In a recent number of ANTIQUITY (1) Prof. V. Gordon Childe discussed Mr Donald I McCown's study of the Iranian prehistoric sequence published last year by the Oriental Institute of Chicago (2), and in his article raised the question of the dating of the Hissar settlements, for which McCown argues a higher antiquity than that hitherto assigned. The dating of such a site must necessarily depend ultimately on correlations made with the centres of civilization to the southwest, but I hope to show that synchronisms and parallels may usefully be made from the opposite direction, and from that viewpoint in which the Middle East has to be studied as geographically the Middle West. Apart from the Harappa Culture of the Indus Valley and the Punjab, with its famous brick-built cities, its undeciphered script and its individual glyptic art, the prehistory of western India and the Iranian borderlands has been an uncomfortable enigma to the majority of archaeologists owing to the combined causes of insufficient excavation, inadequate publication, and the inaccessibility of the actual finds to the western world, concentrated as they are in local site-museums or in the Central Asian Museum in New Delhi (3). The accident of war has enabled me to study most of this material at first hand, and in the notes which follow certain points bearing on McCown's thesis and Childe's commentary are given, with the arguments, especially those concerned with stylistic considerations, necessarily in an abbreviated form. Full publication of the evidence for the Indian sequence, and a detailed examination of the relations between prehistoric India and the lands to the west must await the end of the war.