All technical and scientific illustration is at once symbol and communication, a pictorial language addressing the author's audience side by side with his written text. It transmits information according to an agreed code of conventions which translates actuality into forms and outlines in one or more colours, usually black on white, in a manner which will convey to the observer the features of the original which the illustrator wishes to present. As Winston Churchill wrote of painting, ‘the canvas receives a message despatched a few seconds before from the natural object. But it has also come through a post office en route. It has been transmitted in code . . . it reaches the canvas a cryptogram’. Archaeological draughtsmanship involves the construction of technical cryptograms, and as in all ciphers these must be made according to rules carefully observed by both transmitter and recipient.

Fishbourne lieswithin the present-day boundaries of the City of Chichester, about one mile west of the City Cross. The village, situated at the head of the now-silted Chichester harbour, has long been recognized to lie above a Roman site, for finds of Roman material are plentiful. In 1805 a black-and-white mosaic, 13½ ft. wide, was discovered during road widening, by 1869 the remains of a bath and pavement had come to light nearby, and the local inhabitants say that in 1936 children digging in a garden uncovered a further black-and-white mosaic. These discoveries are now thought to belong to one large masonry building, but other finds scattered widely about the village suggest that Roman occupation covered an extensive area around the harbour end of the site.

Wales and its March is a land of fortifications, Celtic, Roman and medieval; and an analysis of any one of these classes in microcosm may also be of value for wider studies. Certainly the student of hillforts has just been presented with an invaluable corpus of material in the completed trilogy of Royal Commission Inventories for Caernarvonshire. As it happens, though the Caernarvonshire forts are deficient in significant finds, they are particularly valuable for settlement studies because house-foundations or emplacements are often still visible within the defences. The implications of this immediately accessible evidence have already been partly explored in a seminal article by the Secretary of the Welsh Commission (Hogg, 1960), but further discussion is both possible and desirable. Moreover, the archaeological evidence for Iron Age settlements makes it possible to discuss and correct the attempts of social historians to probe behind medieval documents to the social arrangements of earlier eras (e.g. Jones, 1964). There is at present a considerable ferment of ideas about the nature of hillforts as settlements and about their place in early Welsh society, which may also be of general interest to students of Celtic archaeology and institutions.

In a recent paper a theory was put forward to account for the end of Mohenjo-daro and of other, smaller, Indus Civilization cities in Sind and along the Mekran Coast.

During the process of archaeological excavation, both in thiscountry and abroad, many thousands of animal bones are discovered in the course of a single year. Much of this material is buried again without examination by those best qualified to do this; and that which is retained is all too often devoid of the data of association which make it valuable to the animal historian, the zoologist and other researchers.