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Nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed since The Archaeology of the Cambridge Region was published by the Cambridge University Press, and a proposal by the Committee of the Journal that I should write down my afterthoughts on that book and such ‘considerations as I might wish to put to students at the present day’ was a compliment an author could not but appreciate, and an opportunity he could not refuse.

Sir Cyril Fox (1882–1967) was an archaeologist and later Director of the National Museum of Wales and President of the Museums Association. Having entered Magdalene College, Cambridge as a mature student, his first year dissertation was judged to be more suitable as a PhD thesis, which resulted in him progressing straight to his PhD. His doctoral thesis, reissued here, transformed archaeological thought when it was first published in 1923. In it Fox pioneered the geographical approach to analysing ancient settlement patterns, linking the expansion of human settlement in the Cambridge area from the Neolithic era to the Anglo-Saxon period with favourable environmental conditions. His thesis emphasised the importance of treating archaeological finds as clues to past human settlement instead of being the main focus for archaeological analysis. This approach became the methodological framework for later environmental and landscape archaeology.

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A unique assemblage of twenty-one objects belonging to the Bronze—Iron transition was discovered over a quarter of a century ago, in a peaty mountain tarn at Llyn Fawr, Glamorgan, 1,200 ft. above Ordnance datum; pl. LXXI shows its position. The hoard came to light when the lake was drained in the course of its transformation into a reservoir: it was presented to the National Museum of Wales by the Rhondda Urban District Council and was published by our Secretary, Dr. R. E. M. Wheeler, in 1921. Figs. 1 and 2 show the range of the hoard, as then recognized.