Since reading a paper before the Archæological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in February, 1913, on the two factory sites at Peppard, Oxon, we have carried out further excavations, and I propose to give a brief account of the new implements found there, and to discuss the evidence as to the date arrived at as a result of the whole work. Sections of the sites and a map showing their position were given in that paper, and 28 of the implements illustrated.

The deeper site (Site 1) was re-opened by Mr. Reginald Smith, F.S.A., of the British Museum, in October, 1913, and some of the problems connected with it cleared up. This site was then found to be an open pit, similar to a modern chalk pit, with a pathway leading into it from the lowest level, 8 ft. across and 7½ ft. long. The floor of this adit formed a gently inclined plane to the bottom of the pit, being covered at the entrance with 2½ ft. of rainwash. This method of approach to the mine is what one would expect from its situation on the slope of a hill. It differs thus from the mines at Cissbury and Grime's Graves, where the circular cups were much deeper (40 ft.) and must have been entered by some form of ladder, such as a tree trunk with the branches cut short to form steps or a rope made of hide.

The Source of the Douix in Châtillon-sur-Seine, France, has been visited by local inhabitants for over 2000 years and served as a watery focal point for the ritual deposition of various types of offerings. While water deposits are by no means uncommon across Europe, the continued use of a single space over multiple millennia is. An examination of the preserved offerings at the Douix indicate there are three phases of depositional activity: late Hallstatt to early La Tène periods, late La Tène to Gallo-Roman periods, and the early modern period. Despite being separated by hundreds of years there are similarities across depositional phases including the importance of modified metallic objects, personal ornamentation, and possible connections to women. Could the persistence of these ritual practices be the result of behavioural and ideological continuities? If not, how can we interpret this complex record of intermittent deposition? We examine the deposits from each phase in their wider social and ritual contexts, including the Douix’s connection to the Hallstatt princely centre of Mont Lassois, Gallo-Roman ritual traditions, and the historic folklore surrounding springs. We then explore the inter-depositional phases and discuss the conditions that could lead to the persistence of ideas despite the dearth of material evidence and summarise what these patterns mean for the history of ritual activity at the Source of the Douix.

Ancient fingerprints preserved in clay artefacts can provide demographic information about the people who handled and manufactured them, leaving their marks as an accidental record of a moment’s interaction with material culture. The information extracted from these ancient impressions can shed light on the composition of communities of practice engaged in pottery manufacture. A key component of the process is a comparator dataset of fingerprints reflecting as closely as possible the population being studied. This paper describes the creation of a bespoke reference collection of modern data, the establishment of an interpretive framework for prehistoric fingerprints, and its application to assemblages of Iron Age briquetage from coastal salterns in eastern England. The results demonstrate that briquetage manufacture was constrained by age and sex.

Ten years ago the prehistoric soil of Europe was literally riddled with ‘pit dwellings’ in which our ancestors slept and cooked, huddled together like soldiers in a bell tent. I suppose it was wraithes from Tacitus and Xiphilinus combining in the minds of 16th century antiquaries with more exact travellers' tales of the earth lodges of the Red Indians that caused this overcrowding of the pits. For the holes in the ground are there right enough: it is only in the last ten years that Bersu and Paret have evicted their human occupants to make room for the pigs and weevils these would properly accommodate. Thanks to them we realize that neither Stone Age Danubians nor Iron Age Britons were housed in subterranean silos or semi-subterranean sties. But it is only fair to remark that Laszlo and Marton in Hungary and Schuchhardt in Germany before the first world war had identified commodious houses built above the ground on a frame of stout posts. Today it is plain that such farm houses were normal from the beginning of the new stone age wherever excavators' technique is adequate for their recognition, and it is to their description that I must devote most of this sketch.

The estuarine peaty shale still to be seen in the cliff section below the Martello tower at Clacton has a thickness of 10 or 12 feet, and seems to pass gradually into a dark clay which we find as the top layer of the shore deposit. On the shore below the Martello, and east of the stone groyne, the following layers were observed:—

1. Dark, stiff clay, without shells. To be seen only on the upper part of the shore, near the sea-wall. Further down, it. has been denuded. Thickness, c. 9 in. from shore sand.

2. A shelly layer, containing much Unıo littoralis: more sandy than the last. c. 3 in.

3. A dark layer with occasional shells. Lower limit variable. c. 4 in.

4. Blue loam: one of the most characteristic features of the deposit. Shells of Unio occur. Helix was also found. There is also in some parts much wood. Partly embedded in this layer most of the bones are found on the shore surface. Eastwards the layer grows less homogeneous and comes to rest directly on the London Clay. I am not sure what is the full thickness of this layer, but, where it is covered by others, I have dug 18 in. into it without reaching anything else. Accumulation of water and return of the tide prevented deeper trenching, but I think if we gave 2 feet as the total thickness we should not be far wrong.

5. A very thin layer, made up almost wholly of fragments of Unio.

6. Sand, shells, and broken flints. Thickness varies; 3 in. and 5 in. were measured in two trenches.

7. Stony layer. Flint pebbles, broken flints, some sand, some shells. Astragalus of deer, horn core (probably of deer), tibia of deer were found in trenching this layer.

In his important study of early wheeled vehicles from the Caucasus region, S. Piggott briefly considered two terracotta models of wagons with arched tilts from the Near East (Piggott 1968, 273). Following Speiser (1934), he argued that the actual wagons represented by these models had been introduced into the Near East from the Caucasus by the later 3rd millennium B.C. The present article aims at a more comprehensive review of the Near-Eastern evidence. It will be almost exclusively concerned with terracotta models of both four-wheeled wagons and two-wheeled carts, because these constitute practically all the documentation we have of vehicles with tilts. This material undoubtedly will be incomplete, since there must be more examples among the many models that have not been published, or published only inadequately. A full description will be possible only in the one case where we have personally examined the model (wagon A1).