This paper offers a provisional assessment of the development of settlement in part of Cranborne Chase between the Mesolithic and the Late Bronze Age. It builds upon the results of Pitt Rivers' work in this region between 1880 and 1900, as well as more recent excavation and field survey. Special emphasis is placed on three factors: the relationship between activity in this area and settlement both in central Wessex and on the coastal plain; the place of the more prominent ‘public’ monuments in contemporary patterns of settlement and exchange; and the relationship between cemeteries and contemporary living sites. We present the first results from the extensive excavation of two Deverel-Rimbury enclosures and associated barrows, and a new analysis of Pitt Rivers' work on the urnfield at Handley Barrow 24.

The results of the excavations at the Iron Age hillfort at Danebury between 1977 and 1980 are briefly discussed. The main features include a number of Iron Age round houses found in stratigraphical sequence in the lee of the ramparts, rectangular buildings in the centre of the fort which may have had a religious function, and other occupation traces including pits and post-holes. Among the finds discussed are a Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age bronze hoard, bronze horse trappings, and a scrap iron hoard containing cauldron hooks. Excavations are continuing.

The demeanour of the figure represented on the Greek metrological relief in the Ashmolean Museum indicates that it must have been made before the Athenian decree regulating weights and measures, variously dated between 449 and 420 B.C. All the dimensions of the slab imply the use of a cubit of 52·3 cm, the length of the Egyptian royal cubit which in a Greek context suggests a provenance on Samos. Finally, the slab was not used for the practical purpose of comparing or checking measures. The width and the angle of the surface point to its being set over a door, perhaps the entrance to a room devoted to the control of weights and measures.

Further excavation at Torksey established that the borough was an open settlement; a medieval ditch merely separated the village closes from the common. One such close contained three more pottery kilns. Two kilns were found immediately south of the village, bringing the total to seven. The pottery industry seems to have started by the middle of the ninth century and lasted through much of the twelfth; it may have been or become subordinate to that of Lincoln.

The glass, now comprising a three-light Crucifixion between two royal figures and their patron saints, reflects the style of Leiden and can be dated c. 1515-27. It may have stood originally in three linked windows in Waltham Abbey Church, and been padded out after the Dissolution to fit the five-light window of the chapel of New Hall, Boreham. On its transfer to Copt Hall c. 1740 William Price the younger replaced some of the glass, and must have overpainted and refired most of the rest. A local glazier, James Loton, was responsible for transferring it to St. Margaret's in 1758.

A textile fragment from the Crimea acquired by the British Museum in 1848 is identified as a Han Chinese monochrome figured silk. Pieces of the same cloth are also in the Hermitage, Leningrad. The context of the find and the associated grave furniture are re-examined and a production date for the silk within the first century B.C. or early first century A.D. is proposed.