The principal object of the campaign was to demolish the great baulk that had purposely been left unexcavated from the very beginning to provide a record of the stratigraphy of the site.* This earth was now required by the Restoration Department of the Greek Archaeological Service to secure and safeguard the mud brick walls that were destroyed in a great fire in Late Helladic IIIB towards the end of the 13th century BC. The intensity of the fire had served to preserve these walls in their original state, though off axis, and they are the most complete examples of their kind on any Mycenaean site. The second object of the excavation was to uncover the rest of the plan of the LH IIIB walls which in the western sector of the site are buried below the postdestruction walls of LH IIIB/IIIC. The second objective was only in part accomplished because of the remarkable and outstanding finds that were brought to light, mostly under the great baulk. The work of their recovery sIowed down the excavation considerably. At the east central end of the great baulk a small room, c. 2 m. x 2 m., was uncovered that was filled with a great variety of clay objects in considerable disarray (PL. xra; see plan, FIG. I,I). Outstanding among these were idols from 0.50 to 0.60 m. in height of a kind that had never been found on the Greek mainland before, although somewhat similar examples are known from Gazi in Crete [I]

To British archaeologists, the hill-forts in France are likely to be second in interest only to those in this country; they also form natural attractions when touring. For the southern sixsevenths of the country, however, information about these sites is very sparse, while plans or detailed directions for access are almost entirely lacking. In these circumstances the following notes may be of use. The accompanyingplans, save where noted, are merely pace-and-prismatic sketches, but give a better indication of the character of the remains than would be possible by description alone; for ease in comparison, they are reproduced to 1/2500 or some simple multiple. They are believed to be fairly correct representations, but it must be noted that many of the sites are very thickly overgrown. It must be emphasized that this is in no way a systematic study of French hill-forts, but merely the results of a brief tour made in 1966 to gain some personal knowledge of what the sites are like, supplemented by a few additional notes made during other visits.

The excavation of the School in 1968, as in 1967, was at Knossos. In addition, a new excavation under Dr A. C. Renfrew was sponsored at Photolivos in Thrace, and Dr P. Warren's excavation at Myrtos on the South coast of Crete was completed. Underwater operations at Elaphonisos in the S. Peloponnese led by Mr R. C. Jones were also sponsored by the School, while in Cyprus the (retiring) Director completed his excavation at Paphos. At Knossos, Mr Sackett completed the excavation begun in 1967 of the post-Minoan overlay of the Unexplored Mansion, and Mr Popham, Assistant Director of the School, excavated the late Minoan levels, which had been extensively robbed in places. The main rooms of the building had been destroyed in LM I11 AI period, though some were remodelled and reused later in the LM I11 B. To this latter period belongs the figurine with raised arms (PL. xvIIIa).

A prehistorian, like any other historian, should aim not only to describe, but also to explain. . .' Thus Childe's valediction (1958, 6). But we frustrate ourselves unless fiercely selective in explaining traces of small farming (or hunting) communities near subsistence level, with the critical apparatus of contemporary or 19th-century industrial societies; conceptions wholly arising from such societies are likely to be appropriate only to them." Yet we cannot easily avoid these errors, for we are alienated from our material-and not only by time. Schools of archaeology are necessarily urban, draw deeply on traditions of longestablished urban institutions. The conditions of that pre-industrial life which was almost the whole of reality to our ancestors may seem inconceivably remote-and disappointing, distasteful even.

The Indus script has been known for a little over 40 years, and it has so far resisted all attempts at decipherment. This is not surprising in view of the fact that the inscriptions are all very short, and that no long connected texts are preserved. It is also not known what language lies behind the writing: bilinguals are nonexistent, and given the historical circumstances, not likely to be found. In the period since the discovery of the inscriptions a number of attempts at decipherment has been made, but none has carried conviction. Quite recently there has been a number of fresh attempts, of which the most sustained and ambitious, by a group of Finnish scholars, has been described in the previous issue of this journal. It is based on the assumption that the language spoken in the Indus cities was a form of Proto-Dravidian. The detailed methods used in this attempt at decipherment have been briefly described in the previous articles, and they need not be repeated here. Instead it is proposed to examine the handling of the Dravidian material, which, as will be seen, is open to considerable criticism

The 1968 excavations were a continuation of the investigations that have been in progress at Knowth since 1962. In brief, this work is establishing that there is a cemetery of Passage Graves at Knowth. This consists of the large tumulus (Site I) with a number of smaller tombs in its immediate vicinity. This group is situated on a low hill that on the west overlooks the River Boyne at a point a couple of miles downstream from Slane where the river takes a sharp turn to the left [I]. MAIN MOUND At Knowth a tract of land that is close to a halfmile in length and one fifth of a mile in greatest width (c. 800 m. x 340 m.) is above the 200-ft. contour (60 m.) but even the highest part of this is only slightly over the 200-ft. mark. The large mound is situated towards the north-western extremity of this ridge and the smaller tombs are

A quarter of a century ago Antiquity carried an article by A. J. Arkell (194.4) on 'Archaeological Research in West Africa'. This was the text of a memorandum submitted by request to the Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (the Elliott Commission), which recommended that in the then Gold Coast, now Ghana, the existing Achimota College should continue its originally envisaged development into a full university college and that the University College of Ibadan should be founded in Nigeria. Not only did these developments take place, but both institutions have since become autonomous degree-granting universities ; in addition two more universities have come into being in Ghana and four in Nigeria. Three of the universities in Nigeria and one of those in Ghana concern themselves with archaeology.

Within the past two years the chronology of the later prehistoric period in Scotland has been given a new precision by no less than 24 C14 dates obtained from nine different sites, most of which are conventionally assigned to the pre- Roman Iron Age. Previously the identification and dating of the cultures and sites of this period had depended almost entirely on various exotic bronzes and the time that they and other traits were estimated to have reached Scotland from further south in Britain and from the Continent. The last phase of the Late Bronze Age was fairly confidently assigned a start in the mid-6th century BC on the basis of links with the continental Halstatt Iron Age [I] but the bronzes concerned are nearly all stray finds or from hoards and cannot be tied to any contemporary structures or material cultures except at Covesea and, tenuously, at Traprain Law. The same is true of the various examples of decorated Celtic metalwork which have been found in Scotland: these can be given rough dates on stylistic grounds but were stray finds and unconnected with other aspects of the contemporary material cultures. The dating of hillforts and domestic sites of late pre-Roman times has had to rely on the rare examples

It has long been known that irrigation agriculture played a significant role in the history of civilization in the Near East, and it is not surprising, therefore, that many researchers have concentrated their efforts on the study of problems connected with early irrigation, based both on the evidence of literary sources (Jacobsen, 1960), and that provided by archaeology and palaeogeography. Probably the most interesting work of this kind is the systematic research which has been carried out in the Diyala river basin, which covers a wide chronological range (Adams, 1965). However, the thick sedimentary deposits in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, and on the foothill plains and intermontane valleys in many regions of the Near East, have resulted, in most cases, in the ancient irrigation systems lying deeply buried and inaccessible. Very recently, as a result of joint archaeological and palaeogeographical investigations in southern Turkmenia, we have succeeded in discovering very early irrigation constructions in the region, where, in the 6th-2nd millennium BC were situated sites belonging to the painted pottery cultures-the Dieitun culture (Berdyev, 1965) and the so-called Anau culturewhich comprise the northern limits of the Near Eastern cultural world (FIG. I) (Pumpelly, 1908; Kuphtin, 1954; Masson, 1962, 1966 ; Sarianidi, 1965; Khlopin, 1963).

The latest despatch from the South Cadbury (Somerset) campaign takes the form of a symposium volume of essays, edited by Geoffrey Ashe. It is a handsome book with a well-chosen range of illustrations, some in colour, and will win popular acclaim as a landmark in British post-Roman studies. Two opening chapters by Mr Ashe ('The Visionary Kingdom' and 'The Arthurian Fact') provide historical summaries of Arthur's background, times, and supposed career, We then have five archaeological contributions. Dr C. A. Ralegh Radford writes on Tintagel and Castle Dore, in Cornwall (Ch. 3), and on his Glastonbury Abbey excavations (Ch. 5). Philip Rahtz deals with his work on Glastonbury Tor (Ch. 6), and Leslie Alcock examines post-Roman Wales (Ch. 4) and the South Cadbury excavations up to the end of 1967 (Ch. 7). This last chapter, the crux of the book, was (rather oddly) edited and arranged by Mr Ashe, who explains (p. ix) that Mr. Alcock 'owing to the pressure of professional duties . . . regrettably had no time to put his material in a form that harmonized with the rest of the book'. There are then four more chapters by Mr Ashe. 'Extending the Map' is concerned with the distribution of Arthurian attributions in folklore and recent times;

The Grottes d'Arcy, situated on the main road (RN 6) between Auxerre and Avallon, are the closest big caves to Paris (FIG. I). Between the 16th and the 19th centuries the most distinguished visitors, from Louis XI11 to M. de Buffon (1740), marvelled at the immense galleries adorned with stalactites at the Grande Grotte. The caves still attract many tourists. All nine of the Arcy caves have a generally southerly exposure, and they have been cut into-some of them through-the south flank of a Jurassic limestone massif, or promontory, around which the Cure River flows in a large bow between Saint-MorC and Arcy-sur-Cure. Actually this area is on the border between the southwestern limits of the Seine Basin and the extreme northwestern extension of the granitic massif of the Morvan, where the Cure has its source. This complex of caves lies on the left bank of the Cure just west of RN 6 some 12 km. south of (i.e. upstream from) the confluence of the Yonne and the Cure, at a distance of just over 27 km. south-southwest of Auxerre and about 17 km. north-northwest of Avallon. Here the Cure (the mean elevation of which at this

The Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies was founded as recently as 1967 with a governing body of distinguished scholars appointed by the four contributing countries. With this, its first publication, it has got off to a flying start. Ever since the first specimens of the Indus script were published nearly 40 years ago, it has constituted a standing challenge to scholars with a bent for cryptography. Several attempts have been made to decipher it, but as Sir Mortimer Wheeler remarked, before the publication of this monograph, in The Indus civilization (3rd edition, Cambridge, 1968, p. 107, footnote 2), 'the published attempts to do so are invalid'. This judgement is now due for drastic reconsideration.