A hundred years ago, when Paxton's Crystal Palace went up among the elms of Hyde Park, it would never have entered the mind even of the Prince Consort that it should contain a section devoted to British Antiquity. The Great Exhibition was a glorification of the Present, of Progress, and its most conspicuous salute to the past took the form of a proliferation of Gothic ornament, and Pugin's gorgeous Medieval Court. The 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition on the South Bank will include a pavilion illustrating the Origin of the British People with material drawn almost entirely from the discoveries of British archaeology made since 1851. I do not think that this can be regarded as a tribute to the progress of our subject in any simple sense, rather it is a result of the development of the historical consciousness so characteristic of our time, and of which this progress itself forms a part. However, without further metaphysic, it remains a fact that one of the two official lines of entry into the South Bank Exhibition will be through a pavilion where many hundreds of thousands of people will find it difficult not to give at least a passing glance at a display of British prehistory.

These three books between them nearly cover the whole effective range of British archaeology, from the gropings and fumblings of medieval monks to the era of pollen analysis and radio-carbon. There is a gap of nearly a century, however, between the death of Stukeley in 1765 and the beginning of Dr Daniel's hundred years. That is the unfortunate but inevitable result of adopting the rigid yard-stick of a century for measuring what in fact is the growth of living knowledge.

Professor Stuart Piggott ends his admirable study of William Stukeley with these words: ‘It was a Druidic dream-world which has left an oddly tangible relic today in the Welsh Eisteddfod with its Gorsedd Circle, invented by Iolo Morganwg in response to romantic Welsh patriotism a century or so ago, but in the end to be derived from Stukeley …’. When I pointed out to Professor Piggott that, in this form, his statement was not strictly accurate, he suggested that a brief note on the Welsh Eisteddfod and Gorsedd would prove of value.

Teeth are the most indestructible of all organic structures. Even in life 98 percent of their enamel is hard mineral matter and this dental durability has resulted in many extinct animals being known only by the fossil forms of their teeth. That is why the vocabulary of the vertebrate palaeontologist abounds in the names of species and orders ending in the Greek root ‘odont’.

The interesting discovery of a spear-thrower in central Africa was made in 1937 by Mr J. S. Owen, then Assistant District Commissioner El Fasher, who heard of one being used in the Daju hills of Southern Darfur, and obtained two examples from Harun Yasīn the man who introduced the spear-thrower to that area. It had not come into general use among the Darfur Daju; and there was uncertainty as to its origin, when I was asked to find out from where it came.

Archaeology has, for its own good or ill, caught the popular mind. A generation ago the average person was quite unable to divest his mind of the idea that an archaeologist must have a long white beard, large spectacles and a pathetic enquiring look on his face: it was equally suspected that, when roused, he would burst into a paroxysm of rage if his views were doubted. There was, in fact, a good deal of truth in this popular conception, for in the first half of the 19th century what then passed as archaeology was largely a hobby reserved for the aged and the retired who, by virtue of curious minds and an inquiring nature, spent their leisure in probing the ancient sites of the past, and collecting ancient relics and ‘curios’. Some less aged men, but nevertheless men of leisure, made very important contributions to knowledge, such as Boucher de Perthes, a French customs officer, who in the '50's was the first to identify palaeolithic implements; or Harrison of Ightham, a Kentish villager, who, with great insight identified, not long after Boucher de Perthes, a still earlier phase of the stone implement industry, the so-called Eolithic. But for the most part the elderly white-bearded men did in fact represent the activities of the student of Antiquity, both in England and elsewhere. Then, slowly, it was seen that there was a difference between the Archaeologist and the Antiquary : that the former was a student of one of the branches of humanist study which can serve, in the historic periods, to add enormously to historic knowledge, and in the prehistoric periods to formulate chronology and create a history recorded not by written records, but by archaeological facts. But the power of the written word, reinforced by the tremendous prestige associated with Holy Script, has given such kudos to what was written that records not consisting of words were considered by scholars as trash. Archaeologists were called, until quite recent years, ‘collectors of pots and pans’, men unworthy to rank with those who in the quiet of their studies had spent long hours emending and correcting the ancient literary records of literary men. To make an emendation in the text of a Greek manuscript was held by many to be a far greater achievement than to have recovered two hundred years of unrecorded history, even if the emendation was a pure invention of the emendator.