It is doubly appropriate that the Prehistoric Society should celebrate itsjubilee in Norwich. The Society was born in the Castle on 23 February 1935of a parent conceived improbably enough in the Public Library at a meetingheld on 26 October 1908 to inaugurate an East Anglian Society ‘for the studyof all matters appertaining to prehistoric man’. The question I want you toconsider in this address is how the Prehistoric Society of East Angliadeveloped so rapidly to the point at which it achieved national status asThe Prehistoric Society. Let me begin by removing one misapprehension. Myhands are not dripping with East Anglian blood nor have I just wiped themclean. The Prehistoric Society was not the outcome of a revolutionaryputsch. It stemmed from nothing more dramatic than a recognition that thePrehistoric Society had long ceased to be East Anglian. When we met atNorwich Castle for our Annual General Meeting in 1935 and passed theresolution which eliminated the words ‘of East Anglia’ from our title wewere merely recognizing a fact, that we had long ceased to be East Anglianin anything but name. There were no dissentient votes.

The two men who between them set the Prehistoric Society on its feet camefrom different but complementary backgrounds. W. G. Clarke was Norfolk bornand bred and earned his living as a working journalist in Norwich, whilecultivating a wide-ranging interest in natural history and prehistoricarchaeology.

Towards the beginning of her novel Excellent Women BarbaraPym recounts a telephone conversation of more than passing relevance to ourmeeting today.

I dialled the number fearfully and heard it ring. ‘Hello, hello, who isthat?’ a querulous elderly woman's voice answered. I was completely takenaback, but before I could speak the voice went on, ‘If it's Miss Jessop Ican only hope you are ringing up to apologize’. I stammered out anexplanation. I was not Miss Jessop. Was Mr Everard Bone there? ‘My son is ata meeting of the Prehistoric Society’, said the voice. ‘Oh, I see. I'm sosorry to have bothered you’, I said. ‘People are always bothering me — Inever wanted to have the telephone put in at all’.

After a further apology I hung up the receiver shaken and mystified but atthe same time relieved. Everard Bone was at a meeting of the PrehistoricSociety. It sounded like a joke. (1952, 29–30)

Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen, if this is a typical reaction to thePrehistoric Society, then on 23 February we become a fifty-year-old joke! Ifwe allow for the history of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, then wereach well and truly back into the days of the Music Hall joke.

Investigations into the ceramic typology of the southern Italian neolithichave helped little in the understanding of neolithic origins there. In thispaper the evidence of the radiocarbon chronology is used to demonstrate theantiquity of the southern Italian neolithic. There are now sufficient sixthmillennium bc dates to suggest that the appearance there of a neolithic withmixed impressed and red-painted wares was contemporary with the earliestneolithic of both Greece and the West Mediterranean, while the penetrationof those traits further north into Italy seems to have been delayed.

Models of population and resource pressure to explain developments such astechnological innovation, increasing cultural complexity and competition andwarfare, have been commonly used in studies of the earlier neolithic (Bandkeramik and early TRB) of Central Europe, in thefifth and fourth millennia bc. The usefulness of such models is questionedfor this period, with reference in particular to Central Germany. Afterinitial colonization, there was no simple pattern of continuous settlementexpansion; rather, initially widespread settlement developed generally intoa more aggregated pattern, with a contraction of the settlement area andvirtually no internal or external expansion of settlement. Models ofenvironmental change or resource exhaustion to explain these developmentsare also challenged, and emphasis placed on social and subsistence changeswhich provided the impetus for the dynamics of the settlement pattern.Changes in settlement, with the emergence of larger villages and enclosures,culminating in the appearance of major enclosure sites and a break insettlement continuity in the early TRB, are linked with other developments;the regionalization of culture, changes in material culture and burialtypes, and social organization. The origins of the settlement and socialpatterns in this period can be seen, not in the changes forced by externalfactors, but in the internal developments of the neolithic groupsthemselves.

This paper is an exploration of the chronological development of a series ofelaborate and architecturally distinctive chambered tombs on the Islands ofOrkney. It begins with a short critique of the present views of the OrcadianNeolithic and highlights a failure to understand chronological developmentsas the most significant problem. Thus after a brief classification of themonuments there is a detailed discussion of the chronological evidence whichconsciously avoids typological assumptions. This is followed by anexamination of the various uses the tombs were put to and involves anassessment of the location and architectural visibility of the monuments andthe remains found in the chamber. When combined with the chronologicalevidence a series of changes in monument size, type, location and use can behypothesized for the neolithic period. This culminates in a shift away fromburial monuments to physically defined spaces, presumably used forceremonial purposes. These changes can be interpreted as deliberatemanipulation by groups within that society to change the ideologicalconcepts which defined the role of the individual in relation to the othermembers of the society.

In the Secondary Products Revolution model advanced by Sherratt it waspredicted that increased use of animals for labour and dairy products wouldbe visible archaeologically in animal bone collections. Published faunaldata from Spain and Portugal for the period 5000–1000 bc show that horses,traction animals and dairy products all became more important after 2000 bc.An historical-geographical analogy from pre-industrial Spain suggests thatby 1500 bc there was a degree of specialization in stockraising which couldbe understood best if sites were integrated economically over a wide region.This is the ‘policultivo ganadero’ of Spanish geographers, and the title isselected deliberately to compare with the Mediterranean polyculture based onplants.

Excavation of the surviving half of a barrow, identified from aerialphotographs as having three concentric ditches, revealed a sequence of atleast six major alterations. The site may originally have been a Class Ihenge monument subsequently adapted for use as a barrow. Features of allphases were mainly in the central area of the barrow and included twoinhumations in coffins, one accompanied by a Yorkshire-type food vessel. Acremation in a Primary Series collared urn was accompanied by a bronzerazor/knife and two flint plano-convex knives. A further cremation in acollared urn was found in the middle ditch. The barrow lay close to asettlement; early Bronze Age flintwork and pottery, including Grooved Wareand Beaker, were recovered from the several phases of mound make-up.

To the north of Milfield, Northumberland the A697 cuts through a cluster ofring-ditches centred at NT933347. Discovered during aerial survey byProfessor N. McCord, these were included in Dr A. Harding's survey of theritual henges and related monuments of the Milfield Basin (Harding 1981,101). Subsequent aerial reconnaisance by Mr T. Gates has increased thenumber of visible ring-ditches to at least eleven and, of these, three typesmay be tentatively isolated (fig. 1). The smallest appears to have adiameter no greater than 3.5 m, but with a ditch some 2 m in width (3examples); in the second type the ditch appears less than a metre in width,but enclosing a larger area estimated at between 9 and 20 m (3 examples). Asingle example (Site 1 below) lies outside these dimensions and it was this,together with an example from the second group, that was chosen forexcavation in 1982 and 1983.

Eskbank Nurseries, a market garden allotment some 200 m long and 30 to 40 mwide, lies at approximately 70 m OD on a relatively level terraceoverlooking the south bank of the river North Esk (fig. 1). The excavatedarea is centred on NT320660 and lies within the two superimposed Roman campsfirst noted as crop marks by St Joseph in 1965 and subsequently excavated byMaxfield in 1972. Her excavation areas I and II were sited to investigate apit alignment, visible on the aerial photographs and plotted by her(Maxfield 1974, 142, fig. 1). In the event no pits were discovered byexcavation, a fact attributable to an unfavourable combination of weatherand soil conditions (Maxfield 1974, 150). The pit alignment did not, ofcourse, appear as a crop mark in the deep market-garden soils of theNurseries but, by extrapolation of Maxfield's plot, it was clear that itmust cross the northern half of the allotment, possibly intersecting thenorth ditch of the earlier of the Roman camps (Maxfield's Camp A) on thewest edge of the site.

This study attempts to define patterns in the artefact distributions fromsubsoil features at Winklebury Camp, an early Iron Age hillfort in lowlandBritain. Two aims are identified: the first is to elucidate the nature andorganization of past human activities within early Iron Age hillforts; thesecond is to determine whether meaningful patterns can be identified withinthe artefact distributions preserved in subsoil features. A variety ofhypotheses drawn from the literature are presented and these are comparedwith the results of a number of statistical techniques. It is possible todistinguish patterns within the artefact distributions from Winklebury andsome interesting results are produced. Specifically, it can be suggestedthat Winklebury was not participating in specialized craft production, thatround-houses had a variety of functions, and that four-posters did not havea domestic function.

Round houses and an enclosure, surviving parts of a nucleated settlement onboulder clay terrain at Roxby (near Staithes, north-east Yorkshire),discovered from the air in 1972, were excavated 1973–81. Most were dated tothe immediately pre-Roman Iron Age, but one round house, standing in an areaof marks of former cross-ploughing, had native Romano-British pottery, andin the last phase of ditch silting, sherds of sixth century AD Anglo-Saxonstamped ware. The economy was based on mixed farming, but two of the IronAge houses also contained iron working comprising both smelting andsmithing. These houses also yielded fragments of jet and glass and wereinterpreted as a repair workshop, rather than a production unit. Greatstructural detail had been preserved and was recorded. The houses werearchitecturally different and represent a significant addition to theprehistoric round house data. They lie in that part of the township of Roxbywhich escaped medieval ploughing, and probably represent a fraction of thetotal original settlement. This and other data in north-east Yorkshire showthat an economy based on settled mixed farming, not on semi-nomadicpastoralism, was widespread across the boulder clay encircling the NorthYork Moors.

Two farmsteads, one of late Iron Age (second-first centuries BC) date andthe other dating to the early Romano-British period (first-second centuriesAD), were excavated at Copse Farm, Oving. The site is situated within theChichester dykes on the Sussex/Hampshire Coastal Plain. The Iron Agefarmstead produced pottery spanning ‘saucepan’ and ‘Aylesford-Swarling’traditions, a transition in ceramic production which is poorly understood inSussex. Information on the agricultural economy and small-scale industries(principally metalworking) practised at this site give an insight into theway the Coastal Plain was settled and exploited at the end of the firstmillennium BC.

Strap-unions of the types discussed in this study were made during the laterpart of the pre-Roman Iron Age and during the earliest part of the Romanoccupation of Britain. Their distribution (fig. 1) and details of theirchronology and cultural associations and also the evidence for their preciseuse are considered in the concluding sections of this paper.

Observations made soon after recent major earthquakes in Algeria, Californiaand Japan have shown that repeated motions on buried fault planes inseismically active areas cause incremental folding of the overlying rocksand sediments. The deformation causes characteristic changes to riverprofiles and is therefore a factor which must be considered when applyingtechniques of site catchment analysis in areas of tectonic uplift. Here weexamine the relationship between tectonic uplift and the palaeoenvironmentsof palaeolithic sites in North-west Greece, which is one of the mostseismically active areas of Europe. Uplift can substantially alter localtopography and sediment distributions and therefore undermine the economicviability of human settlements. Paradoxically uplift can also create stableconditions highly favourable to long-term habitation in two ways: bymaintaining well-watered sediment traps which provide a climaticallyinsensitive environment; by accentuating enclosed topography, whichfacilitates the control of mobile prey species.

The sediments of Kirkhead Cave, a truncated phreatic conduit in theMorecambe Bay karst of northern England, have been investigated by scanningelectron microscopic, granulometric, petrographic, palynologic andstratigraphic methods. These show that almost all the deposits in the caveare glacigenic sediments, reworked into the cave by a variety oftransporting agencies. Investigation of the deposits by radiometric,magnetostratigraphic and biostratigraphic methods suggests that the fillrepresents a near-continuum of deposition from at least pollen zone III ofthe Late-glacial until modern times. Within the deposits is evidence of useof the cave by man from later upper palaeolithic (Creswellian) timesonwards. However, no definite evidence has been found of later upperpalaeolithic use of the cave prior to the middle of pollen zone III. It istherefore suggested that the occupation of marginal areas of upperpalaeolithic colonization, such as the far north of northern England, afterthe last glaciation may have taken place somewhat later than has previouslybeen recognized.