Silbury is the largest ancient man-made mound in Europe. It stands beside the Bath Road (A4) in north Wiltshire, about six miles west of Marlborough. It forms a regular truncated cone, with a flat top 100 ft. (30.5 m.) in diameter and 130 ft. (40 m.) high above the surrounding meadows. The base covers about 5.25 acres (2.1 hectares). A little below the top the profile is broken by a marked step or terrace; and there are traces of what may have been similar terraces lower down, on the north and east sides. It may be that the mound was built originally in the form of a stepped cone.

The last four decades have seen marked changes of opinion about the chronology of the Neolithic. While at first a high dating for the Central European Neolithic was generally accepted, since the Second World War this has given way to a short chronology. With the help of archaeological stratigraphy and comparative methods of research it has been possible to determine anew the relative succession of the individual cultures, and to establish convincingly the temporal priority of those parts of South-eastern Europe adjacent to the Near East.

In the 15 years since the decipherment of the so-called ‘Linear B’ script as Greek, I have often been asked what was the most important resulting gain in our knowledge of ancient Greece. I have always put first the final and conclusive proof that the Mycenaeans, the people who produced a brilliant civilization in Greece between the 16th and 12th centuries BC, were Greeks. Previously there had always been room for argument, and although most people accepted this as a fact, it was always just possible to assert that the Mycenaeans were a non-Greek people, whose deeds and legends had been appropriated by the Greeks as their own.

Ideas and theories in prehistory often seem to have a life of their own, surviving and flourishing quite independently of the evidence upon which they might be supposed to rest. The biblical Lost Tribes, the Etruscan migrations of Herodotus, and the Phoenician merchants of Strabo, for example, served for centuries as a model for the explanation of Europe's remote past, unsupported in many cases by any evidence whatsoever.

The archaeology of early agriculture in Britain was succinctly summarized five years ago (Bowen, 1961). Since then, and largely stimulated by that publication, further work has produced some useful results, not only in the new and continuing field surveys which the author sought mainly to encourage but also by experiment and excavation. Our concern here is primarily with the application of excavation techniques and subsequent molluscan analysis to the study of early fields (cf. Tubbs and Dimbleby, 1965), our discussion arising largely from work carried out since 1961 and in particular from our own excavations in 1966.