Some years ago the present writer had occasion, at a social gathering, to mention the subject of place-name study, one of the foremost exponents of which happened to be one of the party. His remark was met with a blank stare, followed by the question ‘What is place-name study’? Such illiteracy has deep roots in the English cultural tradition which owes more to the dilettante than to the professor. The understanding of place-names demands some knowledge of the early languages spoken in this country (Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon—;or, as it is now called, old English); and that is acquired in universities rather than in country houses and parsonages. But it also demands a familiarity with topography such as can best be acquired by a native who is permanently resident and knows the lie of the land at first hand. The best results are obtained from a combination of both, of book-learning enlivened by field-work.

This really monumental book reviews the material evidence accumulated—in more than two generations—for the periods within which the Homeric Poems came into being, and applies this evidence to discover the circumstances in which they achieved their actual shape. Outlines of this enquiry were proclaimed by Schliemann's excavations at Hissarlik (his site for Troy), Mycenae, and Tiryns; a remoter background by Sir Arthur Evans' work at Knossos; but detail has come from many hands, and in many fields of research—literary and even linguistic study reacting to archaeological, and propounding fresh problems to excavators. Two world wars have interrupted field-work and retarded publication. Miss Lorimer's own preface bears two dates (1946 and 1949), and she has to admit difficulties in obtaining important books, while some recent work is not noticed. In more than sixty years the leading figures in Homeric studies have changed; but one feels the abiding influence of Helbig and Dörpfeld in archaeology, and of Monro and Leaf in scholarship.

This paper concerns the regions of Central and Southern Mexico, Guatemala, British Honduras, and the western parts of Honduras and El Salvador, which are recognized by archaeologists to have constituted a cultural unity in pre-Spanish times. This area was one of the two centres of civilization in pre-Columbian America, Peru, being the other. It includes the several cultural centres north of Tehuantepec, usually grouped together under the name of Mexican Civilization, and those south of that isthmus, in the Mayan zone. For a long time before the Spanish conquest this entire region formed a definite cultural unit—it was a culture area, using this term in the precise meaning as defined by Kroeber—for which the name Mesoamerica is now generally used.

It has usually been assumed that the collecting of surface material from the rich sites of Western Asia brought a harvest of knowledge at the expense of little archaeological skill; that while excavation, potentially destructive of evidence, required strict control, surface collecting was so harmless that it might be pursued indiscriminately. Recent survey work in Baluchistan has convinced the writer of the dangers of this view. This note is offered as a preliminary consideration of the problems involved in surface collecting, and the writer will be grateful for further suggestions from others more experienced than himself.