Fourteen years have elapsed since the appointment of the sub-committee in 1936 to consider the petrological identification of stone implements with special reference to the area covered by the South-Western Group of Museums and Art Galleries; and two reports have been published in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, VII (1941), 50 and XIII (1947), 47, outlining briefly the results of its work. Considerable progress has been made since the appearance of the Second Report and it has therefore been deemed advisable to issue a more comprehensive Third Report summarizing as far as possible all results and thus making available in compact form many of the facts accumulated.

In the Second Report, we drew attention to the fact that in 1945 the value of the work to archaeology was appreciated sufficiently for the Council for British Archaeology to raise what was virtually a regional monopoly on to a national basis, and to appoint, as Honorary Secretary, Mr W. F. Grimes, M.A., F.S.A., Director of the London Museum, to coordinate the work of the existing museum federations. A generous grant towards the cost of the work was made in 1949 by the Lever hulme Trust, since it seemed unlikely that extension of studies would be possible from museum resources alone.

The Council for British Archaeology put as one of its objectives the examination of stone axes by petrological methods, with a view to their more exact identification and their placing into groups of common origin. Of the various regional sub-committees set in being only the South-west Museums Group, which initiated this type of research, has published any results of its findings, its final report being published in this volume of the Proceedings, pp. 99–158 (1, 2). The West Midlands Sub-Committee (C.B.A. Group 8) has gone a long way towards its objective in the counties of Shropshire, Hereford, Worcester, Warwick and the southern half of Staffordshire, and it should not be long before a complete account of its results can be published. The most important outcome of the work, however, has been the recognition of a rock type which, as the material for axe-hammers, is characteristically West Midland in its concentrated distribution and the conclusion that the factory for these implements lay just south of Corndon Hill in Montgomeryshire, just across the Shropshire border. As this discovery has already been announced by one of us (4) to Section H of the British Association in 1950, it would seem to be advisable to publish the evidence for this part of our work without waiting for the full account of the complete regional survey.

The present writer has had recently the opportunity to carry out a revision of the deer of the Cromer Forest Bed series of East Anglia. The entire work is to be published in the Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). The stratigraphical conclusions will be summarized here.

The occurrence of relatively archaic species together with more modern species in the Forest Bed fauna has puzzled many palaeontologists. Whereas the older authors concluded that it was wholly Pliocene (Reid, 1890, with bibliography) or partially or totally derived (Dubois, 1905), more recently a tendency has become prevalent to attribute the whole fauna to the early Pleistocene, and to explain the more archaic species as relics (Osborn, 1922; Zeuner, 1945). It may be shown that all these interpretations are untenable.

A Pliocene age is ruled out by the presence of species which immigrated into Europe after the close of the Villafranchian. On the other hand, the older representatives, once attributed to the Pliocene but actually of Upper Villafranchian age, do not constitute isolated relics: an entire faunal assemblage characteristic of that epoch is present. Moreover, primitive species occur in the Forest Bed fauna together with their more advanced descendants, and the fauna is richer in species than in any other locality.

The point is sometimes made that in primitive trade psychological satisfaction is obtained rather by the exchange of gifts and enhancement of prestige than by any economic advantage to the traders. It is possible, I think, to lay too much stress on this aspect of primitive trade at the expense of the more prosaic motive of material economic gain, though I do not, of course, wish to belittle the non-economic factors involved and indeed propose to draw attention to some of them. Naturally I shall take instances from my own experience, and these are mostly in areas with regular land contacts where the non-economic aspects of trade are likely to be less prominent than they are in self-contained and self-sufficient island communities. At the same time the first case I wish to examine is one of the inter-island trade in the Nicobar Islands.

At the end of the 12th century A.D. Henry II sent a substantial portion of the provisions and gear for his invasion of Ireland from Abingdon and Oxford to Bristol by cart. At the beginning of the 12th century B.C. a migrating horde from the north conveyed its household goods, women and children to the frontiers of Egypt in ox carts. No doubt the wide alluvial plains of Hither Asia, even before goats and charcoal-burners had stripped them of their parkland vegetation, were more congenial to the use of wheeled vehicles for long distance transport than the temperate forests of Britain and Cis-Alpine Europe. Still even in Asia, I suspect, the first economic use of wheeled vehicles was for the carriage of bulky foodstuffs from the fields, where they were grown, to the settlements, where they were stored and consumed, and of farmyard manure in the opposite direction. It was in this way by allowing a larger population to be fed at a single centre that the invention of the wheel contributed to the Urban Revolution in Mesopotamia. (In Egypt, where all cultivable land lies close to the Nile, boats took the place of carts).

Notable advances have taken place on the continent of recent years in the study of bronze types of the Late Bronze Age, and of their distribution both in time and space. In Britain, too, progress has been made. We have some while since distinguished a Late Bronze Age II (roughly equivalent to Hallstatt B) from a Late Bronze Age I (roughly Hallstatt A), and latterly even begun—though still dimly—to envisage a Late Bronze Age III, which would be the counterpart with us of a true Hallstatt period (Reinecke's Hallstatt C and D, or Montelius VI).

In regard to swords we recognize the intrusive Carp's-Tongue variety, characteristic of the opening of our Late Bronze Age II, and certain native weapons that are contemporary with it. We have also long been familiar with the later Hallstatt bronze swords of Gündlingen type. But the series as a whole has not yet been studied, and its origins are vague and ill-documented. It is the object of this paper to offer a reasoned starting-point for the sequence of development in Britain, so that we may be the better equipped to determine which of our sword-types can properly be assigned to our own Late Bronze Age I, and even, possibly, to throw some light on the chronology of the period.

The widespread adoption of deeper ploughing has led to the discovery during recent years of many remarkable antiquities in East Anglia. Prominent among recent discoveries resulting from this practice have been a series of finds of metal objects of the Early Iron Age in north-western Norfolk. These have ranged from an iron anthropoid sword with an inhumation burial at Shouldham through isolated finds, such as tores at Bawsey and North Creake, to the impressive group of hoards of ornaments and coins at Snettisham and the small hoard here studied found at Ringstead five miles from Snettisham and two miles east of Hunstanton.

Few remains of the latter part of the Iron Age from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 43 had previously been recorded from north-west Norfolk. Within a ten-mile radius of Ringstead only indefinite traces of human occupation had been noted, such as pottery from Hunstanton and coins of the Iceni from Brancaster, Burnham Thorpe and possibly Ingoldisthorpe. A much-damaged hillfort at South Creake has been attributed to this period, though on very little direct evidence. Actual indications of settlement at this period are still very scanty.