For several years prior to 1935, the Ipswich Museum, through the kindness of Mr P. H. Jordan, had been enriched by gifts of fossil mammalian bones and teeth found in a gravel pit at Brundon, near Sudbury, Suffolk. From my occasional visits to this excavation, it was clear that a very rich bone bed existed there, and discoveries from time to time, of flint implements in the gravel, led me to conclude that excavations conducted at this site would yield good results. This was confirmed by the geological features of the section, which appeared to show a stratified gravel resting upon, and overlaid by, glacial deposits, thus affording an opportunity of examining that by no means common phenomenon—a true inter-glacial bed.

In the interpretation of the evidence provided by archaeological investigation it is important to realise its limitations, and to appreciate the complexity of the factors involved. From this point of view it is hoped that a demonstration of the influence of the seasonal factor in the life of a contemporary nomadic hunting group, living under ‘stone age’ conditions in Northern Australia, showing the close relationship in which these people stand to their environment, and demonstrating the influence of the seasonal cycle, and even of seasonal fluctuations, upon their local movements and occupations, may be of interest. It will be apparent that an onlooker, seeing these people at different seasons of the year, would find them engaged in occupations so diverse, and with weapons and utensils differing so much in character, that if he were unaware of the seasonal influence on food supply, and consequently upon occupation, he would be led to conclude that they were different groups.

In 1934 a schoolboy found ‘under a rubbish heap, but practically on the surface’ within the boundaries of the city of Norwich a socketed sickle (fig. 1, and pl. xxv, 14). The type is familiar to students of the Bronze Age since Wilde published an Irish example in his Catalogue of Antiquities in the National Museum at Dublin.

The present handsome and perfect specimen, which I publish by courtesy of the Corporation of Norwich, and of the Curator of the Norwich Museum, Miss G. V. Barnard, measures 5.9 inches in greatest length, and 3.0 inches in height. The blade is double-edged: its bold curved outline is emphasized by raised beads defining a central rounded rib which expands towards the socket. On the socket, above a moulded necking from which the lower edge of the blade springs, is a decorative pattern in the form of an M, the upper angles of which extend to form outward-curving scrolls on which the headings of the blade are aligned more or less tangentially. The outer scroll, which is more complete than the inner, forms a moulded rim to a large circular hole. The hole was probably a loop for a thong; the sickle then may have dangled from the owner's waist.

It is particularly interesting for those British geologists who devote themselves to studying the Thames gravels, to have a statement, as accurate as possible, of the results at which I have arrived in a parallel study, which I have pursued for nearly twenty years in the Somme valley.

On the slopes and in the foot of this valley, a series of deposits bear witness to successive oscillations with phases of erosion and aggradation, episodes which brought the river from a high level to its actual course, running on the deposits of its last aggradation, those which are visible being peaty.

There is every evidence, judging by the remains left by the river on the slopes of its valley, of a series of levels, differing both in height and physical state, as well as in their paleontological and archaeological content. These have been called terraces, though this term is very inexact, for they are generally only steps surviving of ancient scooped out aggradations, which in their turn filled up the modern valley. Each is really complex, and, far from being of one date, is the accumulated result of phases of fluvial accretion at different periods of aggradation, which spread out or partially removed, at the beginning and end of these phases, the contributions of lateral phenomena, usually solifluxion, at the time of the deepening of the river bed.

For many years past Mr Mogridge, of the Winchester Museum, has been indefatigable in collecting Lower Palaeolithic flint implements from a number of gravel pits lying between the villages of Warsash and Hook, in the district of the Lower Hamble river, Hampshire. From time to time he has brought up selected specimens to meetings of the Prehistoric Society in London, and exhibited them to members at the conclusion of the formal lectures. These Warsash finds are extremely numerous, show very fine workmanship, and exhibit certain special features which make them of exceptional importance to all students of Lower Palaeolithic cultures in England. Some time ago I suggested to Mr Mogridge that his valuable finds ought to be placed more permanently on record. He at once consented to the writing of a joint article for our Proceedings, and placed all his information at my disposal. Together we visited the sites, examined the sections, and talked to the workmen, from whom, of course, most of the implements are in the first instance obtained. I also consulted with my former pupil, and now colleague, Mr T. T. Paterson, and he very kindly consented himself to study the Quaternary geology on the spot, and to write a brief account. The drawings are from my wife's pen.

There is no feature of quaternary cave art that has called forth more admiration for the Aurignacians and Magdalenians than the apparent liveliness and naturalness of action in their pictured animals. The general belief seems to be that the artists were impelled by a definite desire to depict characteristic actions. This is implied by the titles that have been given to various examples such as ‘The trotting boar,’ ‘The bellowing bison,’ ‘The charging mammoth,’ ‘The wounded and falling reindeer,’ ‘The galloping reindeer,’ ‘The browsing reindeer,’ ‘The neighing horse.’

Yet there are excellent reasons for asking whether the general acceptance of these beliefs has not been too casual and whether the spirit of enquiry might not have carried us much further in this field than it has so far done.

The faults in the action of many of the pictures have received much consideration and it is perhaps fair to say that the following quotation represents current general opinion regarding the matter. ‘We cannot,’ says Mr Baldwin Brown, ‘credit our palaeolithic artist with either the desire or the capacity for analysing and reproducing the actual movements which instantaneous photography has now revealed to us. Many actions which he rendered in the walk or the canter, accord fairly well with the well-known Muybridge photographs, though where the difference comes in the artist gives a more convincing appearance of movement than the camera. It may therefore be said that as a rule action is rendered in an artistic and not a scientific spirit, and the animals are made at all hazard to look as if they were moving. At the same time there is secured a fairly large measure of scientific accuracy. In two cases … the eye of the hunter artist has been quick enough to catch a position, revealed to us moderns by photography.’

The scene of the excavations described in the first part of this paper is the Sewage Farm of the Farnham (Surrey) Urban District Council, situated on the gravels of the old course of the Blackwater River to the north-east of the town at an elevation of c. 250 ft. O.D. (fig. 1). The surface of the gravel within the area investigated is level, but to the west it slopes upwards to Farnham Park. From here there issues the course of a stream, which, skirting the site on the south-west, turns south to join the Wey half a mile to the south. In recent years the Park stream has been captured near its source by a system of swallow-holes, and to-day its effective source is the spring which breaks out from the Chalk below the gravel spread in the immediate neighbourhood of the site. The Bourne Mill Spring, as it is usually known, has cut its way back an appreciable distance, having formed a small valley of its own, so that it can lay claim to a fair antiquity; indeed, there is every reason for regarding it as a main attraction of the site from Mesolithic times onwards (pl. VI). At the present day the spring retains its purity unaffected by the disposal of sewage and is still a well-known stopping place for tramps. For an account of the site written from a geological point of view the reader is referred to Appendix I, kindly supplied by Dr K. P. Oakley, F.G.S.

Ty-isaf long cairn is one of a group of 13 long cairns in the Black Mountains of Brecknockshire. The existence of the group was first recognised by Mr O. G. S. Crawford, who published them in his Long Barrows of the Cotswolds. Several—in particular Ty Illtyd, Gwernvale and the two fine examples at Fostill near Llanelieu—were already well-known; but Ty-isaf, with a number of others, was first launched on an archaeological career by Mr Crawford in 1925.

Crawford's preoccupation being with the Cotswold long cairns he did not attempt to consider every aspect of the Brecknockshire cairns. This I subsequently tried to do in Archaeologia Cambrensis for 1936. But it had long been clear that the complete excavation of at least one of the monuments was badly needed to augment what we already knew— which was little enough—from chance digging and from visible features.

The Brecknockshire Society therefore deserves the thanks of archaeologists in general for undertaking this excavation, and congratulations for the success which has attended their efforts. Gratitude is especially due to the Society's President Sir John Lloyd, by whom with Mr R. G. Sandeman most of the preliminary arrangements were carried out. Other members of the Society helped in various ways. Mr Sandeman himself was present throughout the whole course of the work, and Mr Jestyn Williams was responsible for some of the surveying upon which the plan (fig. 2) is based.

In a recent number of these Proceedings, the present writer defined a type of megalithic burial chamber which was there called the transepted gallery grave, and discussed the distribution of this type in southern Britain. The transepted gallery grave (sometimes called the cruciform gallery grave, or the cruciform allée couverte) consists, as was pointed out, of a central gallery grave or allée couverte with one or two pairs of small rectangular side-chambers: in plan this type of monument resembles either a Latin or a Lorraine cross. Sometimes the gallery extends beyond the last pair of side-chambers, at others it stops flush with them. It will be remembered that we listed eight tombs of this type in England and Wales: Pare le Breos Cwm and Penmaen Burrows in Glamorgan, Nempnett Thrubwell and Stoney Littleton in Somerset, Wayland's Smithy in Berkshire, and three Gloucestershire sites—Uley, Nympsfield, and Notgrove. From the distribution of these chambers it was suggested that some of them formed the primary settlement on the shores of the Bristol Channel of a culture which subsequently spread over south-east Wales, the south-west Midlands, Wiltshire and Somerset, and which we called the Severn-Cotswold culture.

It was, moreover, suggested that the origin of the transepted gallery grave in Britain, and therefore of the Cotswold-Severn culture, must be sought for outside the British Isles, and we agreed with Fleure, Forde, and Le Rouzic in deriving these early settlers on the shores of the Bristol Channel from Brittany. In 1936, when the article was written, I knew of only about half-a-dozen transepted gallery graves in France: but in the following year I discovered among the Lukis MSS. at St. Peter Port a number of plans of other transepted gallery graves in western France.

The large perforated stone axe-hammer, illustrated by fig. 1, was found in 1933 in a peat bog near Cwrt Farm, Llangeitho, Cardiganshire (6-in. O.S. Cards, XX, S.E.). It is described by W. F. Grimes (1935) as being ‘related typologically to other axes which can be dated to the Bronze Age’; he adds ‘a date within that period may be accepted as the most likely. The position and circumstances in which it was found favour such an early date without confirming it.’ The same circumstances suggested that the find might perhaps be dated by the method of pollen analysis. The object itself was examined, but it had already been cleaned thoroughly, and even scraping inside the socket yielded only the merest traces of peat, quite insufficient for analysis.

Ever since the complexity of the Early Iron Age civilization in the British Isles was first realized, the accepted classification of its cultures has been based primarily upon pottery-types. In its present form, as stated by Mr Hawkes in 1931, that classification is, with modifications, likely to remain a basis of research for many years to come. Not only is pottery the most universally durable of the domestic articles then in common use, but it is, from the conditions of its manufacture, particularly sensitive to narrow regional and cultural differences. Nevertheless the very success of the pottery-criterion demands that we should bear in mind its obvious limitations. Not only were several culturally important areas apparently almost devoid of any but the crudest pottery, but the essentially domestic character of the potter's craft, which makes it so faithful a mirror of the constituents of everyday life, at the same time precludes it from reflecting, save in a very general fashion, the wider cultural and political contacts which must have played so large a part in the history of the period.