I must first of all thank you, and more especially Professor Childe and Mr. Maynard, as colleagues and fellow-workers in the research of Prehistoric Man, for the special honour you have paid to my labours, by appointing me your President for this year. I owe, I think, this exceptional mark of esteem to the many personal friends I have amongst you and to the fact that you are particularly alive to the attention with which I have tried to follow the valiant efforts of many of you, and to absorb on the actual sites the unusually important stratigraphical facts which these efforts have helped to bring to light.

It was in 1898 that I came for the first time to your island, to study the Bronze Age of France at Nashmills, the home of your great fore runner, John Evans, one of the three English savants who gave their allegiance to Boucher de Perthes.

I came back again in 1904 to study the Bruniquel collection at the British Museum, where Charles Reid and Reginald Smith gave me a generous welcome. Haddon and Henry Balfour, by their small but very instructive books on the evolution of primitive art, opened for me hitherto unsuspected vistas on the ornamental art of the Reindeer Age. It is to them that I owe my introduction in 1912, to Miles Burkitt, whom I took with me when he was quite young on my Spanish explorations and excavations, and who is now one of your masters.

The sub-crag “stone bed” has been described by many writers and there is now a general consensus of opinion that it represents the non-floatable débris of the Tertiary land surface spread out by the advancing Crag sea and sealed in beneath the sands, clays and gravels of the shelly crag. In Norfolk the stone bed rests immediately upon the chalk. At the present time, when most of the formerly numerous chalk pits are no longer worked, sections are scarce. The best available opportunities for examining the stone bed are provided by the cliff section from Weybourne to Sheringham, and the beach and foreshore exposures from Beeston to East Runton.

At Weybourne, to the east of the old coast-guard cottages, the chalk rises abruptly from beneath the chalky boulder-clay of the Great Eastern glaciation which cuts down below tide-level to the westward; and soon attains a height of about twenty feet above the pebble-bank. For the first few hundred yards the chalk is very disturbed, flints from the stone bed, patches of very shelly crag and fragments of chalk being inextricably mixed in the upper portion, though the chalk four feet below the surface shows the flint layers apparently undisturbed. In about three hundred yards the stone bed becomes continuous, with varying thicknesses of the crag gravels and sands separating it from the glacial beds above. In thickness the stone bed varies from six to nine inches, occasionally reaching a foot, and tending to become rather thicker as it stretches eastward.

The remarkable series of deposits, known as “The Cromer Forest Bed,” is of never-failing interest to a great number of people. So far as we know no other part of England, and possibly no other part of the world, can boast of an accumulation precisely comparable to the Forest Bed. It was laid down when the present river Rhine flowed northwards through what is now the North Sea, and at a time separated from to-day by several hundreds of thousands of years. East Anglia, and no doubt other parts of the northern hemisphere, was then enjoying a warm climate, and was inhabited by herds of great game animals, and hunting people who left behind them a vast number of flint implements which delight, and in some cases, puzzle modern archaeologists. But there are other things than flint implements which puzzle archaeologists. In these days the mere finding of a humanly-flaked flint in a geological deposit is not the alpha and omega of the archæologist's task.

The Raised Beaches on the marine plain between Portsmouth and Brighton are well-known. With the lowest beach at Brighton we are not here concerned. The chief exposures of the so-called 100 ft. beach lie between Chichester and Arundel. In this area the rock platform of the marine plain consists of Chalk and Eocene, and these together with the overlying beach deposits are generally covered by Coombe Rock. The true beach consists of a shingle of varying degrees of coarseness, and though generally associated with a deposit of fine soft sand known locally as “lug sand,” the term “beach” will be used in this paper of the former deposit only.

The implements here described have been obtained from four different beach exposures. Those at Pear Tree Knapp, East Hampnett, and in Aldingbourne Park clearly form part of a single beach, the surface of which ranges from 80 to 90 ft. above O.D. The fourth exposure in Slindon Park, where the beach reaches 135 ft. will be described separately (see Fig. 1). From this pit in 1912, Dr. Eliot Curwen obtained an Acheulean hand-axe, whilst Mr. Fowler has more recently described ten artefacts from the same site, though non e was found in situ.

The area which Mr. Reginald Smith asked me to watch since 1922 is that of the upper reaches of the River Wey from Alton to Farnham, a ten mile stretch of the valley of the Wey which in the 18th century was described by Arthur Young as “the finest ten miles in England.”

To-day the Wey follows a zig-zag course some 50 ft. below the Railway Terrace on the South, and the opposite terrace on the North, on which the village of Bentley (Hants.) is built. Above this lowest terrace of the Wey, deeply covered with a pale stratified gravel of the river drift, is another terrace about 100 ft. above this river, also much gravelled with stratified river drift heavily iron stained. Then still ascending we come to the top of the Alice Holt spur known as the Alice Holt—Bourne plateau on which there are three levels, all much gravelled, but with contorted drift as opposed to the river drift of the terraces on the Northern slope.

This Alice Holt spur is the northern of three spurs that run from Alice Holt to the Waverley Valley: here the river makes a right angle with the Alton–Farnham Valley as it turns south immediately east of Farnham town. The area watched measures in all some 20 square miles.

The object of this paper is to make known the existence of a wide-spread implementiferous deposit hitherto unknown in Devonshire, although comparable discoveries have been made in East Anglia by Mr. Reid Moir and in the Thames Valley by Mr. J. P. T. Burchell.

A brief preliminary statement appeared in Vol. VII, part 2, in “Notes on Excavations,” which reported our finding a number of flint implements which lay to a depth of 12 ft. below the surface of a dry valley in Bovey Lane, Beer.

These specimens were revealed in an artificial cutting made in search of water, when only the faces of the sections could be examined, but by aid of a grant from the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund, we were later enabled to carry out two seasons of excavation.

In 1931 I described two newly-discovered stone age industries of post-glacial age situated in north-east Ireland which had been made by myself and worked in conjunction with my friend C. Blake Whelan: the one from the Lower Estuarine Clay on Islandmagee, and the other from what is probably a fluviatile gravel intercalated between the Upper and Lower Estuarine Clays in the raised-beach formation at Cushendun.

The former of these cultures has its counterpart in the blade industry beneath alluvium in the Orwell Estuary at Ipswich, Suffolk; whilst the latter finds its parallel in the raised-beach at Campbeltown in Argyllshire, Scotland. Adopting the familiar culture-sequence of Central Europe I had previously designated these two groups as phases of the Magdalenian period, but, in order to avoid confusion between the time-periods and the nomenclature of continental cultures, I have decided to base my chronology of the north Irish industries upon the natural changes of climate revealed by a study of the deposits in which they were found. The industries to be described below were contemporary with the Mesolithic Forest Cultures distinguished by Childe and Clark over the plain of northern Europe.

In 1932 the writer published a catalogue of and a commentary on the Neolithic Pottery of the British Isles, in which emphasis was laid on the essential division, first distinguished by Kendrick nearly ten years ago, into the Windmill Hill (Neolithic A) and Peterborough (Neolithic B) groups, and it was claimed that “evidence is consistent in pointing to a late date for Peterborough ware, with constant contacts with the beakers, while the Windmill Hill antedates this.” Since the publication of this paper, however, re-examination of the material, certain new evidence, and above all a most valuable discussion with Mr. E. Thurlow Leeds have made it clear that this claim for a difference of date all over Britain was unfounded. The most convincing, and indeed almost startling evidence was in the form of certain sherds from the recent excavations by Dr. Cecil Curwen in the causewayed camp of Whitehawk, near Brighton. Dr. Curwen invited the writer to examine and describe the pottery, and a brief commentary was contributed to the report on the excavations. Owing to the exigencies of space and other considerations it was thought advisable to omit from this report any discussion of the wider implications suggested, and to deal with them in a separate paper.

Since the Whitehawk sherds form the real basis of the revised views presented in this paper, it is well to consider them in some detail, at the risk of partial repetition of the account already published elsewhere. (Fig. 1.)

The excavation of this pit was commenced in 1928, continued in 1930 and 1932 and completed in 1933. A brief account of the work up to the end of 1932 is included in the Interim Report of the Percy Sladen Trust Excavations 1927–1932 published in Proceedings, viii. 5. p. 60.

Pit 12 is situated at the extreme eastern end of the West Field the boundary fence of which intersected a segment of the shaft and was removed during the excavations. Consequently, the pit is only a few yards distant from the nearest pit of the visible series and within the zone which in my Presidential Address, in 1926, (Proceedings v, 13, p. 125) it is postulated that the type of mining represented by the deep visible pits commenced. In the same Address, (p.95), it was indicated on the evidence of the polished stone celts and the methods adopted in mining, that the visible pits were clearly of Neolithic date, therefore the fortunate discovery of typical Neolithic pottery in Pit 12, is not surprising, though of first class importance for dating purposes in the light of our fuller knowledge of Neolithic pottery. It also confirms and definitely establishes the conclusions arrived at in 1926 relative to the age of the deep pits and furnishes for the first time a datable horizon for the commencement of this mining phase.

Few regions have yielded so many bronzes as the East Anglian fens, yet accurate records of the circumstances of their discovery exist for a small fraction only of the finds. This is very regretable since this evidence is usually of far more importance been than the objects found. In the case of the Methwold spear-head it has to some extent recovered by the diligence of Major Gordon Fowler, F.S.A., who interviewed the discoverer, Mr. John Harrod of Methwold, and obtained the object for the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge. The only completely satisfactory method is an immediate visit to the site of a discovery, and in this the Fenland Research Committee, which is vitally interested in such finds, is always keen to co-operate.

The site of the discovery may be found immediately below the “un” of Queen's Ground, Methwold Fen (Norfolk 6 in. sheet LXXXI, S.E., 1906 edtn.; Long. 0° 28′ 57″, Lat. 52° 30′ 29″). The spear-head itself (fig. 1) has loops at the junction of the socket and wings. Mr. Estyn Evans, F.S.A., to whom a photograph has been submitted, is of the opinion that this type marks the transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age in Britain, in which case it would date from approximately 1000 B.C.

It would, perhaps, be more conventional to ascribe the spear-head to the end of the Middle Bronze Age.

It is perhaps rather late in the day to be describing an experience of twenty-nine years ago, but unless it is done now, possibly a unique relic of the past, though still in existence, may remain unknown to a large majority of antiquaries.

It was on the 15th of April, 1905, that accompanied by Miss Outram, I started from North Berwick, in East Lothian, Scotland, on a voyage of discovery along the picturesque coast. Our goal was a cave opened out rather more than a hundred years ago by Mr. George Sligo, on his property of Seacliff, in the county of Haddington. According to tradition there was incontestable evidence that on this spot human sacrifices had been offered in the remote past. Fired by these dramatic accounts, we decided to seek out the cave for ourselves, and if possible, to test the accuracy of these statements.

A short drive took us to Seacliff House, marked by a cross on fig. 1. In the foreground stands Tantallon Castle, the ruined stronghold of the Douglases, and in the cliff beyond the promontory on which the Castle stands is Seacliff Cave below the arrow (fig. 1).

As we turned the corner in the winding descent from the cliff, it was an arresting scene which held us for amoment spell-bound. At the mouth of a cave, hollowed out in the red sandstone cliff, stood a large pear-shaped stone, with every appearance of an altar, raised upon an artificial mound (fig. 3). Its surface, which was approximately flat, was covered with a small blood-red plant, which had crept over it, and hanging down, seemed to drip over the edge, conjuring up with startling effect, the scene of some gruesome Pagan sacrifice. It was with feelings almost akin to awe that we entered the cave, where other remains were equally suggestive both of occupation and worship.