Only a few years ago scholarly attention was drawn to the area of Lake Tien (also called Lake Kun-ming) in Yunnan Province, where from a group of princely tombs at Shih-chai-shan a strikingly expressive Late Bronze Age culture came to light [I]. With the discovery, in a tomb untouched by later disturbances, of a golden seal bearing the Chinese inscription ‘Seal of the King of Tien’, it was evident beyond doubt that the spade had struck the cemetery of the royal household or clan of Tien.

Even without this find the ethnohistorical identification of the burial site would have been possible from its geographical situation (FIG. I). According to historical tradition, from the Late Chou period onward the fertile plain around the shores of Lake Tien was known to have been occupied by the people of Tien, who gave the lake its name. No reference is made in the earliest records to either the actual extension of Tien’s sphere of influence or the state of civilization it may have attained.

Around 3100 B.C. the kingship of Egypt, a country probably united already for over a century, passed into the hands of a family which tradition states originated from the Thinite nome in Upper Egypt. At about the same time the keeping of written records was begun and these first historic kings have come to form what we know as the 1st Dynasty. This was clearly a crucial and momentous period for under their rule Egyptian civilization began to take on that peculiarly characteristic form which was to last so long. It is obviously a matter of some consequence to be able to locate the tombs of these kings but here archaeology has provided a puzzle. For two quite separate sites have been identified as the royal cemetery of the period [I].

Bampur is today a dusty, straggling village in Persian Baluchistan (FIG. I). Bounded by a variety of desert landscape, blackened gravel on one side, rolling dunes on the other, the Bampur river is its lifeline, providing perennial water and a narrow strip of fertile soil along its course. Hydrants, as yet uncoupled to pipes, stand in the main road as tangible evidence that the village is included in the regional development plans. Bampur has in fact passed through many vicissitudes and it has grown considerably since 1 9 3 2 when Sir Aurel Stein described it as a cluster of some 50 mat huts [I]. In Islamic and later times it was a political centre of some importance and its ascendance almost certainly had an earlier origin.

The discovery in a long pollen diagram from East Anglia of a substantial curve for a pollen-grain referable to Cannabis sativa, L., the Indian hemp, raised the hope that we might, through palynology, have the means of tracing the history of cultivation of this important and sinister economic plant in England and in Western Europe. It was clearly essential that pollen-analytic evidence should be related fully to existing historical and archaeological knowledge, and aided by a notice in this journal (ANTIQUITY, 1964, 287), and by the notable kindness of a great many academic colleagues, I have put together a condensed historical account of the plant in antiquity as preface to a description of the pollen-analytic data.