Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 45

SX 553635 etc. Taking advantage of threats by extraction industries to an area of Dartmoor, a flexible research design was drawn up to investigate the environmental history and the general pattern of human settlement on Shaugh Moor as well as some more specific questions. In addition, techniques appropriate to study of upland environments were developed. A stone row and a number of hut circles and enclosures were surveyed, and a group of cairns - six in all - excavated. These proved typical of Dartmoor, and seven 14C determinations, statistically indistinguishable, gave an EBA horizon congruent with the segmented (? locally made) faience beads also found.

SO 793013. Excavations to prepare the tomb for display added some new details to Clifford's 1937 results. Sherds of an Ebbsfleet and a Mortlake bowl, from forecourt blocking and chamber respectively, were found. Discrepancies between successive plans drawn in 1862, 1883 and 1937/74 still cannot be resolved, and the denuded state of this tomb (as of most Cotswold-Severn tombs) makes assignment to any particular type of transept form unwise without total excavation. The internal cairn construction also remains ambiguous; some remodelling during construction seems likely (again with implications for other tombs). Extra-revetment material appeared to be the true edge of the cairn, functional rather than ritual. The environmental report covers mollusca, charcoals, animal and human bones, and a few flints.

Two shields of Nipperweise type found recently at Thorpe (Surrey) and Long Wittenham are described and compared with five of their continental counterparts. The component traits of the class, analysed in detail, suggest two or three phases and/or sources; indeed the two British examples, though falling within a N Sea-Rhineland-Baltic style zone, may be of insular manufacture and possibly ancestral to other British shields. Comments are made on techniques of manufacture, use, deposition (mostly riverine), dating (?13th century BC) together with discussion of N European shields as a whole (organic examples ancestral to all?).

The Snettisham torcs were probably, the Ipswich ones possibly, made locally, but the type went out of manufacture in early 1st century AD, and indeed the three hoards with coins (Snettisham, Weybourne, and Netherurd) should have been deposited no later than Caesar's Gallic Wars. Cessation is ascribed to the Roman world's demand for gold, and Belgic appetite for Roman luxuries, diverting British gold supplies from Icenian smiths and mints. The practice of gilding in the Late Iron Age may stem from these difficulties in obtaining gold.

Catalogues and discusses twenty-nine early Danish Neo burial structures which include timber in their construction and have analogues in Britain, N Germany, and Poland. Danish mortuary practice was elaborate from the start of the Neolithic; the change to megalithic graves was only architectural, not functional, and not necessarily a foreign introduction. The existence of a common N European tradition of 'unchambered' long barrows can no longer be doubted: these monuments represent a response to the ritual and sociopolitical needs of a newly emergent Neo economy.

H 185625 approx. In the Ulster Museum is a fragment of a D-section self bow made of yew, found in 19th century at 20ft below bog surface; a Neolithic date is argued.