Antiquity V O L . L V I I N o . 2 2 0 J U L Y 1 9 8 3 Editorial We begin with a correction and an apology. I n our discussion of the use of ad/bc for uncalibrated dates and A D / B C for calibrated dates, sparked off by the criticisms of Professor D r W. G . Mook of Groningen, we attributed comments to Richard Burleigh which were in fact from a letter by Dr Roy Switsur (Antiquity, 1983, p. 5 , col. I , lines 7-18). Will bibliographically minded readers make this correction and note also that the date of Clark’s paper was, as correctly stated elsewhere, 1975 ? Meanwhile, for the benefit of all historically minded scholars, like ourselves, we can report that D r Justin Schove, Principal of St David’s College, Kent, is the originator of our bc/ad BC/AD system as D r Roy Switsur suggested (Antiquity, 1983, 4). D r Schove writes: The use of lower-case letters for uncalibrated radio- carbon dates seemed necessary in the 1960s partly because archaeologists and climatologists often for- got to specify whether their dates were or were not calibrated and confused the two. This is sometimes still the case. As a believer in Suess wiggles I felt also that uncalibrated dates should be published as the usual conversion tables smoothed the time-scales unnecessarily. Professor Mook’s laboratory a t Groningen thus later confirmed that whereas 3400 BC converted to 4700 bp but 3300 ~ c t o 4 5 0 0 bp, 4700 bp converted to the range 3500 -3400 and 4600 bp to the range 3350-3200 BC. T h e suggestions were given first in a short paper in the Royal Meteorological Society’s 1966/7 publication ‘World Climate 8000-0 BC’ on pp. 52-53, although printer’s confusion necessitated errata to the first printing given on p . 234. T h e ‘British’ system h a s been accepted by several international committees and is indeed being adopted in some books published in the Netherlands (e.g. eds Creer e t al., ‘Geo- magnetism of baked clays and recent sediments’, Elscvier; and eds, Schove & Fairbridge, ‘Ice-cores, varves and tree rings’, Balkema). I n a Benchmark book published in America (D. J . Schove, ‘Sunspot Cycles’, Hutchinson Ross Publishing Company, Stroudsburg, Pa, 1983) tables of bp and BC/AD dates are given (e.g. Appendix C). Little Ice Ages are thus dated on the bp scale as 4575, 3225, 2800 and 2300 and on the BC scale as C. 3375, c. 1575, C. 1030 and C. 500. 8 Unlike the United Kingdom, the Common- wealth of Australia is a member state of the World Heritage Convention. Late last year, Southwestern Tasmania was inscribed upon the list of properties of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, because its status was such that it met all four natural criteria and half of the six cultural criteria. However, Tasmania’s State government proposes to construct a hydro-electric dam in the heartland of this region, thereby drowning all known major archaeological places, and destroying a botanical wilderness. T h e recent Federal Labour government election landslide was assisted by its pledge to save the Gordon and Franklin river valleys from destruc- tion. Whether it can honour its promise will depend upon its strength of conviction, because i t could become embroiled in constitutional issues concern- ing the rights of individual states in the Federation to determine matters within their borders. Mean- while, the Tasmanian government pursues its dam construction with vigour. World archaeological opinion has been emphatic- ally conservationist. Several months ago, over a score of prominent British, Canadian, New Zealand and United States prehistorians and kindred dis- ciplines wrote to the then Prime Minister, urging preservation policies. Science (218, 3 Dec. 1982) and Nature (23/30 Dec. 1982, 6 Jan. 1983) ex- pressed similar clear views o n the matter. So did the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association and the Pacific Science Congress, at recent meetings in New Zealand. An all-Party Committee of the Australia Senate reported adversely against the dam proposals last November, concluding that, ‘apart from any other reasons for preserving the area the caves are of such importance that the Franklin River be not inun- dated’. 82 A N T I Q U I T Y These valleys contain forests which are botanical relics from the great southern continental mass, Gondwanaland. Living Huon pine survive which exceed 2,000 years in age; recent radiocarbon dating established that two fallen trunks in another valley have lain preserved for 7,000 and 12,000 years respectively. T h e possibilities offered in these moss-covered valleys for dendrochronological and radiocarbon correlation with the Bristlecone pine- derived chronology are challenging. People occupied the valley at least 20,ooo years ago, constituting the furthest southerly penetra- tion of the ice age world, at a period when glaciers covered the nearby mountains. T h e y evidently abandoned these open grasslands some 15,000 years ago, when increasing humidity encouraged dense rain forest. These caves are therefore contemporary with those of Upper Palaeolithic Europe, and represent time capsules of economic and cultural data of immense importance. Both the quantity and quality of preservation of cultural material, fauna and pollen, are virtually unprecedented in Australia. They also constitute places of immense spiritual and symbolic significance to Australian Aboriginal people. I t is ironic that one decade of ‘progress’ to pro- duce a mere zoo megawatts of electricity could submerge this entire world of ancient plants and people. We are pleased to learn that both the Australian Archaeological Association and the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeolo- gists, are taking a firm stance in this debate. We concur with the Senate Select Committee ‘that Australia’s world reputation would be badly tarnished if such significant discoveries were to be lost’. 8 When Mark Gregson was killed in a car accident in 1982 at the age of 24 his colleagues and friends decided to put together some of his unpublished papers with their own comments. T h i s book has now been published, edited by Keith W. Ray, entitled Young archaeologist : collected unpublished papers, contributions to archaeological thinking and practice from Mark S. Gregson (Cambridge, September 1982). I t was an excellent idea to produce this book which can be obtained (price Er2) from his parents (H. Gregson Esq., South Stack, 295 S t John’s Road, Clacton-on-Sea, Essex CO16 8DE). Some, if not all, of the proceeds of the sale will go to boost the Gregson Memorial Fund in the Department of Archaeology in the University of Cambridge. I n this book we can see the contribution Gregson was already beginning to make to archaeological thinking and practice, and what a loss his death has been. I n addition to Gregson’s own papers there are sympathetic and interesting papers by Mike Corbishley, Alison Taylor, Peter Woodward, David Baker, Francis Pryor, and Keith Ray. a When Professor Ole Klindt-Jensen died sud- denly in June 1980 at the age of 6 2 (Antiquity, 1980, 169-70) the University of Aarhus established a Klindt- Jensen Memorial Lecture in Archaeology and Ancient History, and the first of these lectures was given by the Editor of ANTIQUITY in the Forhistorisk Museum at Moesgaard on 2 March of this year to an audience which included H.M. the Queen of Denmark, the British Ambassador to Denmark, Rektor Vandel of Aarhus University, and Riksantiqvariet Olaf Olsen. I t was nice to be back in Aarhus and on this occasion we were re- ceived by the Rektor of the Cathedral School where Ole Worm was a student-that remarkable character was son of the Mayor of Aarhus. A splendid portrait of Olaus Wormius hangs in the Headmaster’s office and we were able to look, for the first time, at Worm’s published letters (the press mark is Havnia, 1761) which include a fascinating correspondence with Sir Henry Spelman. After taking his medical degree at Basel, Worm went to England and practised as a doctor there before taking up his post as Professor of the Humanities in Copenhagen. Probably he met Spelman then ; the DNB gives his date of birth as ?1564, and certainly when Worm was back in Denmark (he became Professor of Greek in 1615 and Medicine in 1624-what a generous poly- mathic age the seventeenth century was!), he was corresponding with Spelman about tumuli and runes and the genealogy of families and about the real meaning of the names Goths, Celts, and Saxons in early times. Henry Spelman is, we think, an under-estimated man in the development of antiquarianism and scholarship. H e was a member of the original Society of Antiquaries and after the Society was discontinued in 1604 he went on trying to resusci- tate it but was frustrated by the prohibition of James I. Spelman was one of the first who realized that to understand the past of Britain we must be able to read Anglo-Saxon and study all the manu- E D I T O R I A L 83 script sources that exist from pre-Norman times. H e came across a man called Abraham Wheelocke (his name in the DNB is given the various spellings of Wheelock, Whelocke, Whelock and Wheloc) whose dates are 1593-1653: he became Librarian and amanuensis in the Cambridge University Library and the first Professor of Arabic in Cam- bridge, a chair endowed by Sir Thomas Adams (1586-1667). Spelman wrote to his friend Wheel- ocke discussing the possibility of founding an Anglo-Saxon lectureship in Cambridge and said in a letter of 28 September 1635, ‘We must not launch out into the deep before we know the points of the compass.’ (Words which might be put on a card in front of the desks of most Old Archaeolo- gists and all New Archaeologists.) T h e lectureship was established and endowed with the stipend of the impropriate rectory of Middleton. Wheelocke was appointed to it but he was the first and last holder of this post. When he died in 1657 it lapsed and the stipend of the rectory of Middleton was paid to William Somner towards the expense of completing his Saxon dictionary. a I t is surprising that though the first archaeologi- cal air photograph was taken from a balloon in 1906, and Wessex from the air was published in 1928, no general handbook for archaeologists telling them how to interpret air photographs has existed until now. This book, Air photo interpreta- tion for archaeologists by D. R. Wilson (212 pp, 121 photographs, London: Batsford, 1982, 49.95 limp, 417.50 cased), by a man who has worked for 17 years in the Department of Aerial Photo- graphy in the University of Cambridge and suc- ceeded Professor St Joseph as its Curator in 1980, fills this need and does so admirably. I t can now be revealed, though it has been an open secret for many years, that as St Joseph was moving to his retirement the University of Cambridge very properly considered the future of the Department he had so successfully created and run. A wrong- headed Committee recommended that the Depart- ment should be reduced to an archive, but eventu- ally the powers of darkness that lurk only too often in the uninformed back-corridors of academic power were defeated and the Department survives with its own aircraft and pilot; long may this continue. In this manual Wilson takes us through the techniques of air photography and of interpretation simply and clearly and it is healthy to find him insisting that one must see the ground and look at photographs with the shadows falling towards one. A brilliant example of this is shown in the pair of photographs of Walton Hall, Warwickshire (p. 32). Wilson is very good in discussing the pitfalls of interpretation, namely natural features and recent man-made features. Among natural features he has good photographs of ice wedge polygons, parch- marks, jointing in limestone, collapsed frost mounds and frost cracks, and limestone solution holes. His examples of modern features include spoil heaps from coalmining near Tankerlet, the site of a fete at Orsett Heath, the riding school at Wramplingham, and emplacements of the 1939-45 war. T h e appreciation of the fact that everything on an air photograph is not made by prehistoric man is a very important lesson to be learnt by interpreters in peacetime, just as in war it was im- portant that interpreters did not mistake normal features of the cultural landscape for military targets. Generations of archaeological under- graduates shown the Yarnbury photograph in Wessex from the air (Pl. vi) could never condition themselves to think of sheep-pens and fairs; everything had to be very old. And we recall, wryly, being excited by discover- ing in 1941 on air photographs of occupied France what we thought were clear traces of prehistoric villages at low water in many places on the Norman and Breton coasts. Stuart Piggott and Terence Powell shared our excited discovery and we began to think that perhaps archaeologists serving as military interpreters in the war might pick up all sorts of discoveries, as the late lamented John Bradford most certainly did in southern Italy. But our prehistoric villages did not exist. We showed the pictures to that omniscient man, Charles Phillips (who once said to a photographic inter- preter wrestling with pictures of a Hungarian city, ‘If there was a second railway station there, I would have known about it’), and he looked at us all with that kind and sympathetic glance which always meant that he was dealing with ignoramuses, ‘Good heavens,’ he said, ‘I’ll excuse Stuart and Terence but not you. You’ve been to Brittany so often. Oyster beds, my boy. Oyster beds.’ And of course that is what they were. Wilson omits to tell us two things: first, how to buy a portable stereoscope for studying overlapping prints, and secondly, how to arrive at the scale of a vertical air photograph by calculating from the flying height of the aircraft and the focal length of 84 A N T I Q U I T Y the camera. These omissions can be put right in future editions of a book which is clearly going to be indispensable to all archaeologists for many years. T o the new interpreter it provides helpful and clear instruction, t o the experienced inter- preter a joyous collection of old and new photo- graphs-and an occasional belly-laugh like the wrongly laid out football pitch at King’s Lynn (p. 16). T h e photograph of the University Parks in Oxford is fascinating-beneath the University’s cricket field and two hockey pitches are a complex of prehistoric and Roman sites, A very well produced and, as it had to be, a very well illus- trated book ; the bibliography is printed in very small type. a We draw attention to a new journal, theJournal of Danish Archaeology, produced by the Odense University Press; it is edited by Kristian Kristiansen and Poul Otto Nielsen, assisted by an Editorial board of 24 including Ssren Andersen, 0. Crumlin-Pedersen, David Liversage, H. J. Madsen, Peder Mortensen, Elisabeth Munks- gaard, Henrik Tauber and Henrik Thrane-to mention invidiously a few of that distinguished corps d e ballet. I t is published in one annual volume and the annual subscription rate is IIO Danish Kroner, excluding postage. Subscriptions should be sent to the Odense University Press, 36 Pjentedamsgade, DK-5000, Odense Co., Denmark. T h e preface to the first volume (signed by Hans Rostholm as well as the two editors) declares that: The background for launching JD,4 is the increas- ing pile-up of unpublished excavations that has accompanied the expansion of archaeology in Denmark in the 1960s and even more in the 1970s. Only a small selection of these many investigations have found their way into the established periodicals. In this way there has been a n increasing disagree- ment between the existing publication structure and expanding needs. Moreover the established periodi- cals have been a t the disposal mainly of archaeolo- gists a t the universities and central museums while today the majority of Danish archaeologists work at regional museums. It is the editorial committee’s hope that the appearance of J D A will help to remove these discrepancies and bring published knowledge more in line with the existing. T h e first number has 17 articles (including Niels Andersen on a neolithic causewayed camp at Trelleborg underneath the Viking Age ring-fort, Harder Ssrensen on the use of air photographs in Celtic field studies in Denmark, Karsten Davidsen on bronze age houses, David Liversage on an early neolithic ritual structure on Sejern, Henrik Thrane on a research policy for bronze age settle- ments), eight reviews, and 25 pages of notes on recent excavations and discoveries in Denmark. We welcome this very well-produced and excellently edited new journal: no one concerned with the archaeology of northern Europe can afford to be without it. a We had hoped that Professor Barry Fell had shot his bolt with America BC and Saga America, but, alas, not so. Here comes Bronze Age America, the third, and please God the last, of these bizarre accounts of his invented past of America before Leif Erikson and Christopher Columbus: his trilogy of fairy stories for foolish fabulists. I n America BC (1976) he described roving Celtic mariners crossing the Atlantic from Iberia, establishing settlements in New England and Oklahoma, followed or accompanied by other colonists from Europe and North Africa speaking Basque, Phoenician and Libyan. Latin numerals, calendar systems, and ancient Greek astronomical knowledge were, he told us, brought to America then. T h i s tarradiddle of rubbish sold like the hot cakes of apostasy, and in 1980 there appeared Saga America in which we are told that pre-Columbian Europeans and North Africans crossed the Indian and Pacific oceans as well as the Atlantic and settled in California and Nevada from the third century BC, and that there is rich evidence of a Chinese presence, and an early Arabic presence, including (yes, believe it or not) the decorative signature of the Prophet Mohammed. T h e name America, according to the deluded D r Fell, is nothing to do with Amerigo Vespucci, but comes from a Libyan word meaning ‘land across the ocean’. (Reviewed, Antiquity, I 980, LIV, I 54 -5 .) So far, so bad-twice round the bend and well up to winning the lunatic stakes and the Von Daniken Cup. What fresh follies and fantasies were we to be subjected to, we wondered, as we opened the pages of Bronze Age America (304 pp. 220 figs. and photographs, 1982, Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, L9.95). Had the emeritus Professor of Biology at Harvard made i t ? Yes, he has. This beats all the other runners from Elliot Smith to M r s Maltwood, John Michell, C. E. Joel, Alfred Watkins, Uncle T o m Cobbleigh and all. Here we are told that seventeen centuries E D I T O R I A L 85 BC a Nordic king called Wodenlithi sailed across the Atlantic, reaching the neighbourhood of Toronto, and established a trading colony with a religious and commercial centre at what is now Peterborough, leaving behind an inscription recording his visit, his religious beliefs, a standard of measures for cloth and cordage and an astronomical observatory for determining the Nordic Calendar Year. ‘Flotillas of ancient Norse, Baltic and Celtic ships’, he tells us (p. 288), ‘each summer set their prows to the north-west, to cross the Atlantic, to return later in the season with cargoes of raw materials furnished by the Algonquins with whom they traded.’ When I am next in the Blue Bar of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in New York I will lift a glass in desperation and despair to learned Pro- fessors from Elliot Smith to Barry Fell and van Sertima who degrade scholarship and besmirch good sound learning by their opinionated and ignorant oddities. Elliot Smith, himself with Perry a prominent peddlar of pernicious and private prehistories, once said, ‘The set attitude of mind of a scholar may become almost indistinguishable from a delusion.’ Fell is a sadly, badly, unhappily deluded man. Most readers of this journal will, fortunately, not share his delusions, or accept his flotillas of fantasies, but the commuters crowding round the bookstalls at Grand Central Station and Harvard Square will be tempted to buy the book. T h e title is good and a catch-dollar, but it is out- rageous that his publishers in England demand E I O for this fumbling farraginous charade. 8 We are sometimes accused of paying too much attention in the Editorials of ANTIQUITY to the lunatic fringes of our subject, but we quote again with warm approval the words of Professor Jeremy A. Sabloff which we quoted in our November 1982 issue (p. 165): ‘It is the responsi- bility of archaeologists to correct the misinformed perspectives of the discipline of archaeology that many members of the popular media and the general public seem to have.’ T h i s was not the view of an earlier generation of archaeologists : Mortimer Wheeler was of the view that bad books and cranky books should not be reviewed, and Crawford was also against bothering about crack- pots and cranks except for refusing t o print advertisements for Watkins’s The old straight track. I n 1935 Gordon Childe surprisingly ended his Presidential Address to the Prehistoric Society with these words: ‘It is the peculiarly British practice t o ignore in scientific discussions the groundless hypotheses of amateurs and cranks, however much publicity these may have in the provincial press. Whether that result [sic] from laziness, snobbishness, the law of libel or a sound historical tradition I do not know. My references to unacceptable theories of diffusion will emphasize my silence on the much advertised drivellings of charlatans’ ( P P S , 1935, I S ) . We therefore welcome and warmly applaud the courage of the Editors of Popular Archaeology in devoting much of their February 1983 number to a discussion of some widely held crankeries such as the Glastonbury zodiac, dowsing (with the good results that can come from it), and particularly ley lines: indeed the issue is called ‘ T h e Great Debate: living leys o r laying lies’, and devotes six pages to a lively debate on leys between Aubrey Burl and John Michell. I t all makes very good reading, and is gutsy stuff. 8 I t has been announced that the X I t h Congress of the Union Internationale des Sciences Pr6- historiques et Protohistoriques will be held in Great Britain (in Southampton and London) from I to 7 September 1986, and the first circular has gone out to 20,000 individuals and institutions all over the world. T h e national secretary is Professor Peter Ucko, Department of Archaeology, Univer- sity of Southampton, Southampton SO9 gNH, England, and those who have not yet received the first circular should write to him. I n a message in the first circular the Secretary says: T h e suggested format of this Congress is different from previous ones. T h e participation of profes- sional academic archaeologists continues, of course, to be crucial to the success of the Congress but, in addition, the 1986 Major Themes are designed to widen the field of participants to include those from all continents, countries, nations and cultural groups who are in any way involved in studying the past, whether as guides, or as custodians of monu- ments, or as trainees on excavations, or involved in some other way with archaeological projects. Personally I believe that the major aims of the Congress will have succeeded only if in 1986 new and continuing dialogues are established between people from diverse backgrounds with diverse pre- conceptions who share a common interest in compre- hending the cultural processes which have con- tributed to past human cultures. I t is my intention that out of this Congress there will develop an increased understanding and appreciation of our 86 A N T I Q U I T Y global heritage and the variety of attitudes that we bring to it. With these unusual aims in mind, it is essential that news of the 1986 conference reaches as wide an audience as possible. There is one alarming sentence at the end of the first circular, namely that the Congress registration fee is likely to be in the region of A200. T h e National Heritage Bill is a matter of very great concern to all involved with our British past and its provisions are of interest to many in other countries as we found on recent visits to Copen- hagen and Paris. We asked Professor Renfrew, who is himself a member of the Ancient Monu- ments Board for England and of the Royal Com- mission on Historical Monuments for England, t o comment o n these far reaching changes. H e writes: T h e legislation now before Parliament, the National Heritage Bill, which is likely to be law by the time these pages are in print, will bring about the most far-reaching reorganization in England’s provisions for its archaeological heritage since the original Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882. That far-sighted legislation first publicly defined (and listed) ancient monuments in Britain, and provided for Commissioners of Works to act as their guard- ians. Later acts placed ‘guardianship’ monuments under the care of the Secretary of State for the Environment, and established Ancient Monuments Boards for England, for Scotland and for Wales to advise him. The new bill incorporates many of these pro- visions : there will still be ‘guardianship’ monuments, directly placed under official care, and ‘scheduled’ monuments, which are on an official list and which it is an offence to damage, but which in practice are often afforded little effective protection under the existing (or the new) legislation. T h e new National Heritage Act will abolish (or radically reduce) the Directorate of Ancient Monuments of the Depart- ment of the Environment, and with i t the Inspectors of Monuments. Most of its activities will be taken over by a new, official but non-governmental body, to be called T h e Historic Buildings and Monu- ments Commission. (The position for Scotland and for Wales will be unchanged by the Act, and the Ancient Monuments Board for each will continue to function.) Although the new Commission will take on most of the functions of the former Directorate, the Secretary of State will still carry out such govern- mental functions as ‘scheduling’ monuments, or granting ‘scheduled monument consent’ to land- owners seeking planning permission for building works and the like. T h e Ancient Monuments Board for England and the Historic Buildings Council for England will be abolished. There will be up to seventeen Commissioners, appointed by the Secre- tary of State, and they will (with his approval) appoint a chief officer and a staff. It is these Com- missioners who will in practice administer the monuments held in guardianship (except the Royal Palaces and the Tower of London). They will like- wise control the budget for rescue archaeology in England. Whether all this amounts to a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen. Certainly it will, as Michael Heseltine (then Secretary of State for the Environment) intended, allow for more energetic promotion of the various ‘guardianship’ monuments. His original consultative document called for ‘entrepreneurial flair’, and the legislation requires that some of the Commissioners should have knowledge or experience of ‘tourism, commerce and finance’ as well as the more obvious fields of ‘archaeology, architecture, the history of archi- tecture, and the preservation or conservation of monuments or buildings’. Some imaginative promotion might be no bad thing, at a time when visitor figures have been falling at many sites in the Department’s care, in contrast to the buildings owned by the National Trust. T h e major concern, however, is that the Commis- sion will be too preoccupied (like Michael Heseltine himself, as some critics have pointed out) with the historic buildings in its care, and with the concern of attracting visitors to them, and insufficiently aware of its wider responsibilities. There are, after all, only 400 guardianship monuments and buildings in this country, as against 1 2 , 5 0 0 scheduled monuments (to say nothing of 275,000 listed buildings), and an estimated 500,ooo further archaeological sites with- out official protection of any kind. Will the new Commission concern itself sufficiently about these, which in reality constitute the greater part of our national heritage ? T h e new Act makes little reference to rescue archaeology (and none at all to the Ancient Monuments Laboratory), so that the emphasis given to this crucial area of activity will be very much a matter for the Commissioners themselves to decide. The way they interpret these responsibilities will be of crucial importance. T h e only body in England with statutory responsi- bilities in this area which is not mentioned in the Bill is the Royal Commission on Historical Monu- ments for England. The Royal Commission has had, since the beginning of this century, the task of recording the ancient monuments and historic buildings of the land. I t does this with a team of investigators, who also maintain the National Monuments Record (held at Savile Row in London). The Royal Commission publishes the handsome E D I T O R I A L 87 and authoritative county inventories and a range of other publications. O n I April it will absorb many of the remaining staff of the former Archaeology Divi- sion of the Ordnance Survey. Until the last moment, it was uncertain whether the Government would seek to incorporate the Royal Commission within its newly created agency. T h e Royal Commission itself (whose Chairman is Lord Adeane, and Secretary D r Peter Fowler) wished to retain its independent status, and the Government recently announced in the House of Lords that this was now its own policy. All of which is fine, but certainly leaves the archaeo- logical world with a problem in terminology. Next year I shall be setting my students the question: ‘Distinguish between T h e Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission [for England] and the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for England’. I wonder how many h1.P.s would score an alpha. T h e real concern among archaeologists, however, is that the great opportunity has been missed of setting up a unified, national Antiquities Service. (And why not include Scotland and Wales too ? T h e answer is, of course, a political one.) Where is the keen awareness that agricultural development (especially deep ploughing) is rapidly destroying a large proportion of what is left of our national heri- tage? One need not doubt the good intentions of those responsible for the new legislation to regret the sadly missed opportunity for a more thorough and thoughtful re-examination of the way we care for our heritage. Nothing is lost so far, however, and there is no a priori reason why the new Commission should not cope at least as well as its predecessor with these broader concerns, as well as exercising appropriate ‘flair’ in its promotional activities. I t is expected to come into operation (appropriately perhaps for a QUANCO with a title in Doublespeak) early in 1984. Does it offer a glimmer of hope that the recently appointed Secretary of State for the Environment, T o m King, who will be responsible for setting u p the new Commission, took Part I of the Cambridge Archaeology and Anthropology T r i p o s ? He must, I think, be the first ever of all those with ministerial responsibility for our heritage to have been so appropriately qualified. T i m e will tell. T h e next couple of years will certainly be crucial for the future well-being and for the further development of archaeology in England. Book Chronicle W e include here books which have been received f o r review, or books of importance (not received f o r review) of which we have recently been informed. W e welcome information about books, particularly in languages other than English, of interest to readers of ANTIQUITY. The listing of a book in this chronicle does not preclude its review in ANTIQUITY. The handbook of British archaeology edited by Lesley Adkins and Roy A. Adkins. London: Macmillan, 1982. 320 p p . , illus. E5.95. The archaeology of Somerset: a review to rgoo AD edited by Michael Alston and Ian Burrow. Taunton : Somerset County Council, 1982 (copies obtainable from the County Planning Department, County Hall, Taunton). 154 p p . , illus. E5.25 + E1.00 p . and p . The Roman and Early Byzantine fortifications of Lower Moesia and Northern Thrace by Malgorzata Biernacka-Lubanska. Ribliotheca Antiqua series, vol. XVII. Wroclazc, Warsaw, Cracow, Gdansk, Lodz : Ossolineuin, f o r the Polish Academy of Sciences. 286 p p . , 156 jigs. 250 z l o t y . Castulo I11 by Jose lLlaria Blazquez Blartinez and Jesus Valiente Malla. Excavaciones arqueologicas en Espaiia. M a d r i d : Ministerio de Cultura, 1981. 300 p p . , I 55 jigs., 28 pls. Atlas of the Roman world by T i m Cornell and John Matthews. Oxford : Phaidon, 1982. 2 4 0 p p . , illus. (many in colour). L I 7 . 5 0 . Falsifications and misreconstructions of Pre- Columbian art edited by Elizabeth H. Boone. Dumbarton Oaks : Trustees for Harvard Univer- sity, 1982. 152 p p . , many illus. $16.00. The art and iconography of late post-Classic central Mexico edited by Elizabeth H. Boone. Dumbarton Oaks : Trustees f o r Harvard University, 1982. 264 p p . , illus. Coastal archaeology in eastern Australia: pro- ceedings of the 1980 Valla conference on Australian prehistory edited by Sandra Bowd- ler. Canberra : Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. 160 p p . , illus. A U S $10.00. Iherir. Klippmalningar frin stenhldern i Centralsahara by Goran Burenhult. Stockholm : Sturejarlaget, 1982. 260 p p . , illus. (many in colour) . E l l e and Ella: Anglo-Saxon kings of North- umbria by Raymond E. 0. Ella. ICfracombe: Stockwell, 1983. 32 p p . , 4 f i g s . , I p l . L I . 5 2 . continued on p . 9 4