In recent years considerable attention has been devoted to the problems of the Early Iron Age in the British Isles; and, amongst these problems, that of the relationship between the insular and thecontinental cultures of the period has not become simpler or clearer as the British evidence has accumulated. How far, and in what manner, were the various Iron Age cultures of Britain derived from the continent? How far, and under what conditions, were they due to local initiative in Britain itself? Until questions such as these can be answered approximately, it will remain impossible alike to estimate the real achievement of the later prehistoric civilization of the island and to visualize the full significance of the adjacent civilization of northwestern Europe. The problem is not an easy one. The agricultural and therefore local basis of most of the Iron Age economy of Britain encouraged the strong local differentiation of cultural forms, and this local individuality was enhanced by the fashion in which the major tracts of open and habitable chalk or greensand tended, in ancient times, to be isolated by expanses of dense and often impassable forest. And, similarly, an intrusive element from overseas might easily take root in a particular area of southern or eastern Britain without directly affecting other areas within a relatively short map-distance.

Before 1918 it was believed that India's contact with the western world began about 3000 years ago with the intrusion into a barbaric peninsula of the half-legendary Vedic Aryans. It was only with the Empire of Darius that India began to figure substantially in the historical records accessible to us. In 1938 we know in the Indus valley a fully-literate and very advanced urban civilization flourishing fully fifteen centuries before the supposed date of the Aryan invasion. We know too that the ancient Indus cities were in regular and intimate contact with the Sumerian cities of Iraq; a stream of Indian manufactures flowed into Mesopotamia, Indian ideas could travel by the same channels. I need not remind you how deeply modern Western civilization is indebted to the ancient Sumerian, how many of the fundamental inventions that make civilization possible are traceable to the Tigris-Euphrates region, how intimately, through the Hebrews and the Greeks, Mesopotamian traditions have been injected into the very core of our spiritual culture. There lie the roots of our mathematics and astronomy, of the myths that, through the Bible, colour our outlook from early childhood. But we can now infer that India too contributed to the formation of the cultural tradition we thus inherit.

‘This map’, the Director General informs us in his Foreword, ‘forms the northern portion of the Map of Britain in the Dark Ages, of which the southern portion was published in 1935’. It represents therefore the completion of a task which must have taken nearly a decade to carry out, from its first inception down to publication. This northern sheet is in fact a map of Early Scotland, showing it as it was roughly between the years A.D. 450 and 850; but in this dim historical dawn exact dates cannot as a rule be discerned. A long historical introduction of 26 pages, and 5 diagrams, serve to amplify and elucidate the map itself; and there is of course the usual index of place-names.