Fifty years ago on 17 February 1934 the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia held its annual business meeting in Norwich. Professor Breuil was elected President for that year, Professor Miles Burkitt as Vice-President and Dr J. G. D. Clark as Honorary Editor. Other elections at that meeting included Mr Stuart Piggott to Council and O. G. S. Crawford to membership of the Society. It had been founded in 1908 when on 17 October a circular had been issued by W. G. Clarke of Norwich and W. D. Dutt of Lowestoft to over 100 interested people inviting them to form an East Anglian Society of Prehistorians. That circular and a selection of replies to it still exist in the records of the Society that have recently been rediscovered. Dr W. A. Sturge of Icklingham Hall agreed to become the first President and, having received 72 favourable replies, an inaugural meeting was held on Monday 26 October 1908 at Norwich.

For the better part of three decades the Society maintained an active, if somewhat parochial, role in the development of British Prehistory. Its interests were East Anglian in orientation and with little exception directed to the study of palaeolithic man and the flint implements that might (or might not) be ascribed to human activity.

By 1930, however, some members of the Society were contemplating change. As C. S. Phillips (1980, 113) has pointed out, it was the only body in Britain devoted entirely to Prehistoric studies, but whilst its membership had originally been local to East Anglia, by the fourth decade of the century it was expanding outside the region.

This short paper summarizes current knowledge concerning the palaeolithic archaeology of the Mongolian People's Republic (‘Outer Mongolia’), although the paucity of well-documented assemblages and stratified sites makes it impossible to do more than comment on the nature of the material. A few early sites can be assigned to the Acheulean technocomplex and the Kazantsevo interglacial, but there is a more extensive group of surface middle palaeolithic assemblages in the Altai-Gobi area with close and dated typological parallels in northern China. At some of these localities, for example Arts Bogd in the southern Gobi, the first beginnings of the microblade tradition which characterizes the later Shabarakh complex of sites may be seen. These later sites, which form part of a remarkably uniform circumpolar epipalaeolithic dating to between 20–11,000 BP, are associated with the gradual Late Pleistocene desertification of the Gobi.

A recent monograph written by three prominent Korean archaeologists reports on the results of the past 20 years of research on Korean palaeolithic sites. Discussed are tasks completed, projects underway, and suggestions for future work to be done on palaeolithic remains in the Korean Peninsula. Particularly significant is the chapter on the archaeology of the Jǒngok-ni site which has produced many palaeolithic artefacts; among these the excavators find a high percentage of handaxes and other core bifaces, a cultural phenomenon claimed to be unique in East Asian prehistoric technology.

In the post-war years, the palaeolithic of Japan has become one of the best documented areas of Stone Age studies. In terms of both quantity and quality, the Japanese palaeolithic record has no equal in East Asia. This paper is an up-to-date review of the western language literature, identifying new trends of research in this important area. It first examines the chronological development of research into the Japanese palaeolithic in relation to the broader palaeolithic perspective. Then regional variability is described, and attention in particular is drawn to postglacial transitions, lithic technology, behavioural archaeology, and the peopling of the New World.

The first early palaeolithic tools, i.e. tools older than the Riss glacial period, were found already in the 1950s as isolated finds on the outskirts of Brno, either in the clay pits of brickworks (at the Brno–‘Červený kopec’, Brno-Židenice, ‘Malá Klajdovka’ and ‘Růženin dvůr’ localities) or in gravel terraces (Brno–Židenice, Brno–Líšeň). All these finds were worked pebbles or flakes.

The research of the Lower Pleistocene palaeontological site ‘Stránská skála’, on the eastern fringes of the City of Brno, started in the early 1960s by the Anthropos Institute of the Moravian Museum and led by R. Musil, brought to the light the first collection of artefacts accompanied by fauna. Stránská skála is a rock of Jurassic limestones, its north-western slope covered with debris, loess and fossil soils. There is a very rich fauna of vertebrata and molluscs, especially in the complex of fossil soils, but also in the loess and in the numerous crevices, fissures and caves of the rock massif. They are classed as Upper Biharian and dated to the Cromerian period (Musil and Valoch 1968). In the loess below the soil complex was also located the Matuyama/Brunhes palaeomagnetic inversion (Bucha et al. 1975).

The middle palaeolithic open-air site of Far'ah II was discovered and tested by the British Western Negev Expedition during the years 1972–73 (Price Williams 1973; 1975). After the British team concluded its field programme in 1976, the Archaeological Division of Ben Gurion University of the Negev in collaboration with the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem took over. For three seasons during 1976, 1977, and 1978, the site was excavated under the direction of I. Gilead.

A preliminary report of the results of the 1977 season described the basic aspects of the flint technology and typology (Gilead 1980). It is the intention of this article to discuss new data acquired during the field season of 1978 and to present a more detailed analysis of the flint artefacts and animal remains and of their spatial distribution on the archaeological surfaces.

Best known as a major prehistoric ceremonial centre, the Avebury region has also yielded a wealth of information regarding the origins, ecology and development of neolithic farming systems in the chalklands of southern England. This paper draws the various strands of evidence together, considers interpretative problems such as pollen survival, the status of bracken, the significance of forest regrowth, etc., and concludes by reconstructing the interplay between man and his environment during this crucial stage of economic development. Some form of mesolithic participation in early cereal cropping and barrow building is identified, and indeed, in being valley-based from the outset, neolithic settlement and land use patterns form a continuum with what had gone before. The spread of agriculture is seen to have had adverse consequences, not least of which were concomitant bracken invasions. In adapting to these more difficult secondary environments important social and economic changes occurred within the local farming communities.

The results of a two-year field survey in Calabria are described. A number of specially designed ‘intensive’ field survey methods were devised and tested, and the results quantified.

Through typological and fabric analysis of the pottery material recovered on the survey, some indication of the changing patterns of settlement in the region are detectable, and these have a number of implications relating to the questions of internal settlement organization and exchange patterns of neolithic and later prehistoric societies in Southern Italy.

In 1979 Cleveland County Archaeology Section completed fieldwork for a survey of Bronze Age burial mounds in the county. The survey isolated a number of themes for further investigation, including the examination of several of the few remaining barrows near the coast, all of which are threatened with destruction from continued ploughing. One of these mounds was a shallow earthwork surviving in a hedgebank at Street House Farm, Loftus. Excavation in the autumn of 1979 and in the summers of 1980 and 1981 revealed a multiphase neolithic cairn which incorporated a burnt timber façade and mortuary structure. The cairn had been badly damaged by ploughing, but the evidence for the construction and use of the monument survived to a considerable extent. The neolithic monument had been overlain by a Bronze Age round barrow, of which only a part had survived.

Thom has proposed that megalithic monuments were planned using geometry and a unit of length — the megalithic yard. All data in Thom's data-sets not deriving from well-preserved stone circles are removed, so that these proposals can be tested on this one category of monument. The statistical evidence for the existence of the megalithic yard is found to be equivocal. The shapes of stone rings, a part from the true circle, can be most easily explained as arising from layout by eye, without geometric planning. Exceptionally, two groups of stone circles which have distinctive architectural traits appear to have been planned to be truly circular, presumably using peg and rope construction. These groups are in southern England and north-east Scotland, although the latter group is not identified with certainty.

A total of 190 axe-hammers and 82 battle-axes from all over Scotland were studied. Attention was focused on the key question of whether the implements were made from cobbles or from scree-outcrop blocks. In glaciated regions such as Scotland, the nature of the source exploited is critical, since the area from which a rock-type may be obtained is greatly enlarged if cobble-blanks were used. Exhaustive petrological and typological studies suggest that a rather haphazard exploitation of suitable-looking locally available rock-types took place. The manufacturing experiments described here were designed to discover how the implements were made, and the essential properties required of the blanks. They showed that a blank should be (a) free of flaws, (b) of a suitable rock-type, and (c) close in form to the implement required. Thirty-one timed searches were made of cobble-deposits and scree/outcrop sites within the areas of distribution of the artefacts. Cobbles, because they are more often free of flaws and better-shaped, proved much superior to scree/outcrop blocks as blanks. The main conclusion of this paper, therefore, is that the great majority of Scottish battle-axes and axe-hammers were made from cobbles. There is evidence to suggest that this conclusion may be extended to the rest of Britain, and to other types of implement made by pecking and grinding, including some unperforated stone axes.

This paper deals with a unique glass bead from the second millennium BC in Wessex. Overlooked for more than 150 years, it has now been recognized for its intrinsic interest and general importance and is here presented for its wide significance in ancient Europe and beyond (pls 8 and 9).

In Ancient Wiltshire (1812, 210) Richard Colt Hoare recorded the excavation of a barrow in a group of Bronze Age date at Wilsford: ‘No. 7 is a large bell-shaped barrow’ (now regarded as a bowl barrow) ‘composed entirely of vegetable earth. It contained within a cist a little pile of burned bones with which had been deposited a very fine brass pin, a large stone bead which had been stained red, a bead of ivory and a lance head of brass’. This account is based on the records of William Cunnington (1807, 5–6), which include a transcription of a letter from the original excavator, a Mr Owen. The dimensions of the barrow are there given as 80 ft in diameter, 9 ft high, with a circular cist 18 in deep. The barrow is described as ‘No. 6 of Mr Duke's barrows’; there is thus a discrepancy in the numbering of the barrow, since Colt Hoare referred to it as Lake No. 7, while Cunnington kept to No. 6. The barrow, though recently ploughed, still stands to a height of over 2 m, and is today known as G.42 (Grinsell 1957, 211).

The excavation of eighteen round barrows was undertaken by the late Charles Green during summer seasons from 1958 to 1960, in advance of their destruction by ploughing. The excavated barrows are members of two linear groups which occupy adjacent spurs to the east of the village of Shrewton in the modern parish of that name (fig. 1). One of the barrows investigated lies in Winterbourne Stoke parish. This western part of Salisbury Plain is termed the ‘Lower Plain’ comprising those areas having their ‘upper limit… between 400 and 450 feet OD and their lower limit where they overlook the valley trenches … between 250 and 300 feet O.D.’ (Gifford 1957, 6). In such a lower valley lie the modern villages of Shrewton and Rollestone, and through it flows the river Till, the nearest modern open water supply to the barrows. This connects the area to the River Avon via the Wylye and Nadder.

An assemblage of cairns, distinguished by the incorporation of orthostatic elements suggestive of ring structure, is described from an area of central Wales. The morphology and distribution of the sites are discussed in terms of geology, erosional processes and land-use history. It is concluded that the form taken by individual cairns is largely a function of local environmental constraints, their distribution limited by factors of survival and discovery. The susceptibility of the monuments to superficial modification is stressed and caution is urged in the application of classificatory schemes.

The Assendelver Polders, 20 km west-north-west of Amsterdam (fig. 1), consist of some 2000 ha of typically flat Dutch polder landscape, treeless and cut by hundreds of drainage ditches, primarily in use for grazing. Observations by amateur archaeologists and a few small excavations have shown that the area was relatively densely populated during the period 2150 bp to 1750 bp. There were also indications for occupation around 2500 bp. The site discussed in this paper dates to this earlier period, the Early Iron Age. Until recently, circumstances were good for the preservation of organic remains owing to the high water table of the peat which covers large parts of the polders. Wooden posts, representing structural elements, were regularly retrieved by amateurs, as well as occasional lengths of wattle-work. These favourable conditions were, however, brought to an end in connexion with changes in the allotment scheme, implemented between 1970 and 1978. The organic remains became acutely threatened by desiccation due to the lowering of the water table by c. 1 m. Because of this, the Albert Egges van Giffen Institute for Pre- and Protohistory, of the University of Amsterdam, initiated the Assendelver Polders Project. Fieldwork took place in the polders during the summer months of 1978–82.