The Neolithic settlement of Auvernier on the shores of Lake Neuchltel in Switzerland, first described in 1854 (Keller), is archaeologically dated by imports from the Schnurkeramik civilization (‘corded’ complex) (JCquier and Strahm, 1965).

Recent archaeological and botanical studies of a number of major food plants throughout the world have clearly shown that thle initial domestication of each of them was a slow and laborious process, carried out by generations of experimentalists familiar with the total ecosystem of which the plant was a part (Darlington, 1963; Harris, 1967, 1969; Ucko and Dimbleby 1969b). Therefore, any pronouncement about the who, where, how, and when of the domestication of a food plant must be based not on general preconceptions but on local facts.

The old reconstruction, widely publicized and discussed by specialists, has been on exhibition in the British Museum since 1949. It is now replaced by the new reconstruction (PL. I). The change of this very early stringed instrument, the earliest reconstructible stringed instrument in Europe, from harp to lyre, is of great archaeological and musicological interest.

The Siren Vase, an Attic red-figure stamnos by the Siren painter (PL. xvra), was made between 490 and 480 BC, and is now in the British Museum. Odysseus is shown bound by his own order to the mast of his ship, the only man to hear the Sirens’ irresistible song and to survive it. Their ears stopped with beeswax, his crew row stolidly on.

The writers of this important and interesting symposium did not set out to answer all the questions that they ask, and this was wise and modest. They wanted to think afresh themselves about old problems-problems of the inter-relationships and origins of British megalithic tombs that have been discussed for over a hundred years-in the light of new knowledge, and to make all other megalithic enquirers do the same. In this they have succeeded: this stimulating and thoughtprovoking book must be read by all concerned with the prehistory of western Europe in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.

I have done some varied seafaring in different kinds of odd craft and so have some idea of the difficulties involved in earlier days. In the summer of 1925 I was at sea in a Fleetwood trawler, which was fishing the Ioo-fathom line from St Kilda to the Blaskets. On I July, we were off Galway Bay; it was a fairly calm day with a big Atlantic swell running. A three-man curragh from Inishmore (one of the Aran Islands) came alongside and the crew begged for fish.

The purse found at Sutton Hoo contained forty-two gold objects. Thirty-seven of them were Merovingian coins of the last decades of the 6th and the first half of the 7th century, three were unstruck circular blanks, and two were small rectangular ingots (Bruce-Mitford, 1968, 47-51; Lafaurie, 1968, 258-60, correcting Marseilles to Arles as the mint of no. 3). The coins weigh from 1.221 grams to 1.388 grams—Bruce-Mitford's text by a slip reads grains—and average 1.27 g. (= 19.6 grains), the theoretical weight of the Merovingian gold coin at this period being 1.3 grams, i.e. 20 grains. They are generally termed tremisses or trientes, this being the name of the third of the Roman solidus from which they were derived, but they were in fact somewhat lighter—1.3 g. as against 1-5 g.—and no longer represented the Roman tremissis of eight carats but the Germanic shilling of twenty grains (Grierson, 1961, 351-2). The three blanks, which are about the same diameter as the coins, are of much the same weight (1.09 g., 1.38 g., and 1.46 g.: average, 1.31 g.). The ingots are heavier, weighing respectively 5.21 g. and 4.97 g., i.e. 80 grains and 76-7 grains, and are also of slightly inferior gold. It is probable that they were each intended to represent four shillings.

A final season of excavation of the site at Mycenae called the Citadel House by Professor Wace (referred to as ‘Wace’s House’ by Mylonas and also known as ‘The House with the Idols’) was carried out in 1969. The following is a brief account of the finds and their context as revealed by the 1968 and 1969 excavations”.

The views of Jacquetta Hawkes give vent to the uncomfortable feelings that many older archaeologists have been harbouring against the ‘intrusion’ of science into their exclusive domain of ‘humanistic’ archaeology. I am not so bothered here about the protests of the ‘passing generation’ which is ‘suffering from universal decay’ (using her own words) as with the problems of the two cultures, the methods and meaning of archaeology, its relation with other sciences and the direction towards which it is heading.

The ‘faience’ beads of the British Bronze Age have since the last century been appreciated as the product of a somewhat sophisticated technology. Although the possibility of local manufacture was seriously considered by earlier antiquaries, especially for the Scottish beads, in more recent years-since the writings of Childe and Piggott-a Mycenaean or Egyptian origin has been widely assumed for them.

This is probably the question most often asked of the metallurgist by the archaeologiist, and the object of this report is to show how far we have got in our attempts to answer it.

First, it must be clearly understood that we can only expect some correlation between ore and weapon or utensil, and therefore provenance in the early eras of metallurgy, where the bulk of the metal used emanated from primary sources, and where the amount of secondary re-used metal was negligible. This objection does not apply, however, in the case of semifinished products such as those ingots which have been made from ores and not from secondary material. This should include the plano-convex copper ingots of Late Hronze and Roman date in Britain and the ox-hide ingots of the Eastern Mediterranean.

There is no agreed definition of industrial archaeology. My own preference is that it is a field of study concerned with investigating, surveying, recording, and, in some cases, with preserving industrial monuments. An ‘industrial monument’ in this context iis any relic of an obsolete phase of an industry or transport system, but in practice it is useful to confine attention to the monuments of the last 200 years, both because earlier periods are dealt with by more conventional archaeological or historical techniques, and because of the sheer mass of material dating from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.