An ingenious derivation for the La Tène dagger with anthropoid hilt shows how craftsmen gave an agreeable character to a working weapon. The dagger remained every bit as effective, but the splayed person on the hilt added a touch of playful luxury to the serious business of stabbing. By way of a modern anthropoid corkscrew, the author lures us away from an obsession with symbolism and encourages us to look for a more down-to-earth ‘psychological functionality’ in decorated objects.

In this wonderful century when discoveries and inventions have followed fast on one another’s heels Man seems to look dazed and half comprehendingly at the works of his own hands. So that there are some who say that he is on the brink of new andmore wonderful mastery over Nature ; others that there are no more discoveries to make ; and others again who wish to cry halt, and ask, hopelessly, for ten years’rest from the innovations and disturbances which scientific inquiry is bringing into their world.

Tangas are small convex triangular pottery covers found in large numbers in the Amazon delta. Their suggestive shape has long been attributed to use as a cover or shield for the female Mound of Venus, for protection, modesty (‘cache-sexe’ is the French term) or embellishment. Here the author offers a typology and searches for correlations between the shapes, sizes and patterns of the tangas and the date, location, purpose and status of the women who wore them. He emphasises that in spite of this advance, better understanding requires new information from properly designed excavations; 85 per cent of known tangas have been acquired by looting, purchase or low-precision digging.

Ever since the beginning of recorded history, Ancient Egypt was dependent upon the goodwill of the Phoenician overlords of the mountain land of the Lebanon for supplies of timber in the long running lengths required for the construction of large ships, especially those intended for use on long voyages by sea ; fine timber was also in considerable demand for the making of the elaborate wooden sarcophagi of nobles and of members of the royal family as well as for furniture of superior quality. This lack of suitable native timber made the Egyptians late comers in sea-trading ; indeed, it restricted progress so seriously that their water-borne commerce was limited to traffic with Nubia and the South by way of the Nile waterway, to occasional expeditions down the Red Sea to Southern Arabia and to Somaliland (Punt) and to short coasting trips to Phoenicia to buy timber logs and to the coasts of the Sinai Peninsula in search of copper.

The saints in Greece occasionally have curious epithets. In Attica all know St. John the Hunter. In Naxos there is St. George the Drunken and in Thessaly you will find St. Nicholas the Murderer. Now too in Argolis you will hear of St. George the Vampire.

The little church or rather shrine dedicated to that saint is in a kind of open cave which is really the entrance to a Mycenaean rock cut chamber tomb and it lies on the outskirts of the village of Thymari at the base of the tangle of hills at the western foot of Mount Arachnaeus. If you go to the village and visit the shrine you will probably be told fantastic tales of the Vampire and the English archaeologist who was afterwards killed fighting the Bulgarians. The exact circumstances of the case you will probably not be able to discover. Even those of the village most closely connected with the events which led to the dedication of the shrine have allowed more freedom to their imaginations than they should. The village priest Athanasios nowadays is in his dotage and his cups, and not competent to give a credible or even a coherent version of what really took place and the part he played. Evesham himself is dead, because as you know he was killed on the Salonika front in 1917.

Mr Jack Hanbury-Tenison is a Field Director of the University of Sydney excavations at Pella, and has combined this with doing surveys of his own in Jordan to pick up settlement patterns in the fourth millennium. In writing a thesis on the Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze I transition in Palestine and Transjordan he says he is trying to steer a course between the anti-empiricism of the New Archaeology and the positivism of the Kenyon school. He says, engagingly, that ‘what got me on to Hegel and Darwin was wondering where people got their loopy ideas from’. This essay is a plea for commonsense, and an understanding of how pastoralists use the landscape today. Hanbury-Tenison is a research student of Magdalen College, Oxford.