Third Report of the Sub-Committee of the South-Western Group of Museums and Art Galleries on the Petrological Identification of Stone Axes

Abstract

Fourteen years have elapsed since the appointment of the sub-committee in 1936 to consider the petrological identification of stone implements with special reference to the area covered by the South-Western Group of Museums and Art Galleries; and two reports have been published in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, VII (1941), 50 and XIII (1947), 47, outlining briefly the results of its work. Considerable progress has been made since the appearance of the Second Report and it has therefore been deemed advisable to issue a more comprehensive Third Report summarizing as far as possible all results and thus making available in compact form many of the facts accumulated.In the Second Report, we drew attention to the fact that in 1945 the value of the work to archaeology was appreciated sufficiently for the Council for British Archaeology to raise what was virtually a regional monopoly on to a national basis, and to appoint, as Honorary Secretary, Mr W. F. Grimes, M.A., F.S.A., Director of the London Museum, to coordinate the work of the existing museum federations. A generous grant towards the cost of the work was made in 1949 by the Lever hulme Trust, since it seemed unlikely that extension of studies would be possible from museum resources alone.