On 6 June I started from Southampton to carry out an investigation of the Roman roads and sites in Scotland from the air. For several years, as part of my official duties, I have been examining these on foot, in pursuance of a plan to publish a third edition of the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain. It is intended to prepare the way for this map (which may be published on a slightly larger scale—10 miles instead of 16 miles to the inch) by the publication of maps of special regions on the scale of 4 miles to the inch. The drawing of the first two of these (Scotland, Sheet 3 [Forth and Tay], and Sheet I [The Border]) had been finished; but many doubtful points remained even after intensive field-work, and it seemed probable that a short air reconnaissance under favourable conditions would solve some of them. This opinion was amply justified by results. About a dozen new Roman sites (including as ‘ sites ’ new stretches of Roman road) were discovered; about 50 new sites in all, including many native forts, were placed on the map; and valuable results of a general character were obtained.

The story of the discovery of Mapungubwe, which led to its systematic excavation, makes reading as vivid and exciting as any adventure-fiction of our youth.

The site is one of many precipitous sandstone kopjes which rear their almost perpendicular sides some 200 ft. above a valley-floor tributary to the Limpopo, which lies only a mile distant, at the point where the Shashi river, flowing from Rhodesia, joins forces with it. Messina—archaeologically famous for its pre-European copper mines—lies about 50 miles west, and it overlooks the meeting point of Transvaal, Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesian territory. Fortunately for science, British administration being parsimonious in these matters, the hill lay within the Transvaal border.

West of the Provadia hills in Bulgaria is the valley of Shumen. The northern part of this valley belongs to the basin of the Provadia river, the southern to that of the river Kamtchia. The present railway line from Shumen to Kaspitchan serves as an ideal boundary between these two regions, but the two valleys are best known because of two historical sites, Preslav and Aboba (now Pliska).

The rivers of the Aboba plain have very little water during the summer season, but during winter and in time of heavy rains they overflow and cover great parts of the barren valley. The winter there is cold and severe, the surnmer dry and hot. In the plain, north of Kaspitchan railway station, are the ruins of Aboba. Eshberiich or Isperich (Asparuch), the younger son of Kurt (644–702), in his march southwards stopped there, and founded the first capital of the Bulgarian khans, later to become the magnificent Pliska.

The staple food crops of Saxon and Norman England included rye, barley, oats, millet, beans, and peas. Wheat also was not unknown. In fact, a few carbonized grains have been found upon Neolithic sites. But, even as late as the thirteenth century, wheaten bread in more than one region of England was a luxury food, enjoyed by the mass of the agricultural population only on boon days or religious festivals. The porridges and cereal soups, or flat-baked cakes and small loaves, which accompanied the peasants’ daily cheese, sausages or herring, were usually made from a coarse meal composed of rye, or rye mingled in some proportion with wheat, barley, oats or beans.

The primary purpose of this paper is to publish for the first time a complete set of plans and descriptions of the Dorset stone circles, and of certain allied monuments in which timber uprights may have played a part but whose visible remains today consist only of encircling banks and ditches. The existence of most of the sites described has been recorded, with full references, in the Ordnance Survey’s Map of Neolithic Wessex, but we have been able to add several new circles to those listed there. The field-work was undertaken and the surveys made in 1936 and 1937, while in certain instances use has been made of air-photographs to which Mr O. G. S. Crawford has drawn our attention.

I. La Civilisation d’Assur et de Babylone. By Dr G. Contenau, Conservateurdes Antiquités Orientales au Musée du Louvre. Paris: Payot, 1937. 30 francs.

Fouilles de Telloh: sous la direction de H. de Genouillac. Vol. II, Époquesd’Ur IIIe Dynastie et de Larsa. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1937. Vols. I and II. 400 francs.

The Music of the Sumerians. By F. W. Galpin. Cambridge University Press, 1937. 18s.

These three works, all published in the same year, form a trilogy with the Tigris and Euphrates as a background. The Land of the Two Rivers, as historians have aptly called it, was from the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C. a focus on which man converged from the cardinal points of western Asia. The earliest settlements were composed of farmers and hunters: in the south their pottery and the art of painting suggest that they were predominant with the Syrian hinterland and eastern Anatolia. Sometime before 3000 B.C. the invention of the wheel, of metal-working and writing produced an industrial revolution, which brought the young civilization of these early farmers to maturity. The beautiful painted pottery of A1 ‘Ubaid and Tall Halaf died out, partly because, as de Genouillac says, the invention of cuneiform writing made the pictorial writing of clay vases obsolete, and no doubt caused the skilful artisans of painted ceramic to apply themselves to the more paying craft of metallurgy, much as in western Europe in the first quarter of this century a horde of stable hands left the paddock for the garage and forsook the horse for the motor car.