Before the Romans
British Prehistory. By Stuart Piggott,. (Oxford University Press. ss.) SINCE it took over the Home University Library, the Oxford University Press has been replacing old titles as well as adding new volumes. No title was so much in need of replacement as Munro's Prehistoric Britain, which, though re-issued in 1928, at a time when men like Childe, Fox, Crawford, Fleure, Peake and Kendrick were revolutionising British prehistory, still smacked strongly of the days of 1913. when it was-first-issued, and prehistory was slowly assimilating the shocks adniinistered by Pitt-Rivers and Abercromby. - The O.U.P.has been fortnnate in securing Professor Piggott to write this volume to replace Munro, and he has brought to the task his great knowledge of prehistoric archaeology as well as that broad historical imagination and that lucidity of exposition
which characterise all his writings. - - -
Piggott well realises that, while archaeology must be the basis of all prehistorical scholarship, Ike ":aim -of the prehistoric archaeologist is to write history—that specialised, incomplete, anonymous history that lies at the beginning of the human past. It is, I think, no accident that the word archaeology does not appear in the title. Archaeological literature is notoriously difficult, and to vulgarise archaeology successfully is hard. Piggott has succeeded to a greater degree than had hitherto seemed to me possible, not only in making the results of archaeology readable to an unspecialised public, but in transmuting the archaeological facts about pre-Roman Britain into history. This is an outstanding achievement of synthesis and scholarship, and should be read by every serious student of early Britain.
But this book should not be dismissed by the professional archaeologist as another, if brilliant, work of popularisation. Small though it is, it is packed with facts and comment, and Professor Piggott has something new and interesting to say on almost every aspect of his subject—the origin of the Abernethy folk, for example, the purpose of causewayed camps, the date of the Roos Carr model longboat, or the origin of the Clyde-Carlingford tombs and the Orkney stalled cairns. His chapter on the Neolithic in Britain is a most masterly summary, and gives us a foretaste of the detailed exposition to be published in his forthcoming Neolithic Cultures of the British isles. .
There will be, without any doubt, many editions of this book before it. too, will have to be rewritten in the light of new dis- coveries. 1 think that that rewriting will see the abandonment of the framework of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages used by Piggott as by Munro. These technological divisions mask the significant groupings of historical facts. They were good enough for archaeo- logical treatment ; they cannot• be the real framework for writing prehistory. Already Professor Piggott's analysis here shows how more closely linked to the Iron Age than. to the Middle Bronze Age is the Late Bronze Age.
Let us hope that, encouraged by the success sthich this book will have, the Oxford University Press will proceed to the revision of the other prehistoric titles in this series. Myres's Dawn of History and Burkitt's Our Forerunners were classics in their time, but are now thirty years old. Perhaps, in the end, the Press may even persuade its parent university that at Oxford, no less than in that University in the Home which this series still so excellently serves, there is, by the middle of the twentieth century, a place for pre-
history in any scheme of liberal education. Guis E. DANIEL
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