aileen Fox on Gelligaer Common, Glamorgan. These homesteads, each consisting of from one to three buildings erected on platforms levelled into the hillside, were sited on a little shelf at the junction of the moorland plateau and the valley scarp at an elevation of about 1,300 feet. Each house was divided into two parts by an almost central cross-passage and the ridge-pole was supported by two or more upright posts. Dark Age and medieval houses of the platform type are known from twenty-six sites in Glamorgan, three in Radnorshire and two near Llanbadarn Fynydd, whilst many smaller homesteads of a similar character have been discovered in Caernarvonshire by Hemp and Gresham.

‘Although the Greeks seem to have undertaken the founding of their cities most successfully looking for beauty and security of position, harbours, and fertile country, the [Romans] planned best those matters which the Greeks made light of, laying down roads, and bringing in water … They laid a network of roads over the countryside, adding cuttings over the hills and embankments along the valleys, so that their wagons can accommodate whole shiploads’

So says Strabo (v. 3.8), stating concisely a great deal that has since been written contrasting the beauty-loving Greeks with the practical Romans. S The justly admired roads of the Romans have long been a symbol of Rome at her best. The Greeks come off very poorly indeed when contrasted with Rome in the matter of roadbuilding—so poorly that their apologists have often felt constrained to explain it away : the mountain-terrain, and the division into unco-operative city-states were hostile to the development of road-building. Yet both these excuses are groundless, for under certain circumstances the Greeks did build roads over difficult terrain and across state boundaries. Roads from quarries to temple-sites are good examples of the first difficulty overcome, sacred roads of the second. The truth is that the Greeks could build good roads if the need for them was sufficiently compelling, but they had no sense of the ROAD, as the Romans did, and as we do to-day.

Among the adventures of Odysseus described in the Odyssey one of the least A favourable to ancient or modern attempts to make a geography of his wanderings is traditionally his visit to the isle of Aeolus, who bound the winds for him in a bag. The famous geographer Eratosthenes said of the whole problem: ‘It will only be discovered where Odysseus’ wanderings lie when the cobbler is discovered who stitched together the bag of the winds’. Others have not failed to point out that Homer makes it a floating island anyhow, as if he were determined that no one should find it, and that the procedure of tying the winds in a bag is a piece of magic, known in practice or recorded in folk-lore in too many parts of the world for a definite location to be possible.

Our dictionaries tell us that ‘Philistine’ denotes ‘an uncouth or uncultured person’. Archaeologically, this definition is quite unjustified for the Philistines were the main civilizing influence on the Hebrews during the critical period when Israel emerged from rude tribalism to forge a cultured empire. The magnitude of the Philistine impact is reflected in the name of ‘Palestine’ (= Hebrew peléšet ‘Philistia’) which clings to the country after more than three millennia.

THE high carboniferous sandstone formation named Landek, on the left bank of the order at Ostrava-Petřkovice, is the site of the most important palaeolithic settlement at present known in Silesia. The exploratory excavations carried out there in 1952, by the Brno Archaeological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, were continued systematically the following year, particularly to determine whether coal had been intentionally used as fuel by the palaeolithic hunters.

The second season’s excavations brought to light numerous particles of coke and coal in the ash layers which had resulted from the dispersal of hearths by solifluxion. Fragments of coal unaffected by heat were rare in comparison with the coke particles, indicating that the coal had been almost completely converted into the ash which colours the whole cultural stratum grey, especially near the hearths. While the discovery of coal is not, by itself, decisive evidence of its use as fuel, it is corroborated by the fact that the coal is found in various forms, and it may be concluded as a result of the 1953 excavations that 30,000 years ago, in the Ostrava-Petřkovice region, man used coal as a source of heat. This remarkable conclusion is more easily acceptable if it is borne in mind that the Ostrava coal-measures rise to the surface in the immediate neighbourhood of the site, and that the use of coal, though only as a material for ornaments, is known in other instances, e.g. at Kesslerloch, and at Kniegrotte. That the coal-fed fires reached high temperatures is shown by the considerable degree of incineration of the animal bone fragments (strongly resembling charcoal), which occur, together with particles of mammoth ivory, in the ash.

This paper outlines the beliefs associated with Elf-shot and the influence these had on the treatment of cattle disease and the pattern of field ploughing. The subject may conveniently be introduced and partially defined by way of two examples. In the late Autumn of 1884 a Buchan farmer was heard to complain ‘I’ve gotten an ill job this mornin’ in the deth o’ a fine stirk by elfshot, an’ the pity is he wasna fasent to a hair tether (a halter made of hair) fan the wapin wad a fa’en short o’m’. When asked whether it might not have been due to quarter-ill, he replied ‘that could na be, my neebor an’ me opent up the beast, an’ there was a hole through his hert’. Some few years before in 1867 a Mr Hew Morrison saw a cow which was said to have been killed by the fairies. When he pointed out to the farmer that her death had been caused by rolling over, and her long horns penetrating the ground had kept her in a position from which she could not rise, he was told that was the common way in which cows fall when struck by the saighead sithe or fairy arrow.

Domus Aurea, the Golden House. The name conjures up a vision of splendour, which even a visit to the gloomy vaults beneath the southern slopes of the EsquiIine cannot altogether dispel. All too little has survived ; and unless there are surprises in store for us still below ground, it seems unlikely that we shall ever know very much more about it from the actual remains than we do at present. But with each year that passes fresh knowledge accumulates in other, related fields. Vision shifts and perspectives change, and every now and then it becomes worth while once again to take stock, to ask which of the old problems still matter, and to see what are the new ones that have now to be considered. The present article, which lays no claim to originality, is an attempt to present and assess the present state of scholarly opinion about what must, by any computation, be held to be one of the most important buildings in the whole long history of classical architecture.