SALON - the Society of Antiquaries of London Online Newsletter

Fellows’ visit to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Saturday 11 September 2010

This visit to the Bodleian Library, with which the Society has long-standing connections, offers the opportunity to see one of the world’s greatest research libraries at work, to hear talks from Fellows on the Library’s past and future, to see a display of selected material of antiquarian interest and to visit the Bodleian’s summer exhibition, ‘John Aubrey and the Development of Experimental Science’.

Places are limited so please book as soon as possible; tickets (including buffet luncheon and wine) cost £10 and can be reserved by sending an email to the Society’s Executive Assistant.

Clive Gamble joins the British Museum Board

Fellow and former Council Member and Vice-President, Professor Clive Gamble, has been appointed to serve as a member of the British Museum board of trustees for four years from 2 August 2010. Announcing the appointment, Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, described Clive as ‘the UK’s foremost archaeologist investigating our early ancestors … co-director of the British Academy’s Centenary Project, “From Lucy to Language: the archaeology of the social brain”, which seeks answers to the question of how and when human minds developed.’

The Board of Trustees of the British Museum has statutory duties — under the British Museum Act 1963 and the Museums and Galleries Act 1992 — for the general management and control of the museum and for the appointment of the Director. The Society of Antiquaries is entitled to a place on the board, though it is up to the Public Appointments Board to select the trustee. The full text of the announcement can be read on the website of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

The future of ‘arm’s length bodies’

John Penrose, the Minister for Tourism and Heritage, has also announced that our Fellow Tom Hassall’s term of office as Chair of the Advisory Committee on Historic Wreck Sites (ACHWS) has been extended, ‘in order to provide continuity during a period of major transition’. The ACHWS, set up under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 to advise Ministers on the designation of wreck sites and the issuing of excavation licences, was one of the so-called ‘arm’s length bodies’ that the Government plans to abolish as part of its ‘drive to cut costs and increase transparency, accountability and efficiency’. The Advisory Committee on National Historic Ships is also to be ‘declassified’ and its functions transferred to another body.

In a statement issued on 26 July 2010, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport also said that his department would:

• abolish the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council;
• look closely at its responsibility for Heritage and the Built Environment and consider the role and remit of English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund;
• consider the role of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and explore opportunities to consolidate its functions;
• discuss with the Church of England the merits of declassifying the Churches Conservation Trust so it has greater operational freedom.

The necessary legislative changes will be made through a Public Bodies Bill, to be introduced in the autumn of 2010.

Select Committee Inquiry into the Funding of the Arts and Heritage

While the DCMS considers and discusses and negotiates with the Treasury behind closed doors, the parliamentary select committee that acts as a watch dog to monitor the Department’s work has announced an open inquiry into the funding of the arts and heritage. The Committee is inviting written submissions and requesting views on the following issues:

• What impact recent, and future, spending cuts from central and local Government will have on the arts and heritage at a national and local level
• What arts organisations can do to work more closely together in order to reduce duplication of effort and to make economies of scale
• What level of public subsidy for the arts and heritage is necessary and sustainable
• Whether the current system, and structure, of funding distribution is the right one
• What impact recent changes to the distribution of National Lottery funds will have on arts and heritage organisations
• Whether the policy guidelines for National Lottery funding need to be reviewed
• The impact of recent changes to DCMS arm’s-length bodies — in particular, the abolition of the UK Film Council and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council
• Whether businesses and philanthropists can play a long-term role in funding arts at a national and local level
• Whether there need to be more Government incentives to encourage private donations.

The deadline for submissions to be received is 2 September 2010, and guidance on submitting written evidence can be found on the UK Parliament website.

More HLF money for ‘major transformational projects’

If the DCMS is reducing its funding of heritage bodies, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) is going the other way. Carole Souter, Chief Executive of the HLF, announced two important changes on 3 August 2010: the first to increase the pot of money available for ‘major transformational projects’ (HLF grants of £5m or more) from £20m pa to £30m pa from 2011; the second to remove, with immediate effect, the time limit within which HLF projects have to complete their first-round planning stage and submit their second-round bid. In future, applicants can work to timetables that suit their project, which means that projects can work more effectively with the grant schedules of other funders.

Carole Souter said: ‘This is a first-step response to the challenging economic climate. We are setting aside more money when applicants might be finding it hard to raise funds elsewhere, and our applicants will have more flexibility in how they manage their projects during the tough times ahead. We know heritage can play an important role in economic recovery and we are looking at other ways we can help our customers continue to deliver excellent projects. We are also urging any new applicants to be realistic about the amount of grant they will need, given the current challenges.’

The Government is also proposing that the HLF will receive a larger share of Lottery proceeds from next year; this could mean a further £19m for heritage projects in 2011—12 and then £50m pa from 2012 onwards.

HLF invests £10.5m in four new projects

As a sign of what that extra money is capable of achieving, the HLF also announced the award of four major project grants on 27 July 2010. The four confirmed HLF grants are:

• £4.8m to restore Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott’s home;
• £2.9m to turn Newbridge Memorial Hall, Caerphilly, a Grade II* listed building created as a memorial to those who gave their lives during World War I, containing the largest ballroom in south Wales and a spectacular art deco auditorium, into a heritage centre covering the history and people of the Welsh Valleys;
• £1.7m to restore The Walronds, a rare intact example of an early town house from the early 1600s built in the centre of the Devonshire market town of Cullompton;
• £1.14m to restore the upper gardens and path network at Wrest Park, Silsoe, Bedfordshire, described as being ‘the Sleeping Beauty of England’s landscape gardens, on a par with the great landscapes of Stowe and Stourhead’.

World Heritage decisions

At its 2010 meeting in Brasilia, capital of Brazil, UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee inscribed fifteen new cultural heritage sites on the Word Heritage list, five natural heritage sites and one ‘mixed’. Reports from the meeting said that a concerted effort was made this year to redress ‘a perceived bias towards Europe’s well-documented cultural hotspots and recognize unique areas in developing countries hitherto overlooked’. As a result, only two new European heritage sites were inscribed — Amsterdam’s Grachtengordel (Canal Circle) and the city of Albi, in France.

Among the other sites inscribed were an imperial palace in Vietnam, temples in China, an Australian penal colony, a historic bazaar in Iran, fourteenth-century villages in South Korea, an eighteenth-century astronomical observatory in India and the Bikini Atoll Nuclear Test Site in the Marshall Islands. The full list of sites can be found on the UNESCO website.

Four sites were added to the World Heritage List of Sites in Danger, including Florida’s Everglades, but the Galapagos Islands were removed from the list of thirty-one sites on the danger list, despite UNESCO’s own consulting body on heritage matters stating that the archipelago was still under threat.

The World Heritage Committee also voted unanimously to keep Istanbul on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List, despite evidence that the city’s historical sites have not been appropriately conserved to international criteria. Necmi Karul, Chair of the Istanbul Archaeologists Association, greeted the news with relief, saying that ‘had UNESCO decided otherwise, it would have opened the way to further depredation of our historical sites’.

Karul also called on UNESCO to press the Turkish authorities more strongly to fulfil the country’s obligations under international agreements it has signed, particularly the European Convention for the Protection of Archaeological Heritage, signed in Malta in 1992. As part of its decision to keep Istanbul on the list, the World Heritage Committee has asked Turkey to report back to it on plans to relieve the city’s traffic burden, to protect Istanbul’s traditional wooden houses, to restore the city walls and to conduct independent environmental impact studies on the effects on the city’s historic environment of major transport projects such as the Golden Horn (Haliç) metro line and the building of road tunnels under the Bosphorus Strait.

Eighteen sites that had been nominated for World Heritage Site status were not inscribed, including the UK’s nomination of ‘Darwin’s Landscape Laboratory’. Supporters of the bid argued that Down House and its surrounding woods and fields have outstanding universal value as the laboratory in which Darwin made observations and conducted the experiments that led him to develop his theory of evolution by natural selection — a theory that has had a ‘profound influence on the life sciences, medicine, agriculture, philosophy, the creative arts and general views of humankind’s relation to other living creatures in the natural world’.

The World Heritage Committee decided that, although Darwin’s Landscape Laboratory was very strong in terms of recognising scientific achievement, further study and analysis was needed before the site could be considered for World Heritage designation. The Committee voted to defer the nomination back to the UK authorities for these issues to be addressed.

Peter Fowler initiates World Heritage debate

The Down House decision prompted our Fellow Peter Fowler to write to the Guardian on 5 August, arguing that the UK should consider a tactful withdrawal from the nomination process for a while, and focus instead in managing better the sites that have already been inscribed.

Peter wrote as follows: ‘You rightly draw attention to the increasingly incredible number of world heritage sites, their biased global distribution and the inadequate resources for their maintenance (Editorial, 2 August). Yet the die was cast in the last two decades of the twentieth century when rich countries, like the UK, stacked up their sites on the world heritage list while others’ thoughts were elsewhere. For a decade now, however, the world heritage committee has positively encouraged nominations from countries in Meso- and South America, Asia, Africa and the Arab world. Its policy is visible in practice with the inscriptions announced this week: of 21 new world heritage sites, only two are in Europe.

‘Equally revealing are the 18 nominations which were not inscribed. One of these, Darwin’s Landscape Laboratory (Bromley, Kent), nominated by the UK, underlines the force in your argument about “lowering our sites”. The UK, contrary to the impression given in some quarters, has no obligation to nominate a site each year: the “one per year” rule was introduced by the committee to stop “greedy” countries like Italy, France and us swamping its annual agenda. We could now stand back a while and let much of the rest of the world, where the demand for world heritage sites and status is often intense, move some of its wonderful sites on to the list. Given Darwin’s failure in this of all years, it might well be tactful anyway to withdraw gracefully for the time being.

‘In any case world heritage is actually about sound management of sites, and our means currently fail our responsibilities in some respects with some of our existing gems. Think Stonehenge, for example.’

Astronomy and World Heritage thematic study points the way forward

The Down House nomination and deferral raises questions about the best ways to acknowledge and commemorate technical and scientific heritage. One possible route was set out at the Brasília session when members of the World Heritage Committee endorsed a report reviewing the history of astronomy and identifying key sites of universal significance for astronomical heritage.

Heritage Sites of Astronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the context of the World Heritage Convention was co-written by our Fellow Clive Ruggles, who said ‘astronomy represents a rich and significant part of humanity’s shared cultural and natural heritage. Recognising this [report] formally means that we can now identify and clarify astronomical value in the context of the World Heritage Convention’.

Report co-ordinator Anna Sidorenko-Dulom said that the new thematic study had important practical implications for the effective implementation of the World Heritage Convention and for helping State Parties create credible nomination dossiers. The document can be downloaded from the International Year of Astronomy website.

Our sites need protection too, say Aboriginal leaders

The inscription of eleven Australian Convict Sites in the 2010 list, including Old Government House, Hyde Park Barracks and Port Arthur in Tasmania, has been greeted with anger by members of the Aboriginal community, who have asked why ‘200 years of white history’ has resulted in so many nominations, while ‘the evidence of 50,000 years of human existence in Australia is in danger of extinction’. ‘That suggests a strong ethnocentric bias towards everything Anglo-Saxon and a prejudice or ignorance about the Aboriginal past and a lack of understanding of its value’, said Michael Mansell, director of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre.

Michael Mansell pointed to Australia’s endangered rock art heritage as worthy of immediate protection and said that the lack of Aboriginal sites on the list could be blamed on the fact that there were no indigenous people on the board that decides on the country’s UNESCO nominations.

The penal sites were selected ‘from thousands established by the British Empire on Australian soil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ as ‘the best surviving examples of large-scale convict transportation and the colonial expansion of European powers through the presence and labour of convicts’.

Australia’s earliest contact rock art discovered

Australian academics and members of the Aboriginal community working together to record and protect rock art in the Wellington Range, Arnhem Land, have stumbled across the oldest ‘contact rock art’ yet discovered in Australia. This depicts a south-east Asian sailing vessel known as a prau, and a large beeswax snake overlying the ship has been radiocarbon dated by Stewart Fallon at the Australian National University (ANU) to between AD 1624 and 1674, providing a minimum age for the sailing vessel painting.

The discovery was made by our Fellow Paul Taçon (Griffith University), Ronald Lamilami (Senior Traditional Owner) and Sally May (ANU) as part of their fieldwork for the ARC-funded ‘Picturing Change: 21st-century perspectives on recent Australian rock art’ project. So far, some 1,200 individual paintings and beeswax figures have been found in the area under study.

Historians and archaeologists have long speculated that south-east Asian ships must have visited the northern parts of Australia long before European settlement, but this is the first dated evidence. ‘This part of Arnhem Land is well known for its south-east Asian heritage and extensive pioneering archaeological research undertaken by Campbell Macknight, although rock art was not a focus of his early archaeological research’, said Dr May.

The Djulirri site where the ship depiction was found ‘has more diverse contact period rock art than any other site in Australia’, said Professor Taçon. ‘Besides paintings of south-east Asian ships, there are European tall ships and many other forms of watercraft, all of which can be placed in chronological sequence.’ The research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Australian Archaeology.

Humans in the Philippines 67,000 years ago

Possibly the earliest human fossil in the Asia-Pacific region has been found in Callao Cave in Cagayan province, Luzon, in the Philippines, dating from 67,000 years ago. The remains of the so-called Tabon Man of Palawan, the archipelago’s earliest human remains until this discovery, date from 50,000 years ago. Uranium-series dating was used to establish the age of the remains and the results have been published in the journal Human Evolution. The discovery was made by a team of archaeologists led by Armand Mijares, of the University of the Philippines-Diliman, who said that Callao Man, or his ancestors, probably reached Luzon from what is now Indonesia by raft. The remains of butchered animals were found in the same layer of sediment, but no stone tools. ‘We can only speculate that they were using different tools. From our initial analysis of the cut marks on the animal bones, they could have used organic tools such as bamboo which is ubiquitous in the region’, Mijares said.

HMS Investigator found in the Arctic

Archaeologists working for Parks Canada have found HMS Investigator, one of several American and British ships sent out to search for the HMS Erebus and the Terror, vessels commanded by Franklin in his ill-fated search for the Northwest Passage in 1845. Captained by Robert McClure, Investigator sailed in 1850 and was abandoned in 1853, but not before McClure had probed further east than any other European expedition, sailing into the strait that now bears his name and realising that he was in the final leg of the Northwest Passage, the sea route across North America.

The ship was found in shallow water in Mercy Bay, along the northern coast of Banks Island in Canada’s western Arctic. Marc-Andre Bernier, Parks Canada’s Head of Underwater Archaeology, said ‘the three-masted copper-bottomed ship is standing upright in very good condition in about 11 meters (36 feet) of water’.

Canada’s Environment Minister, Jim Prentice, said the British government had been notified that one of their naval ships had been discovered, as well as the graves of three sailors. He also said that the ship was fundamental to Canadian claims to sovereignty in the North Arctic. ‘This is the ship that sailed the last leg of the Northwest Passage; it’s a bit like finding Columbus’s ship.’

The ship and its sixty-nine-member crew spent two years — 1851 to 1853 — trapped in ice before being rescued and eventually returning to England aboard HMS Northern Star. Captain McClure was awarded £10,000 on his return as a reward for discovering the Northwest Passage.

English Heritage guidance on The Setting of Heritage Assets

English Heritage (EH) is seeking feedback on its newly published guidance document on The Setting of Heritage Assets. ‘Setting’, in this context, means the surroundings in which people experience a heritage asset; elements of the setting may be neutral, or they might make a positive or negative contribution to the significance of the asset and thus affect one’s ability to appreciate that significance.

The guidance follows on from the publication of Planning Policy Statement 5: Planning for the Historic Environment and its associated Practice Guide in March 2010. In this consultation EH is seeking feedback on its interpretation of PPS5 with regard to (a) the definition of setting; (b) the contribution that setting makes to the significance of heritage assets; and (c) approaches to assessing the implications of change within any such setting. The closing date for responses is Friday 26 November 2010.

The historic environment: what do we need to know?

English Heritage is also consulting on its research strategy, inviting comment on its plans for ‘Prehistoric Archaeology’, ‘The Historic Industrial Environment’ and ‘The Urban Historic Environment’, with further thematic strategy documents to come shortly on ‘Roman Archaeology’, ‘Wetlands and Freshwater Archaeology’, ‘Places of Worship’, ‘Marine and Maritime Archaeology’ and ‘The Archaeology of the Contemporary Past’. Comments are invited by 30 September 2010.

The Stone Age seafarers of the Mediterranean

Hesperia 79 (2010), the journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, has published evidence that early humans (such as Homo heidelbergensis) navigated from Africa to Crete at least 130,000 years ago.

The evidence, in the form of Lower Palaeolithic stone tools, was found by members of a team of archaeologists led by Professor Thomas Strasser, of the Department of Art and Art History at Providence College, USA, and Dr Eleni Panagopoulou, of the Greek Ministry of Culture, at nine sites on the island. The survey team surveyed caves and rock shelters near the mouths of freshwater streams along a stretch of the south-western coast of Crete facing Libya. Up to 300 pieces were found at each site, and the geological contexts at five of the sites have enabled the finds to be dated to at least 130,000 years ago, though some of the hand axes, cleavers and scrapers could be much older, as they closely resemble hand axes fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago by early hominins.

By this period, Crete had already been an island for several million years. The journey from Africa would have involved an open-sea crossing of some 200 miles. The Cretan finds add to a growing body of evidence for early sea journeys: tools that look Palaeolithic have been made on the island of Gavdos, off the south coast of Crete, and the much earlier date of 1.3 million years ago has been proposed for occupation at Atapuerca, near Burgos, in northern Spain, perhaps the result of a relatively short sea journey across the Straits of Gibraltar.

Our Fellow Curtis Runnels, of the Boston University Archaeology Department and the Palaeolithic expert on the Plakias survey team, says these finds ‘are a first step on the path of research leading to a better understanding of the movements of early prehistoric peoples among the Mediterranean islands and beyond’.

The most north-westerly Roman villa in Wales

Trial excavations in July 2010 have shown that a building first identified by aerial photographs taken by our Fellow Toby Driver for the Welsh Royal Commission in 2006 is, as suspected, a Roman villa of ‘winged corridor’ plan and a decorative roof of pentagonal slates of a type more common in the villas of south-west England and the Isle of Wight. This villa, at Abermagwr, near Aberystwyth, is located in a part of Wales previously considered to be well outside the bounds of the Welsh villa-belt.

‘Our trial excavations this year have confirmed the remains of an imposing Romano-British building in the heart of mid-Wales, where no Roman villas were previously known’, Toby Driver said. ‘The nearby Roman fort at Trawscoed was abandoned by AD 130, yet here we have a later Roman building where the owners were importing pottery, using coinage, and insisting on decorative slate roofing akin to the largest Roman villas in England. The discovery raises significant new questions about the regional economy and society in late Roman Wales, and raises the possibility of future villa discoveries in the surrounding countryside.’

Caerleon dig

Fellows Peter Guest and Andrew Gardener will be returning to the site of the Roman legionary fortress at Caerleon with a team of archaeology students from Cardiff University and UCL, putting spade to turf with the intention of excavating the remains of a large courtyard building (probably a legionary warehouse or store) from today (9 August) and for the next six weeks. Last year’s excavation revealed the remains of several enigmatic structures overlying the demolished remains of the legionary warehouse (either very late Roman or, just possibly, post-Roman in date), as well as farm buildings from Caerleon’s medieval past.

As well as following the excavators’ fortunes on the project website website, you can visit the excavation on any day except Monday. An open day will be held over the Bank Holiday weekend (28 to 30 August), with tours, displays of the latest finds and activities.

Caerleon is the focus of several research projects at the moment (see the Caerleon Research Committee’s website). Peter confidently predicts that the summer will bring remarkable discoveries that will change the way we think about the history of the fortress.

Cattle skulls, painted plaster, henges and carved stones

This has been an outstanding summer for Neolithic archaeology in the UK, with important discoveries having been made in the last few weeks that will change our perceptions once again of the British Neolithic. The last issue of Salon reported the discovery of a second figurine at the Links of Noltland site on the island of Westray, but what is emerging now, as the excavation uncovers more middens and house walls, is the extent of the cattle skull inclusions: previous reports mentioned a small group of inverted cattle skulls in the foundation trench of one of the dwellings, but animal bone specialist Sheena Fraser reports in her blog that no less than thirty cattle skulls have now been recovered from the east and west wall cores of Structure 9, packed into the base of the wall core, sometimes with their horns intertwined. With figurines in the middens and cattle skulls in the foundations, the Links of Noltland site becomes more and more like a Scottish version of Çatalhöyük by the day! EASE Archaeology Site Directors Graeme Wilson and Hazel Moore also report report (the discovery of large numbers of bone tools (points, pins and a ‘neat spatulate tool’), probably used for leatherworking, and of bead-making debris, as well as large sherds of decorated grooved ware pottery, all in an excellent state of preservation.

Equally rich in well-preserved material is a newly discovered Neolithic house at Marden Henge, in Wiltshire, where our Fellow Jim Leary has just completed a six-week excavation. The house sits on top of the bank of a mini-henge, and the remarkable state of preservation of the house walls and associated middens is down to the fact that the site seems never to have been ploughed: the chalk walls of the house, with internal plasterwork, survive to a height of 15cm and lie no more than 15cm below the turf. The excavation ended before the floor and middens could be fully excavated, and Jim hopes to be able to return next year, but enough has been found to suggest strong similarities between Marden Henge and Durrington Walls, and Jim is convinced that the Pewsey Vale landscape, and Marden Henge, should now be considered as of at least equal importance with the Neolithic landscapes of Avebury and Stonehenge.

Stunning as it is to see the house at Marden Henge, one of the first buildings to be built by the first farmers to arrive in this landscape, it must compete with Orkney for the prize of best-decorated Neolithic building. Here the team, led by Nick Card, from the Orkney Research Centre for Archaeology, have found evidence of the first Neolithic painted building in the UK. Two stone slabs bearing red, yellow and orange pigment have been found as part of the structure known prosaically as ‘Structure 10’, otherwise known as ‘Orkney’s Neolithic “cathedral”’, a huge and beautiful stone building with five-metre-thick walls, a cruciform central chamber and a paved exterior passage or walkway. Nick Card said that the paint will be subjected to laboratory analysis to determine its composition, but that it was probably based on hematite or limonite, two iron ores found in the region, finely ground and mixed with animal fat, milk or eggs to create pigments.

Nick also said that ‘paint-pots’ containing pigment residues had previously been found at the Neolithic settlement sites of Skara Brae, Rinyo (Rousay) and Crossiecrown (St Ola), but that these pigments were generally thought to be for personal decoration. Only at Maeshowe have traces of pigment been hinted at on the walls by the work carried out there by our Fellow Richard Bradley.

Pictures of the painted stonework being excavated can be found on the Ness of Brogdar website for 26 July 2010 and for 2 August 2010.

Cambridge Archaeology and Anthropology

The many graduates of the Cambridge ‘Arch and Anth’ faculty among the Fellowship will be interested to know that planning is underway to create a new faculty (name not yet finalised, but possibly to be called the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences) by merging the three current Faculties of Archaeology and Anthropology, Social and Political Sciences and POLIS (Politics and International Relations).

Within the new faculty, the Human Science division would include the Department of Bioanthropology and its Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, the Department of Archaeology, the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Haddon Library. The Social Science division would include the Departments of Social Anthropology, Sociology, Social and Developmental Psychology and the Centre for Family Research. Each unit will remain as a autonomous teaching and research unit and will negotiate separately in the annual planning reviews which look at undergraduate and postgraduate numbers and research grants.

Our Fellow Graeme Barker, Disney Professor of Archaeology and Head of Department, comments that ‘While we are all sad about the likely passing of the name of the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, the independence of the units within it remains, their various teaching and research links should not be affected, and we are involved in new degree proposals linked to the new structures that should involve us to strengthen our archaeology and anthropology teaching in exciting ways.’

Merger to create ‘Britain’s largest heritage service’

Wessex Archaeology and Cotswold Archaeology have announced that they are in talks about merging. The two organisations, both of which are charities, will undertake a process of due diligence over the coming months and anticipate announcing the result in the autumn. If merged, the two companies will offer clients what our Fellow Sue Davies, Wessex Archaeology CEO, describes as ‘the most complete and widest range of heritage services in Britain’. Our Fellow Neil Holbrook, Cotswold Archaeology’s CEO, says: ‘the merger will create an organisation with 300 staff based in five offices across the UK. We will be able to meet the increasing demand for a nationwide service that is both comprehensive and competitive.’

Feedback

Fellow Robert Gibbs commends Salon’s interest in post-war heritage, as evidenced by the report on the listing of Milton Keynes shopping centre, and reminds us of the plight of Preston Bus Station, which is facing demolition as part of the City Council’s Tithebarn redevelopment project. Completed in 1969 to the design of Keith Ingham, this is a building that is not just esteemed by architectural historians: a survey conducted by the Lancashire Evening Post in May 2010 found that Preston people loved the building, which has become an informal social centre for the town. The Twentieth Century Society is leading the campaign to save the building, and though its application to have the bus station listed was rejected by the Secretary of State, a public inquiry was initiated and held in May 2010, the outcome of which is expected in September or October.

Robert comments that ‘given the impending destruction of the “iconic” Owen Luder car park in Gateshead [demolition of which started on 26 July 2010] the whole legacy of the 1960s appears to be in jeopardy, its unpopularity exacerbated by poor maintenance, bad press and the ill-informed popular preference for shallow sentimentality and meretricious claddings in the replacements being thrown up at present, and by speculators eager to profit from the dismantling of the welfare state that major monuments like the Preston Bus Station represent.’

Fellow Roger Ling quite rightly points out that Salon’s translation of the name of the Istituto per la Storia e l’Archeologia della Magna Grecia as ‘The Institute for the History and Archaeology of Ancient Greece’ was wrong: Magna Grecia (‘Greater Greece’) being the name of the area around the Tarentine Gulf of southern Italy which was colonised by Greek settlers from the eighth century BC. That helps to explain why the Institute is based in Taranto, the ancient Roman city of Tarentum but formerly the Greek colony of Taras.

And Fellow J D Hill, now the British Museum’s Research Manager, is keen to give credit where it is due for the Happisburgh project (Salon 237), which is jointly run by Simon Parfitt (UCL), Simon Lewis (Queen Mary College) and our Fellow Nick Ashton (British Museum), being a joint project between those three institutions. The fieldwork has been fully funded by the BM since its start in 2004, while specialist analysis has been funded through the Leverhulme-funded Ancient Human Occupation of Britain project, of which the Happisburgh project forms a part.

News of Fellows

Congratulations to our Fellow Mike Smith, of the Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia, who has been awarded the 2010 Verco Medal by the Royal Society of South Australia. The medal is the highest honour that the Society can bestow on one of its Fellows and is made for outstanding contributions to his or her field(s) of research. For more than thirty years Mike has carried out fieldwork in the Australian desert, attempting to piece together the region’s human and environmental histories. Mike says ‘previous Verco medallists include C T Madigan, N B Tindale, H H Finlayson, and C P Mountford — so I find myself in the shadow of some of the totemic heroes of desert research’.

Fellow Brian Philp has just celebrated forty years of archaeology in Dover, where he arrived in the summer of 1970 assuming that he was making only a brief visit to the town. Now Director of the Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit, Brian was part of a team drafted in from the Roman fort at Reculver to undertake a rapid rescue excavation prior to the York Street bypass being built. The dig resulted in the discovery of the town’s Roman fort and the Roman Painted House, now one of Dover’s busiest visitor attractions. The local paper reported that many of the 800 volunteers who had worked at Dover over the last forty years would be attending a reunion to mark the anniversary.

The launch of the Society’s Westminster Abbey Chapter House monograph in May was made more colourful by the scarlet cassocks worn by the volume’s editors, our Fellows Richard Mortimer and Warwick Rodwell, both Lay Canons at the abbey. Now our Fellow Kate (Coral) Taylor is to join the Lay Canon ranks, this time at Wakefield Cathedral, where she will be installed at 6.30pm on 10 October. The honour’, says Kate, is ‘given by the Bishop of Wakefield, and reflects my work in local history and, perhaps more particularly, my years of service to the Friends of Wakefield Chantry Chapel, the historic building on Wakefield Bridge. I am currently researching a history of the Diocese of Wakefield and, as part of that, have done (very minor) research on the impact upon Wakefield Parish Church of becoming a Cathedral. In announcing the installation the Bishop referred to the many talks I give and to my years of work for the Open University.’ Kate adds that her cassock will be, appropriately for a conservationist, a shade of green.

Lives Remembered

Tributes were paid to our late Fellow Corinne Bennett in the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph last week (both obituaries can be read in full on the Society’s website. Both pointed out that Corinne was the first woman to be appointed a cathedral architect in Britain; recruited by Winchester Cathedral in 1974, she oversaw a fifteen-year programme of stone and roof repair, installed new lighting both inside and outside the cathedral and restored a number of the houses in the Close. She was also responsible for the restoration of Brighton Pavilion, where she was consultant architect for twelve years from 1980, and in 1989 she was the leading consultant for the repairs to the Albert Memorial.

With her husband Keith Bennett, also a conservation architect, she was involved in the care of a multitude of properties in the 1980s, among them Wilton House, Ealing Abbey, Charleston Farmhouse, the ruins of Cowdray House, Mompesson House in Salisbury Cathedral Close, Mottistone Manor and Lacock and Mottisfont Abbeys. In 1991 she joined English Heritage as national cathedrals architect and was later appointed English Heritage’s representative to the Church of England’s Cathedral Fabric Commission, a role she fulfilled until 2006.

A Mass of Thanksgiving for Corinne’s life, followed by a reception, will be held at St George’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Southwark, London, on 30 September 2010 at 11am, and all are welcome to attend.

Books by Fellows

The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History, by Fellow Richard Pfaff (ISBN: 9780521808477; Cambridge University Press), is described as ‘the first comprehensive historical treatment of the Latin liturgy in medieval England — a history of the worship carried out in churches (cathedral, monastic, or parish) primarily seen through the surviving manuscripts of service books, set within the context of the wider political, ecclesiastical, and cultural history of the period’. The book is commended by our Fellow Julian Luxford, in his Times Literary Supplement review, as ‘frequently humorous, and free of academic jargon’, while Miri Rubin, of Queen Mary, University of London, says this is ‘the product of decades of work: reading liturgical manuscripts, discussing them, teaching them. Its strength is not only in many historical insights into the religious culture of medieval England, but in its assured usefulness as an essential reference book for medieval historians of religion, Anglo-Saxonists, historians of music and liturgy. Early Reformation scholars will also find it a necessary tool in evaluating English religious life on the eve of Reformation.’

Fellow Robin Daniels’s new book, Hartlepool: an archaeology of the medieval town (Tees Archaeology Monograph Series No 4, continues the account begun in his earlier volume (Anglo-Saxon Hartlepool) of a small medieval town whose story has value because it is so typical of small urban settlements in general in the medieval period. The book combines historical research and archaeology, but is primarily a triumphant demonstration of what archaeology can bring to the understanding of a town and its people, their diets, beliefs, domestic life, occupations, crafts, industries, buildings and defences.

Hartlepool’s coastal location makes it less typical than, say, an inland town for, until the nineteenth century, when ship building became the dominant industry, fishing and related trades permeated the life of everyone in Hartlepool, and Robin makes a plea for this aspect of the UK’s past to be studied in more detail. ‘The North Sea fishing industry has been studied by a few historians’, he writes, ‘but almost no archaeologists in this country. This is in marked contracts to other North Sea countries, where fishing was and is an important part of the economy and afforded due attention. This lack of attention … is most obviously manifested by the general absence of sieved assemblages from our major ports … comparable to those from Hartlepool.’ Robin, and his co-author, Fellow James Rackham, do their best to tell a coherent story of the changing focus from local inshore fishing to deep sea fishing over time, and of the related shellfish and freshwater fishing industries, as well as the processing of fish by drying, smoking and salting and its distribution, sketching in what is currently known as a first stage towards a much fuller study.

SAVE Britain’s Heritage has published Rediscovered Utopias: Saving London’s Suburbs, edited by our Fellows Bridget Cherry and Anne Robey (ISBN: 97809059785628; SAVE), as a way of highlighting the architectural joys of the planned estates of the Edwardian and inter-war years, with their scaled-down hints of the country houses built by Lutyens, Voysey and Shaw.

Looking at these handsome and architecturally lively houses now, it is a common enough reaction to think that traditional building arts flourished and were commonplace until the watershed of the Second World War. Here we are reminded through the detailed histories of fourteen London estates that these suburbs were special and different: the ‘utopia’ in the book’s title is justified by the evidence that many were built by philanthropists, charitable trusts and co-operatives as a conscious effort to improve people’s living conditions or with the deliberate aim of keeping ancient building traditions alive. These houses are not only the focus of conservation interest in the twenty-first century, they are, in a very real sense, the products of the nascent conservation movement of a hundred years ago, and it is salutary to be reminded that conservationism was then engaged not just in pickling the past, but also in making new and self-confident additions to the built environment.

We are very lucky that the ‘Arts and Crafts Movement’ had such a benign and pervasive influence over such a long period. Today, the skills to maintain these beautifully photographed houses are scarce and expensive. Slowly but surely these lovely houses are falling victim to modern materials and practices. Doors and windows tend to be among the first victims, followed by original clay tiles and roof slates, down pipes and gutters; boundary walls and gardens are swept way to create parking space and porches, garages and extensions are added that bear no resemblance to the original building in terms of colours, materials and design. That is what we can see from the street: inside, fireplaces, chimneys, doors, decorative plaster work, panelling and skirting boards all go and generous back gardens get built upon.

One telling photograph sums it all up and asks what possessed the owners of a ‘decent Arts and Crafts house’ to transform it into something that looks like the worst kind of 1970s housing development; but mainly this book works by presenting the alternative: beautiful, well-designed and well-maintained suburban homes presented in such a way as to inspire and encourage emulation. The campaign message of the book is that local authorities need to make much more use of the statutory powers available to them to protect the integrity of our best suburbs, and that communities can also do much to conserve their fine homes and encourage neighbours to do so to by drawing up their own conservation guidelines.

Fellow Charles Higham has published the first of a series of reports on the excavations that he directed at Ban Non Wat, a large prehistoric site located in the upper Mun Valley of north-east Thailand, from 2002. In The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor. Volume 3. The Excavation of Ban Non Wat: Introduction (ISBN 974417997X; Fine Arts Department of Thailand), Charles outlines a remarkable cultural sequence that begins with five hunter-gatherer graves dating from some time before 2000 BC, followed by the cemetery of the first early farmers, who, from about 2100 BC, moved south from the Yangtze Valley, bringing domesticated rice, cattle and pigs, and their techniques of weaving and fashioning pots decorated with complex incised and painted designs, some of which were used as mortuary jars.

Six or seven centuries later, a major cultural change took place as knowledge of alloying copper and tin and casting objects of bronze began to pass from southern China along established trade routes. Some individuals were now buried with very great wealth and ceremony; a bronze arrowhead buried with a child hints that conflict with other groups might have been a regular occurrence, and this theme continues into the Iron Age, where large socketed spears are commonly found as grave goods, and the large and growing settlement is now ringed with moated defences. Exotic jewellery of agate and carnelian, in vogue by 200 BC, reflects participation in a developing trade network linking south-east Asia with India, and with it the beginning of a fruitful interchange of goods and ideas that contributed to the rapid transition to forms of culture well represented at Angkor. More on the site, including photographs, can be found on the about.com website.

Prehistoric Rock Art: Polemics and Progress (ISBN 9780521140874; Cambridge University Press) is based on the Rhind Lectures that Fellow Paul Bahn gave in 2006 at the invitation of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. As well as summarising recent advances in our understanding of prehistoric rock and cave art, including new discoveries, new approaches to their recording and interpretation, and current conservation challenges, Paul argues that we do not need shamans, drugs and ‘flying sorcerers’ as an explanation of this art. The sense of humour that Paul brings to the task (and that is not entirely absent from the rock art itself) is indicated in his chapter titles: ‘Art on the rocks’; ‘Myths and meanings’; ‘The emperor’s new clothes: sloppy tailoring and fashion disasters’; ‘Location, location, location’; ‘The votive motive’; ‘Mustn’t crumble’.

Martin Carver’s new book — Archaeological Investigation (ISBN: 9780415489195; Routledge) — has a title that evokes a crime series on TV and is that rare thing in archaeology — a good read. Not quite beach-reading material (though Francis Pryor’s The Making of the British Landscape was, astonishingly, tipped as exactly that in The Sunday Times recently), but nevertheless a story that is told so well that you do indeed want to keep reading.

Partly that is because the book is autobiographical — not overtly so, in the sense of a chronological account of a digger’s life, but many of the examples that Martin uses to illustrate his arguments are drawn from hard-won personal experience, and not from other books — hence he is able to reveal the thinking that went into this or that excavation and recording strategy, rather than simply describing what was done and what was found. Many paragraphs end by drawing a crisp conclusion — ‘this is what we learned as a consequence’, and ‘that is what we would do differently another time’.

Also autobiographical — explicitly so — is Martin’s preference for what he calls ‘evaluative archaeology’, in preference to the other five kinds: the fossicker, the historical, the empirical, the processual and the reflexive. Don’t worry that these terms sound theoretical: Martin does a brilliant job of explaining each, with vivid metaphor and some good jokes (such as the photograph of our Fellow Ian Hodder looking pensive, over the caption ‘the reflexive’).

Martin defines evaluative archaeology as the process of assessing, in advance of any fieldwork, the purpose of the project, what we want to know, how we intend to find out, what we will do with the material we retrieve, how we analyse, synthesise, publish, conserve and archive the resulting stuff. This much is surely common ground; all archaeologists of all persuasions would agree with the central proposition.

Where Martin makes a claim to be different is in his insistence that archaeological values are not the only values, nor even the primary values. He uses the phrase ‘social contract’ to describe the ethical obligation of archaeologists to consider all interests, including those of the unborn (by which he means asking whether more is to be gained by leaving the site un-dug for future generations). He insists that we need to seek a consensus for the intended programme of work, involving all points of view, and for him this involves the widest possible consultation and the adjustment of the project design in the light of the feedback.

Sutton Hoo is used as an example of a value-led project, and Martin describes how he had to devise a strategy that would overcome the hostility of academics who wondered why the project was necessary at all, of local archaeologists who resented ‘London’ academics working on their patch, of metal-detectorists who accused the archaeologists of keeping all the excitement of discovery to themselves, of local residents who felt protective towards ‘their’ ownership of the site (even when this was based on no more than their use of the mounds as an exercise area for their dogs) and of the real landowner, whose assent to the work was vital in a country in which property rights are paramount. This is a far from exhaustive list — other stakeholders included gamekeepers, TV crews, schools, enactment societies, students, people on job creation schemes and even animal lovers concerned at the harm that might come to Sutton Hoo’s rabbits.

What Martin’s account reveals is something that gets to the heart of this book: he argues that a formal and explicit project design involves taking all these diverse interests into account. Yet, as he explains what problems had to be resolved at Sutton Hoo, and as he shares with us the ingenuity that went into devising solutions, what comes across is something different altogether: the success of the project was down to Martin’s own personality. How does a project design win over the owner of the land, especially one who has no real interest in the mounds or in the outcomes of the planned excavation? It doesn’t: as Martin candidly admits, you go and talk to her; or, as Martin puts, you offer friendship ‘regularly in the form of a few hours of companionship’.

Is it not more likely that the success of the Sutton Hoo project was due to the human being who led it, and who was and is an egalitarian, with a strong personal commitment to sharing the rewards of an engagement with archaeology with as many people as possible? Essentially Martin makes a very strong case for trying to combine being a good human being with being a good archaeologist. For that reason, it is hard to share the enthusiasm that he brings to extolling the merits of such planning procedures as MORPHE (Management of Research Projects for the Historic Environment), which too often encourages dull conformity to a bureaucratic regime rather than creative engagement with the widest possible range of stakeholders.

For a textbook to raise so many issues and still work as a manual of how to do archaeology is a remarkable achievement. Despite the possible contradictions between Martin’s practice and his theorising about it, there is no doubt that this book is going to be used as a primer for teaching new generations of archaeologists all over the world for many years to come — best of all, those who are lucky enough to be given it as a set text are going, for once, to have a thoroughly enjoyable, as well as an intellectually challenging, experience.

Events

24 to 26 September 2010: ‘Crisis, what Crisis? Collapses and Dark Ages in Cross Cultural Comparison’, a three-day international conference to be held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. Speakers will include our Fellows Colin Renfrew, Graeme Barker, Lotte Hedeager, Martin Millett and others. For registration details and a provisional programme please visit the McDonald Institute website.

2 October 2010, Medieval English Wall Paintings, the Ecclesiological Society’s Annual Conference, St Alban’s Centre, Baldwins Gardens, London EC1N 7AB; for further details see the society's website.

18 to 21 November 2010: ‘Inca Ushnus: Landscape, Site and Symbol in the Andes’. To coincide with the opening of the British Museum’s new Andean gallery, this three-day conference organised by Fellows Frank Meddens and Colin McEwan, with Katie Willis and Nick Branch, will take place on 19 to 21 November at the British Museum’s Clore Centre. It will be introduced by a keynote public lecture to be given on 18 November at 6.30pm by Tom Zuidema, of the University of Illinois, on ‘The concept of ushnu in ethnohistory, ethnography and archaeology’, focusing on the Inca Empire (c AD 1400—1532).

The ushnu represents a sanctified central space marked by a vertical opening into the body of the earth into which libations and other offerings were made. Beside this, the ushnu platform served as a stage from which the Inca king and his retinue of lords could observe and preside over the annual round of seasonal festivals and ceremonial events. The conference will bring together colleagues who have developed interdisciplinary studies of ushnus across the length and breadth of the Inca empire. Archaeological, ethnographic and ethnohistoric approaches will offer a comprehensive understanding of the role that ushnus played in Andean political and sacred geography and their relevance today.

Full details will be posted on the ‘Events’ page of the British Museum website shortly, but in the meantime anyone who would like a copy of the programme should contact Frank Meddens. Further information on the Inca ushnu project can be found on the websites of the AHRC, Royal Holloway, University of London, and the British Museum.

16 to 26 June 2011: Saeters and Stave Churches. The Vernacular Architecture Group (VAG) is arranging a tour to Norway to visit some of the country’s notable timber buildings, and see something of the scenery. The tour is open to non-members of the group. For further details, see the VAG website . The VAG is asking for expressions of interest at this stage. Details and a booking form will be sent out at the end of September/October.

Vacancies

Bath Spa University, Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Heritage & Applied History
Salary £34,607—£43,840 pro rata (0.5 FTE); closing date 11 August 2010
Details from the Bath Spa University website.

Durham Cathedral: Head of Collections; closing date 20 August 2010
To take responsibility for the care of Durham Cathedral Library, with its modern and historic collections (including the Durham Gospels, the Durham Cassiodurus and the collections, manuscript and printed, of the great antiquarian historians of Co Durham, including Hunter, Sharp, Raine, Surtees and Longstaffe) and the non-Library collections (including St Cuthbert’s coffin, pectoral cross, a portable altar, a comb and embroidered silks), which will form the core content of new exhibitions planned for 2012. The Durham Cathedral website has further details.

Cambridge University Department of Archaeology: Lecturer in Palaeolithic Archaeology Salary £36,715—£46,510; closing date 17 September 2010
Applications are sought from any sub-field of Palaeolithic archaeology, but the preference is for research interests and teaching expertise to complement current departmental strengths. Applicants require proven ability to undertake research, a strong publication record and an active research project with prospects for graduate collaboration. Experience in fund-raising for research projects is desirable. Further details from the Cambridge University website.

Queen’s University Belfast: Professor of Archaeology; closing date 4 October 2010
QUB has produced a very impressive brochure to help in the recruitment of someone to fill this key post and to play a leading role in promoting the profile of archaeology at QUB. It can be downloaded with full details of how to apply from the QUB website.