A YEAR before the first number of ANTIQUITY appeared, its founder reviewed a new publication for the Antiquaries Journal. ‘This book,’ he began, ‘is the most important of its kind that has hitherto been published…. Never before has the whole field of European origins been surveyed by a specialist who can also generalize, who writes clearly and intelligibly, and who is apparently familiar with all European languages. Its publication brings us appreciably nearer to the ultimate goal of our study.’

Crawford saw that Gordon Childe’s The Dawn of European Civilization, in its first edition of 1925, marked the beginning of a new era in archaeological studies in this country. I suspect that he was one of the very few British prehistorians at that time who realized the fact and appreciated the implications. More than thirty years later a revised sixth edition has been published, appearing almost simultaneously with the tragic news of the author’s death in his native Australia. For a full generation The Dawn, as we have all affectionately called it, has been with us, the indispensable reference-book for student, teacher and interested layman, our Ariadne-clue in the labyrinth of Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age Europe.

In recent years there have appeared a number of books about the Etruscans. These have for the most part been devoted to Etruscan art and culture of the historical period, and touch only lightly on the so-called mystery of Etruscan origins. This mystery is a peculiar thing, for no one regards the origin of other ancient peoples such as the Greeks or the Romans as mysterious. It is simply assumed that they developed where they are found at the beginning of history out of various prehistoric elements that had already arrived.

The Etruscan mystery arises in part from the remarkable differences both in language and in civilization between the Etruscans and the other peoples of pre-Roman Italy. The ancients also speculated about it, and the puzzle is in part due to contradictory statements made by them. Herodotus in the 5th century B.C. said that the Etruscans came from Lydia, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century B.C. said that they did not come from anywhere but originated in Italy. The aim of much discussion in recent times has been to determine which was right. I should say at once that it seems to me that there is something in both views. But the statement of Herodotus can hardly be taken literally, since there is insufficient specific connexion between the ancient language and culture of Lydia and anything in Etruria. I shall return to that part of the story later.

Rudolf Karl Ludwig Virchow was born in Pomerania on 13 October 1821 of German parents. He became a pathologist, the leading medical scientist in Germany, and attained world-wide fame through establishing the correctness of the ‘cell theory’ that now underlies all biological and medical thought. He was also a radical politician, in the 1860s one of the few effectual opponents of Bismarck, and for 25 years chairman of the Finance Committee of the Prussian Landtag.

When I suggested, in commenting on this quotation, that an African cattle-thief would laugh at Beech Bottom dyke, Mr Crawford did not agree; and the idea that seems to prevail with regard to the stopping-power of a ditch and bank is responsible for these notes.

Cattle-defences may be considered under two heads: 1, Fences: 2, Dykes: the latter being actually of secondary importance when the object in view is to keep cattle in or out; and stockades without a ditch do occur in Britain.

From a University of Copenhagen excavation in the United Arab Emirates come two fragments of sheet alabaster, from a large private house dated to the 1st century AD. They prompt consideration of alabaster's use for windows and of provision for natural lighting in the ancient buildings of the broad region, using ethnohistoric observations, medieval literary sources and ancient epigraphic evidence.

Much needed within scholarship related to archaeology, the construction of nations, and the politics of epistemic practice, the two books under review—Bureaucratic archaeology and Archaeology, nation, and race—are certainly welcome additions. The first, by Ashish Avikunthak, is a deep and engaged ethnographic study of the ways by which the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) produces archaeology, and links it to religiosity, at the excavation site. Through this study, Avikunthak lays open “this social, cultural, and scientific universe of postcolonial archaeologies and demonstrate the impact of bureaucratic ontologies on epistemological practices” (p. xix). The second volume, co-authored by Raphael Greenberg and Yannis Hamilakis, can be considered autoethnographic, fashioned around conversations during a seminar at Brown University. In a series of fascinating chapter-conversations, they provide nuance to otherwise very difficult, slippery and easily conflated arguments that bring together and reflect upon the histories of archaeological imaginaries and contemporary politics of Greece and Israel/occupied Palestine. Both texts are grounded in an ethnographic modality that allows for clarity of their epistemic critiques of the nation. It is remarkable how much political work both texts are doing by carefully holding and contextualising history and contemporary politics, while also providing critical insights into the ways in which archaeology is used to further the politics of the nation.