In a recent number of The Antiquaries Journal (Vol. II., No. 2, pp. 114-117), I described four flint blades of Solutré type found in various parts of East Suffolk, and it is now my purpose to figure and to give an account of seven similar, but more remarkable implements found, with one exception, in the same county. The specimens, to which this note refers, are in the possession of Mr. W. Wells, of South Benfleet, who suggested that I should describe them, and has kindly sent the implements to me for examination.

For the details of the provenance of these blades Mr. Wells is responsible, but I am confident that he has taken all reasonable care in getting together the information which he has forwarded to me for publication. There can be no doubt but that the specimens now to be described constitute one of the finest series of flint blades yet found in this country, and it is gratifying that such specimens have been drawn by Mr. E. T. Lingwood.

Mr. Moir has described the circumstances under which the skeleton was found and has given the evidence on which these bones have been assigned to the period preceding the formation of the Boulder Clay. It remains for me to give a description of the skeleton and to draw certain inferences as to the kind of man to which it belonged. Before doing so, however, I should like to mention a matter which may be of service to future investigators. So fragile were the remains, such was the degree of disintegration, that Mr. Moir found it impossible to extract the bones from the matrix in which they were embedded. He therefore, most wisely, cut out the stratum in which the bones lay as solid blocks, which were forwarded to me in the condition in which they were excavated. On reaching the Museum we impregnated each block with a solution of gelatine and then proceeded to expose the bones by removing from them the overlying boulder clay piecemeal and leaving them still in situ on the underlying glacial sands. The removal of the boulder clay required extreme care and great patience, but the advantage of leaving the bones attached to the underlying parts of the blocks became very apparent when we came to reconstruct the position of parts of the skeleton.

Blawearie Cairn was first excavated by Canon William Greenwell in 1865. His findings indicated that the cairn was a cist cemetery of the Early Bronze Age. Recent excavation has demonstrated that the cairn was originally a kerb circle and that funerary rites were not necessarily its prime function.

The barrow whose excavation is described below was situated about 770 feet above Ordnance Datum a hundred yards south of the Hardy Monument on Black Down Hill, Portesham, on the edge of a large gravel pit. In the winning of gravel during the war the face of the pit had been worked round the barrow on both sides destroying the southern half of the ditch and part of the south side of the mound. As the mound was slowly falling into the gravel pit, it was decided by the Ministry of Works to excavate the barrow before further deterioration took place. The first-mentioned author undertook the supervision of this work for the Ministry in April and May, 1955, with a further fortnight in October of the same year, with the kind permission of the owner, Mrs H. Tuke.

Some objects defy archaeologists to understand their function. Two gold rod-like fragments from the Kerivoa hoard, Côtes-du-Nord, and one from Plouarzel, Finistère (Briard, 1965, fig. 21, 2), are the only gold objects on the Continent with broadened terminals similar to the ‘neck-ring’ from Arlon, Belgium. Three similar rings in copper exist in Britain. These six objects, their function, and their relationship to other prehistoric objects, form the nucleus of this article.

The two Kerivoa fragments (pl. XVI, B), with rod-like body and broadened ends, fit together to form a complete object like that from Arlon. They were a part of the Kerivoa hoard which also contained three gold lunulae with a fragment of sheet gold broken into four pieces. These were found near Bourbriac, Côte-du-Nord, France, in 1932, surrounded by a dark mass, which has been interpreted as a disintegrated wooden box. The fragments with broadened terminals and their association with lunulae are critical to this paper.

When the Saxons from the mainland of Europe sailed up the Thames around the middle of the 5th century A.D. to lay the foundation-stone for the Anglo-Saxon Empire, they brought with them a signum sacre which has been handed down to us as the decoration of an urn from the burial-ground at Lackford in Suffolk. This consists of the figure of a horse, against which at the rear is a swastika (fig, 1, 1). Already at that time this sign had clearly a long history—a similar combination, closely related in style, is known to us from the first half of the last millennium B.C.; at that time it represented the Northern idea of the movement or journey of the ‘divine’ sun (fig. 1, 2), which idea has been brought down to us in plastic form from more than five hundred years earlier in the sun-chariot from Trundholm on Zealand.

The period of the war has in Denmark, as in most other European countries, been one of difficulty and anxiety. Would it be possible to carry on the fieldwork, and, still more important, to preserve the valuable collections and carry them safe through this life- and death-battle of all the great world powers? The danger was especially obvious after the German occupation of Denmark in 1940. In the National Museum at Copenhagen we have one of the best prehistoric collections in Europe, and it was with great anxiety that we saw Copenhagen changed into an important German base. Air raids and invasion by the Allied forces were both expected, and, still worse, the enemy threatened to bomb the museum as vengeance for the sabotage done by the Danish Resistance Movement. A good proportion of the collections was dismantled, some of it evacuated to safe places, and some of it deposited in the cellars of the museum. Fortunately the National Museum—and also all the prehistoric museums in the small towns—came through the war without damage.

The museum authorities tried to save the prehistoric remains in the country—protected by law—from violation through the German fortification works. We got a promise from the German military authorities that nothing would be destroyed without very important military reasons; but a good many barrows from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age had to be removed at the large new flying bases, especially in Jutland. Although we got a chance to excavate most of the barrows before destruction, many others—more than 200—were destroyed or damaged by the various fortifications, mostly in western Jutland. It will, however, be possible to restore a good many of them.

During these four hard years of German occupation and in spite of hindrances of all kinds—preliminary permits to be obtained, censorship and severe limitations imposed on the liberty of the scientific press—research and the publication of works on our national antiquities have not meanwhile been interrupted. Excavations have been carried on with an activity, which the struggles for liberation during the summer of 1944, have not invariably retarded. The reviews and publications of the learned societies of the departments, although perceptibly reduced in bulk, continued to record discoveries and to print erudite articles. A new documentary review, Gallia: Excavations and Archaeological Monuments of Metropolitan France, was even published for the first time in 1943. Edited under the aegis of the National Centre for Scientific Research, its object is to publish, with the least delay possible, the reports of excavators upon their discoveries. Such results could not have been attained without the co-operation of all archaeologists, editors and printers, in fulfilling a single and imperative duty, namely, to assure the continuity of French archaeology in spite of the uncertainties and distress of the period. This amounted moreover, at the same time to a form of service and was one of the aspects of resistance to the invader. All were thus only following the example, set at the time of the first world war by Camille Jullian, the great historian of Gaul, who then placed his science and his eloquence at the service of his country. The book, dedicated to him by Albert Grenier, is no mere biography; it traces another page of the history and archaeology of contemporary France.