The long history of investigations at Hoxne, Suffolk, beginning when John Frere discovered Palaeolithic implements there in the last decade of the eighteenth century, has been described by Moir. Moir himself worked on the deposits at Hoxne, and the results of his investigations, together with those of Reid, have formed the basis for our knowledge of the geology and archaeology of the deposits. From these investigations it is clear that Hoxne is an important site, for it is one of the rare places where there are interglacial lake deposits and Palaeolithic implements in direct association with ground moraines of the older glaciations. Moreover, the deposits occupy a well-known position in the East Anglian Quaternary succession.

The cave known as the Mugharet Kebara opens at the western foot of Mount Carmel, 13 km. to the south of the Wady el-Mughara, and 1½ km. south of the railway station of Zikhron Yaaqov. It faces north-west on the 60 m. contour line, at 2½ km. from the sea, from which it is separated by a strip of marshy land and a wider belt of sand dunes.

The first sounding on this site was made in 1927 by Dr M. Stekelis, who was unable to continue owing to lack of funds. In 1930, unaware that Dr Stekelis had already tested the cave, I went over from the Wady el-Mughara with Dr Theodore McCown and spent one day in digging a trial trench (Garrod 1932), which revealed the presence of a Natufian layer with an underlying level containing an industry then unfamiliar, but since described under the name Kebaran (Turville-Petre, 1932). At the bottom of the trench we found a number of typical Aurignacian implements. In the summer of 1931 Francis Turville-Petre and Mrs C. A. Baynes undertook a three months' season at Kebara on behalf of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and the American School of Prehistoric Research. During this time they camped with us at the Wady el-Mughara, so the two expeditions were in close touch and able to compare results throughout the campaign. The work at Kebara revealed a very rich Lower Natufian horizon (Layer B) with a thin underlying level (Layer C) containing the new Kebaran industry. This culture, which has proved to be fairly widespread in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, is Neuville's Upper Palaeolithic VI (Neuville, 1951). Turville-Petre published the material from Layers B and C in the year following the excavation (Turville-Petre, 1932), but the Aurignacian industries of Layers D and E which were dug to contact with an underlying Levalloiso-Mousterian, have for various reasons never been studied or described in print.

It is convenient to begin this study of Azilian harpoons by first considering the Magdalenian harpoons of northern Spain. The two Basque sites of Aitzbitarte, a few miles within the Spanish side of the frontier, and Isturitz, not many miles within the French side of the frontier, are useful in delimiting the Spanish area from the point of view of the fauna. At Aitzbitarte, Harlé (1908) found a great predominance of red deer with one or two odd fragments of reindeer antler, whereas the well-known excavations by St. Périer (1936) at Isturitz showed a great preponderance of reindeer in conformity with other sites in the Pyrenees. The other occurrences in the three east Spanish provinces agree with that at Aitzbitarte (for instance, at Valle, Lorenzo Sierra, 1908, gives the ratio of antler fragments as red deer to reindeer: 73–1). Judged by the fauna, therefore, the modern political frontier corresponds roughly to the limit of the effective penetration of the reindeer westward, and consequently to the line of demarcation between harpoon-heads made respectively from red deer and reindeer antler.

The subdivision of the Magdalenian deposits in north Spain has never been satısfactorily resolved, and they have obstinately refused to conform to the French sequence. The main difficulty has been the lack of stratified sites; only Cueto de la Mina has yielded three layers; and two or three other caves have given two layers. Nevertheless two stages, an earlier one without and a later one with harpoons have been clearly distinguished (Breuil and Obermaier, 1936, 165–70, 192–4). Although no stratigraphical division of this later stage is possible, a number of interesting points arise from a typological study of the known harpoons.

Sir Lindsay Scott carried out excavations on the barrow on Whiteleaf Hill, near Princes Risborough, Bucks., with meticulous care from 1934 till the outbreak of war in 1939 interrupted operations. After the war he had no opportunity to resume excavations beyond making a 2 ft. section across the ditch on the west, and he was not able to complete the work he had planned or to prepare the material for publication before his untimely death in 1952. He gave four short and explicitly provisional reports in P.P.S. 1935, p. 132; 1936, p. 312; 1937, p. 440, and in the Records of Bucks. 1941–6, p. 298, but insisted that ‘this description must be taken as entirely provisional.’ His papers comprised a master plan contoured at 6 inch intervals, and showing the grid over the excavated area, small detailed plans of individual features—post holes, pits, and the ‘peristalith trench’—and a series of sections taken across the whole excavated area at 2 ft. intervals on both X and Y axes, but no complete plan of the excavated area nor any detailed description of the observations made in the course of the excavation. The relics are, however, all numbered with three co-ordinates, so that the position of each can be exactly located on the plans and sections, and these, especially the Neolithic pottery, are of such exceptional importance that it is an obvious duty to attempt a provisional account of the results achieved, without waiting for the completion of the excavation.

In the course of enquiries into the nature of the primary vegetation of Britain and its associated soils, the soils buried under prehistoric earthworks have provided valuable material. Such work is usually carried out on barrows which can be dated by the archaeological finds in them, but occasionally samples have been examined from undated barrows. Pollen analysis of the old land surface under an earthwork gives a broad picture of the vegetation extant on the site up to the time that earthwork was built, and it has been found that this picture varies according to the impact of prehistoric man upon the vegetation. This effect is, of course, progressive and it is possible to show that the later the earthwork the further removed is the flora from the forest conditions which once prevailed. Once such a sequence has been established, it should be possible, by pollen analysis alone, to allot an undated construction to its approximate position in the sequence.