A prehistorian, like any other historian, should aim not only to describe, but also to explain. . .' Thus Childe's valediction (1958, 6). But we frustrate ourselves unless fiercely selective in explaining traces of small farming (or hunting) communities near subsistence level, with the critical apparatus of contemporary or 19th-century industrial societies; conceptions wholly arising from such societies are likely to be appropriate only to them." Yet we cannot easily avoid these errors, for we are alienated from our material-and not only by time. Schools of archaeology are necessarily urban, draw deeply on traditions of longestablished urban institutions. The conditions of that pre-industrial life which was almost the whole of reality to our ancestors may seem inconceivably remote-and disappointing, distasteful even.

A quarter of a century ago Antiquity carried an article by A. J. Arkell (194.4) on 'Archaeological Research in West Africa'. This was the text of a memorandum submitted by request to the Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (the Elliott Commission), which recommended that in the then Gold Coast, now Ghana, the existing Achimota College should continue its originally envisaged development into a full university college and that the University College of Ibadan should be founded in Nigeria. Not only did these developments take place, but both institutions have since become autonomous degree-granting universities ; in addition two more universities have come into being in Ghana and four in Nigeria. Three of the universities in Nigeria and one of those in Ghana concern themselves with archaeology.

The Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies was founded as recently as 1967 with a governing body of distinguished scholars appointed by the four contributing countries. With this, its first publication, it has got off to a flying start. Ever since the first specimens of the Indus script were published nearly 40 years ago, it has constituted a standing challenge to scholars with a bent for cryptography. Several attempts have been made to decipher it, but as Sir Mortimer Wheeler remarked, before the publication of this monograph, in The Indus civilization (3rd edition, Cambridge, 1968, p. 107, footnote 2), 'the published attempts to do so are invalid'. This judgement is now due for drastic reconsideration.

The site where the torcs were found is just above the 100-ft contour (30.5 m.) on high land 3.2 km. east of the town centre (TM 13684273). The torcs were lying on the west flank of a hill overlooking a tributary of the Belstead Brook; this tributary has now been filled in and underlies Bridgwater Road. The hill is pasture land adjoining Fir Tree Farm and, being steepsided, is unlikely ever to have been ploughed. It was decided to cut back the hill at its foot to provide larger gardens for the houses of Holcombe Crescent. The flank was removed by bulldozing in 3-m. swathes, the width of the machine. When Mr Tricker walked past the spot he saw an almost vertical cliff some 4-5 m. high; the bulldozer, which was removing the second swathe, was working, as a safety precaution, about a metre from the edge; the spine of earth which was left was falling down the slope, loosened by the vibration. Projecting from this loose earth, some 2 m