The conditions under which the beautiful carved ivory fragment illustrated on pl. I, fig. 1, was discovered may be given in the words of Mr. H. H. King, through whose friendly intervention it has been added to the collections in the British Museum. The discovery was made in 1920 on Mr. King's land by his gardener, in the spring following the filling in of the trenches which he describes, while fragments of tile and stone were being collected from the surface of the replaced soil to fill in a hollow place in a garden path.

In Sir William Wilde's Catalogue of Bronze Antiquities is described and illustrated under the heading of chariot furniture an iron-backed bronze disc, 3¾ in. in diameter, coated with white metal, projecting from which is a bronze stud in the form of a dog's head, 1½ in. long, with a human head engraved on its muzzle. The stud is threaded by a bronze chain made up of two rings and double loops (fig. 1, 1). Wilde considered this object was intended for the attachment of a trace. It was found when making a railway cutting near Navan Station adjoining the River Boyne in July 1848, associated with a quantity of human remains; the skull of a horse; a number of antiquities including a bronze bridle-bit, and harness-plate; iron rings plated with bronze; some small bronze buttons; and seven ornamented gilt-bronze plaques.

The site of an Early Iron Age village on All Cannings Cross Farm, about six miles east of Devizes, was discovered quite by chance. In this corn-growing country great open ploughed fields fringe the lower slopes of the high chalk downs. At All Cannings Cross the ploughed land stretches to the foot of Tan Hill and Clifford's Hill, on the Marlborough Downs, overlooking the vale of Pewsey. The site of the settlement has been under plough for many years, perhaps for centuries, so that any surface indications there may once have been, have long since disappeared.

Among a large number of comparatively unimportant Scottish documents purchased recently from a dealer at Hove was found one folio sheet of considerable interest on account of its connexion with the saving of the Regalia of Scotland in 1652. It is the original draft of the conditions of surrender of the Castle of Dunnottar by Captain George Ogilvy of Barras to the Parliamentary troops commanded by Colonel Thomas Morgan.

The discoveries at the Grange were made below the tennis-court in a garden that slopes down to the Hitchin road and the river Mimram; and when the terrace at the top of the slope was under construction some thirty years ago, some Roman relics came to light and are now in the Hertford museum. Immediately opposite, on the other bank of the river, are the foundations of a Roman villa in the garden of the Manor House.

In his account of the leaf-shaped bronze swords of the Hallstatt period, the late M. Déchelette wrote: ‘Doubtless one might ask whether this weapon might not have been brought to the British Isles by the first Celtic invaders, but that is purely conjectural (une conjecture fragile), for it is difficult among the British finds the same period to detect any really characteristic analogies’ (vol. ii, pt. 2, p. 724). The same paragraph points out that bronze swords of identically the same type have been found in regions as widely separated from each other as Scandinavia, Bohemia, and Ireland, to which one might add Finland and Southern France. The conclusion is irresistible that these swords were derived from a common centre of dispersal, and that they were not evolved independently in each region. Had the evolution taken place locally there might have been similarity, but not identity of type. I propose to bring forward evidence in support of the hypothesis that, towards the close of the Bronze Age, the British Isles were invaded by the first wave of Celtic-speaking peoples, bringing with them leaf-shaped bronze swords, many other entirely new types of bronze objects, and at least two types of pottery new to these islands and evolved somewhere on the Continent. I suggest that these invaders may have been Goidels, arriving about 800–700 B.C. Possibly the new types under review may not all be strictly contemporary; and there may have been more than one wave of invasion. But there can, I think, be no doubt that an invasion on a large scale took place at about this time.

When I presented my Report last year, work was about to begin upon some stones on the north-east of the outer circle of Stonehenge. These formed a group of four monoliths, numbered from west to east, 29, 30, 1, and 2. They carried lintels, survivors of the series which once capped the stones of the outer circle. Nos. 1 and 2 had moved out of position, leaning badly outwards, and had drawn with them the three lintels from their seatings to the danger of these and themselves. They would have fallen long ago had they not been supported by props which were beginning to decay, so it was necessary to attend to them at once.