Until a few years ago it was customary amongst many historians to suppose that the towns of Roman Britain ceased to exist in or very soon after A.D. 410. Records such as that of Pevensey, admittedly a fort rather than a town, which was not taken until A.D. 491, had always suggested a modification of that View, and more recently efforts have been made to demonstrate that life of some sort continued unbroken in certain of the towns throughout the Dark Ages. Dr R. E. M. Wheeler has argued thus particularly in the case of London.

It has been seen how tin evidently came to be known at Byblos (Gebeil) through the occurrence of its ore in the two rivers near that city. It has also been seen that its presence there mixed with copper ore led on naturally to the manufacture of bronze, which became known to the Egyptians as ‘Asiatic copper’. Now we may turn to the state of affairs far away to the north and west where conditions prove to have been totally different from those obtaining on the coast of central Syria.

The basic importance of food in the daily lives both of individuals and of communities, and the all-pervading influence upon outlook and social structure exercised by the methods adopted to ensure its adequate supply have become more and more widely recognized among students of ancient society during recent years (1). Rather less attention has yet been paid to water (2), that other necessity of life, bound up so intimately with the distribution and density of human settlement, and linked at the same time with man’s exploitation of his physical environment. Yet water-supply merits the closest attention, not only of those who approach prehistory from a functionalist point of view, but of all those whose studies are in the last resort based on archaeological material. In the first place, the connexion between human settlement and sources of water offers a cardinal clue to the location of ancient sites; in the second, the dampness of wells and springs has made for conditions favourable to the preservation of objects, organic as well as inorganic, which in the course of time have found their way into their recesses; and in the third, the veneration in which sources have been held has fostered from time immemorial the deposition in their waters of offerings as welcome to the archaeologist as to the spirits themselves.

The great developments that have taken place in the study of prehistoric archaeology during the present century have made it possible to outline with reasonable accuracy the major cultural movements associated with Western Europe for at least two and a half millennia before Christ. It is, therefore, fitting that some attempt be made to re-examine the cultural material of the proto-historic period in the West in the light of this vastly extended knowledge of prehistoric times.

Many of the Grim's ditches and others of similar character in East and South England have been tentatively dated to the Late Roman or Saxon periods. The question of their date and purpose has frequently received attention in Antiquity, notably by Sir Cyril Fox and Mr O. G. S. Crawford.

But all these Grim's ditches need not be alike, and the group of linear earthworks known by this name in Cranborne Chase is especially distinctive. Parts of it can perhaps best be compared with the Grovely Grim's ditch, with which it is almost certainly associated, and which was described by Mr Crawford in his article on ‘Our Debt to Rome’ as being pre-Saxon. Since then Sir Charles Oman has suggested a later date for it, and put forward the view that Grim's dyke, and other ditches in the southeast of Wiltshire ‘were thrown up to mark the limit of the Saxon frontier’.

The story of the ferry is, at the outset, the story of the boat. It begins with prehistoric man noticing that wood will float and possibly, from the riding of birds and small animals, that it will carry a burden according to its size and character. Observant and imitative, the human animal, in the childhood of the world, proceeds to experiment gingerly and doubtfully at first, boldly and confidently—perhaps in some cases too boldly and confidently, later. He mounts himself astride a log and propels it, probably at first with his legs, towards the opposite bank of the river near which he lives. On the other side lies a new world, with resources untapped, especially in the matter of food, which he is anxious to reach. Even in the middle of the 19th century Pickering (Races of Man) speaks of men in the tide waters of the Sacramento river crossing, standing on split logs.

In previous papers the writer has suggested that, according to such evidence as is available, the rotary quern must have been derived from the large and heavy donkey-mill of Greece and Rome (1), and Childe has further suggested that this development may have been brought about through the adaptation of the rotary principle to small portable mills suitable for the use of armies in the field (2). Thus legionaries, upon demobilization, would carry the idea, if not the articles themselves, back to their peasant homes.

In the Middle Ages wool was so valuable that it was necessary to have an accurate means of weighing whereby the merchant, in the presence of the farmer at the farm, could weigh the wool to the satisfaction of all concerned.

The method described below was used all throughout the Middle Ages and until quite recently, and as I am one of the last of those who were brought up from boyhood in the use of this system and in conforming to some of the ancient customs of the country Wool-Staplers, it seems only right that I should prepare this record before it is too late to do so.

The Spanish slopes of the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian chains are rich in classic caves and galleries of art of the Upper Palaeolithic Age. In the southeast Spanish coastal belt, on the other hand, while many shallow rock-shelters are adorned with lively painted scenes, classed by Burkitt as Group II of the Cave Art, no complete or stratified record of the activity of old stone age hunters had been published till Prof. L. Pericot Garcia explored scientifically the cave of Parpalló in the Province of Valencia in 1929–31. The sumptuous publication of his results, delayed of course by the civil war, is of exceptional importance as a contribution to fill in this painful hiatus in our knowledge but also for the very surprising results it records.

The pilgrimage to Mecca made on foot across Africa from west to east between the desert and the tropical forest keeps many West Africans in close touch with the valley of the Nile. The pilgrims follow a route along which culture must from the earliest times have been spread by refugees, traders, military expeditions and the like. (In these latter days motorized convoys of West African troops and aerial reinforcements for the Middle East have followed the same route).

Over twenty years’ service in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (of which twelve years were spent in Darfur, where the cultural and political influence of West Africa was strong in medieval times, and is still felt today), has left me much interested in West Africa, although I have never been there.

The religious ideas of the illiterate villagers of South India, nominal adherents to Hinduism, are extremely vague, ill-defined and confused. In one respect alone is there general understanding and agreement; this is the universal acceptance of the belief that demon spirits prowl around their homes, ever seeking opportunity to inflict misery and disease upon those who do not adequately propitiate these potential workers of evil. The basis of this belief reaches back into a distant past, antecedent to the influx into the plains of India, through the northwest passes, of those swarms of Aryan-speaking people who brought with them the Vedic cult of the sun, moon and planets, fire, wind and rivers, humanized by anthropomorphic ideology. On entry into India this glorious imagery found itself in conflict with two aboriginal cults strongly entrenched in the religious beliefs of the land. One of these was the worship of gods and goddesses of whom the most honoured or dreaded as the case might be, were those concerned with procreation, the continued fertility of the fields, and with the infliction of epidemic diseases and other miseries. Of these deities we have little precise information but it seems certain that phallic worship, typified in the lingam of Siva, was incorporated in this cult, and that many of the ills that afflict mankind were considered as due to the malevolence of malignant demons and to the jealous hatred of the living possessed by the disembodied spirits of the dead. The other and milder cult native to the soil was the worship of trees and serpents, or rather of the spirits or influences inhabiting them or associated therewith.

In their annual migration from the warm waters of the North Atlantic, the pilchard shoals rarely travelled further east than the coasts of Cornwall and southwest Devon. Here they were caught in vast numbers and preserved, for export or use, in fish cellars which lay along the coast. The Cornish fish cellar was a building of highly specialized type, in which the pilchards were salted and pressed. With the gradual disappearance of the pilchard fishery during the nineteenth century the cellars were first abandoned, and then became ruinous or were converted to other uses.

It has long been obvious that a new policy is wanted for our museums and their buildings. The need, often discussed, now takes on a new urgency. The second world war has visited our cities with insensate destruction on a scale which we have hitherto associated only with Acts of God. Some of our museums have already suffered —and as yet we cannot say when or where more will be damaged or destroyed. Replanning schemes will see old museums rebuilt, new museums established in many places; and now, while such schemes are being blocked out, is the time to see that individually and as a body the museums are planned and developed to the best advantage. The necessary driving force must come from a comparatively small body of people. For as a nation we can hardly be called museum conscious: we have no official museum policy, and the local efforts which are the substitute for it operate so unevenly that a large part of the population is quite without a service which ought to be of great educational and cultural value to all.

Those who witnessed the fires of London in 1940 were occupied with other thoughts and acts than the contemplation of the past. Today remoter skies are aglow, and the quiet and cavernous places of London where busy offices once stood are already planned and regimented for reconstruction. No doubt, as often enough in the past, London will gain functionally if not artistically in the process; the new buildings will be higher and deeper than their predecessors, with air-conditioned basements carried far down into the native clay.

Why Berkshire? Well, any other county might have been chosen; that in Berkshire there are both the Romano-British city of Silchester and the ruins of an abbey founded in Norman times may have influenced the choice. As for the last word of the title, ‘interlacings’ will be confined here to a pattern of curved strands. This rules out such motives as the zig-zags of the filigree on the handle of the Sumerian dagger and the Coptic meanderings of one strand only.

There are, of course, many examples of interlacing to be seen nowadays. Men criss-cross their shoe-strings, unless they have been taught to lace them straight across as they do in the Army; a basket is made of interlacing canes; a hurdle of interlacing wattles; women formerly interlaced the strands of their long hair and the manes and tails of horses are often treated similarly. A cane carpet-beater is an excellent example of interlacing. The ‘under and over’ of the canes make for both strength and resiliency. The implement is remarkably attractive in appearance, an instance of the combination of the arts of necessity and of form.