Our recently elected Fellow Adam Zamoyski writes to say that he has just been elected Chairman of the Czartoryski Foundation, which owns the Czartoryski Museum and Library in Krakow, Poland, the only surviving private museum in the former Soviet bloc. The Czartoryski Museum was founded in 1796 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska to preserve Polish heritage. Her son, Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, added many Roman antiquities after visiting Italy in 1798, where he also acquired the Museum’s most celebrated painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Lady with an Ermine’. The museum survived under Communist rule thanks largely to the work of Professor Marek Rostworoski who dedicated his life to the collection. In 1991, the museum was returned to Prince Adam Karol Czartoryski by the High Court of the Nation, and it is now administered by the Czartoryski Foundation, set up by Prince Adam Karol in 1991.
Adam Zamoyski’s lavishly illustrated guide to the museum (Azimuth Editions, London 2001) tells the full story of its foundation and survival: details can be found on Adam Zamoyski’s website.
The Society has been informed of the death of our Fellow Dr Nigel John Seeley (elected in March 1980, and a former Council member) who passed away on Monday 21 June 2004, at the age of 62. His family plans to hold a memorial service at some point and will let us know once they have made their plans.
Dr Seeley’s obituary, published in The Independent on 26 June, described him as a former police scientist who became Head of the Department of Archaeological Conservation and Materials Science at the Institute of Archaeology in London in 1974, moving to the National Trust in 1989, the same year that Uppark was all but destroyed by fire and thus the year when he took charge of ‘the largest and most complex single conservation rescue operation ever mounted in England with the exception of Windsor Castle’. Ten years later, he was appointed Head of Conservation, a post he held until his retirement in 2002.
Nicolas Barker, author of the obituary, says that Nigel Seeley’s ‘too early death is [a great] blow, as his career had just opened out on a new phase that might have had a still greater impact on the science of conservation’: following his retirement he became Visiting Professor at the UCL Centre for Sustainable Heritage, where he was planning a new range of work on materials science in relation to historic artefacts and buildings and the environmental interactions between them. ‘He was looking forward to a host of other projects, to which his catholic vision and always enquiring mind would have brought new ideas and new achievements.’
An obituary also appeared in The Times on 30 June for Philip Stell, MBE, surgeon and historian, whose death on 29 May 2004, at the age of 69, was announced in Salon 91. The obituary described Philip as ‘the first and most successful exponent of reconstructive surgery after head and neck cancer in this country, [who] developed a large practice dealing with the most difficult cases in the UK and on the Continent. He made countless advances in ear and throat surgery (otolaryngology) and lectured all over Europe. Poor health forced his early retirement in 1992, at 57, after which he went back to his earlier interest in history and languages. He completed a masters thesis on the practice of medicine in medieval York, the city he grew up in and to which he returned after retiring.
‘Using the skills in languages and computing built up during his medical practice, Stell tackled the untranslated medieval documents held in York City Archives and the York Archaeological Trust. He programmed a voice-recognition system to recognise spoken Latin and translate it directly into English. This system allowed him to publish six volumes of translations from the documents, including the records of the maintenance of York Minster from 1360 to 1500 and the accounts of the medieval masters of the Foss and Ouse bridges.
‘At the same time, he compiled a database of the medieval population of York which included names and biographical information. Now holding details of more than 10,000 people, it provides a useful resource for genealogists worldwide: before its inception, records predating the mid-16th century (when parish registers were introduced) were extremely difficult to obtain. The funds generated by this research tool continue to fund two postgraduate research posts in the department of medieval studies at the University of York.
‘His election as a Fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries [on 14 May 2003] and the Royal Historical Society were both very rare honours for an amateur historian. He was appointed MBE in 2004.’
Finally the death of a former Fellow, Joan Harding, at the grand age of 93, was marked by an obituary in The Daily Telegraph on 30 June 2004. This described how Joan directed excavations of an important early Bronze Age settlement at Albury on behalf of the Surrey Archaeological Society in the 1960s and pioneered experimental archaeology by making and firing clay storage jars which she then filled with grain and buried for a year in the Bronze Age manner. The next spring, she opened up the jar to find the grain perfectly preserved. She also became an authority on bee diseases, which led to an interest in the houses and cottages in which her bee-keeping friends lived and hence to her formation of the Domestic Buildings Research Group (Surrey), which has now recorded more than 3,800 houses, cottages and other dwellings and farm buildings in Surrey. Joan Harding was a trustee of the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1971, and was appointed MBE in 1991 for services to the national heritage in Surrey.
Antiquaries Journal distribution arrangements
It was agreed at the Publications Committee meeting held on 17 June 2004 that the practice of delivering journals en masse to Fellows at their place of work would have to cease because of the administrative burden involved with this service, a task that was performed by Mrs Eva Rhys until her retirement at the end of April 2004 after many years of loyal and dedicated service to the Antiquaries. Fellows who are affected by the cessation of this service (namely those working at English Heritage, The British Library, The British Museum and the Institute of Archaeology) should contact Lisa Elliott or tel: 020 7479 7080) to say whether they wish their copy of the Journal to be posted to a home or work address in future, or whether they would prefer to collect their Journal from the Burlington House.
Barbarous cull of GCSE Archaeology
Only three weeks after the Education Minister, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, told Lord Redesdale in the House of Lords that his concerns for the future of GCSE Archaeology were groundless, the subject has been abolished from the GCSE exams syllabus. AQA (the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance), the only exam board to offer GCSE archaeology, sent a letter to schools last week saying that summer 2006 would be the last time they would offer the exam.
Archaeologists are understandably outraged. Don Henson, FSA, Education Officer of the CBA and a member of the AQA’s history and archaeology advisory committee, said that not only had the advisory committee not been consulted, it hadn’t even been informed of the decision. When AQA was asked why not, their Assistant Director (External Relations), Helen Hallett, said that it was because ‘they have a vested interest’.
Don also pointed out that the problem with GCSE archaeology was not the lack of student demand: ‘there is a huge interest among teenagers’, he said, ‘thanks to TV programmes, but there are just not enough qualified teachers’.
When questioned in the House of Lords three weeks ago, Baroness Ashton said she believed that the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority would work to ensure that minority subjects were offered by at least one of the examining boards and she confirmed that they (the QCA) had the right to intervene to ensure that subjects remained available through at least one board. Archaeologists are now calling on Baroness Ashton to ask the QCA to do just that.
Better news on the Heritage Protection front
Salon 92 reported the publication on 28 June of the Review of Heritage Protection, the DCMS decision document on the way forward for the listings and scheduling regime. Alison Taylor, FSA, has now read all 78 closely typed pages, and wants to draw attention to ‘a couple of really welcome announcements that could transform the protection of scheduled monuments: the proposed review of the current consents that permit damaging arable agriculture on nationally important sites and, at long last, a requirement for local authorities to maintain historic environment records’.
The two decisions to which Alison refers are:
‘Class Consents Orders: Government will review the operation of the Ancient Monuments (Class Consents) Order 1994, in order to improve the protection of nationally important archaeological sites from the damaging effects of ploughing. English Heritage will undertake the preparatory work to deliver this reform, in consultation with interested parties.’
‘Historic Environment Records: Government should require local authorities to establish and maintain or have access to Historic Environment Records. It is acknowledged that this measure has potentially serious resource implications for Government. Nevertheless ODPM and DCMS have agreed to work closely with other key and interested government departments to take this measure forward to a successful outcome.’
Alison adds: ‘this support will be a huge boost for the archaeological sites and monuments records that local authorities have struggled to maintain and which already underpin nearly all archaeological work in Britain today. Lord McIntosh is certainly to be congratulated on these two policies, which have been on archaeologists’ wish-lists for some time. The important thing now is to make sure they are put into effect quickly, and there is the necessary funding to make them effective’.
Amongst her many other roles, Alison Taylor is also the editor of the Institute of Field Archaeologist’s excellent quarterly magazine The Archaeologist. The latest issue, just out, features Anglo-Saxon and early medieval archaeology. There are articles on many of the latest discoveries, such as a Saxon bridge in Leicestershire, Middle Saxon London, Frisians in Southampton and evidence for very early literacy on a Scottish crannog, plus reports on sessions at the highly successful IFA conference at Liverpool and other archaeological news stories and points of view. Copies are available in the Society’s library.
Old trees should be listed too, says Woodland Trust
Veteran trees would join buildings and ancient monuments on the Government’s new all-embracing heritage assets register if the Woodland Trust has its way. A campaign to protect to protect ancient trees from destruction was launched at the end of June, with the backing of English Heritage, English Nature and the Forestry Commission.
The Trust has compiled a list of 100 ancient trees at 50 sites, including Windsor Great Park, which it would like to see given better protection. Tree Preservation Orders alone are not enough, says Jill Butler of the Woodland Trust, because a provision allowing ‘dying trees’ to be cut down is being used to destroy perfectly healthy specimens that ‘happen to have a bit of fungus on the trunk’. At Lullingstone in Kent an ancient yew tree was burned down recently because it had a hollow trunk and at Kenley, in south London, two 400-year-old oak trees are under threat from nearby building work.
According to the Woodland Trust, Britain’s oldest tree is thought to be a 3,800-year-old yew at Ashbrittle church in Somerset. By comparison, the 2,500-year-old Ankerwyke yew in Wraysbury, Berkshire, which overlooks Runnymede, is a mere youngster.
Countryside Report pinpoints major changes since 1990
The Countryside Agency’s annual State of the Countryside Report was published at the end of June. This seeks to provide an overview of facts and trends about the social, economic and environmental issues encountered in England’s countryside. The section on ‘Environment and recreation’ reports that the CA has developed a new methodology for assessing changes in countryside character and quality, which (the report says): ‘depends on the unique combination of elements such as woodland, boundary features, cropping and grazing patterns, settlement pattern, semi-natural habitats and historic features’.
The report then goes on to state rather worryingly that nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of these landscapes showed ‘changes in the key elements that shaped their character, that were marked and inconsistent with current Character Area descriptions’ in the period 1990 to 1998. Among the changes recorded was a 5 per cent loss of permanent grassland in the south west, west and central southern England, and in Sussex, and the development of previously rural or agricultural land, which is especially marked in Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and the limestone belt through Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire, in the West Midlands, Hereford and Worcester and Shropshire.
The report says that the methodology will be refined for future years to include information on historical features such as the distribution of ancient monuments or historic farm buildings. Landscape typologies and historic landscape assessments will also be used to ‘help us understand where change is occurring and to help assess its significance’.
Copies of the report can be downloaded from the Countryside Agency’s website.
An independent report into compliance with the Nolan Principles [on openness, integrity and accountability in public life] by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) was published at the end of June, following allegations that the property development interests of the Chairman and some trustees were in conflict with their duty of impartiality as public servants.
The report recommends that DCMS should undertake a review of the make-up of the CABE Board to ensure a balance between experts currently active in the industry, and those from an independent but relevant background; that the Audit Committee should formally consider CABE’s register of interests twice a year to assess the extent or depth of specific Commissioner interests; that induction and training processes for Commissioners should be strengthened to ensure the Nolan principles are clearly communicated and understood by all Commissioners; and that in the future, the position of Chair of CABE should not be held by a property developer with significant commercial interests. On behalf of DCMS, the Heritage Minister, Andrew McIntosh, said: ‘We welcome this report. DCMS and CABE will give immediate thought to putting the recommendations into effect’.
Sir Stuart Lipton, who is chairman of the leading property developer, Stanhope, had already made clear his intention to step down as Chairman of CABE, prior to the publication of the report. DCMS will shortly begin the process of finding a new Chairman. Sir Stuart’s resignation came at the same time as the announcement that Richard Simmons has been appointed as CABE’s new chief executive, in succession to Jon Rouse, who has moved to become chief executive of the Housing Association. Richard is a former Chief Executive of Dalston City Challenge, where he helped to promote the regeneration of the artists’ quarter in the Hoxton area of London. He has also worked for the London Docklands Development Corporation. Among the qualities listed in his CV on the CABE website is persistence: apparently Richard took 25 years to complete his PhD in urban history and economics.
CABE and the Regent Palace Hotel
Meanwhile, backbench MPs have decided that they too want to look into the activities of CABE, and in particular to ask why a Government’funded public body should advocate the demolition of listed buildings. Andrew Bennett, MP, Chairman of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister Select Committee, said that an inquiry would begin in the autumn, sparked by the discovery that CABE had actively supported the proposal to demolish London’s Grade-II-listed Regent Palace Hotel to make way for a development designed by a member of its own design review committee ‘ the architect, Graham Morrison.
Mr Morrison, who is also on the London advisory committee of English Heritage, says that he did not take part in the discussion of his proposed new building and that he had been excluded from contact with panel members for the whole day that the design was presented, as required by CABE’s rules.
The Regent Palace Hotel is not the only contentious development project affecting a listed structure: SAVE Britain’s Heritage has recently written to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport stating that it is ‘deeply concerned’ at CABE’s advocacy of new schemes against the presumption in planning law that listed buildings should be protected, citing the development of the park at Toddington Manor, Gloucestershire, a Grade I house unchanged since 1835, as one example of a scheme that CABE supports.
Adam Wilkinson, SAVE’s secretary, said that ‘many of the schemes promoted by CABE have a strong ‘ frequently unsympathetic ‘ impact on the historic environment in spite of the quality of the design in its own right’. He added that ‘CABE’s endorsements were often used by developers to negate heritage-based objections: the result is that heritage concerns are over-ridden’.
Mr Wilkinson also criticised CABE for not being ‘properly informed’ on heritage matters: ‘It is important that a publicly funded body as influential in the formation of public policy as CABE is properly accountable and is run to the very highest standard of objectivity’, he said.
Norfolk squirrel solves riddle of Holbein masterpiece
This is an old story but one that is far too good to let pass without mention in Salon. Earlier this year, the 1 May issue of Apollo, the academic art journal (edited by our Fellow Michael Hall) published an article by David J King, linking Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Lady with a Squirrel and Starling to a fragment of late-medieval glass in a window of the parish church of St Peter and St Paul in the Norfolk market town of East Harling.
The article suggests that the painting is a visual pun on the name of the hitherto unidentified lady in the picture. The starling that sits on a fig tree in the background, with its beak pointing at her right ear, is a reference to East Harling, and the squirrel comes from the badge of the Lovell family. Squirrels are not only carved on three Lovell tombs in East Harling church, there is also a fine stained-glass painting of a red squirrel cracking a nut in the east window of the church and six more squirrels appear on painted shields of arms in various windows in the dame church.
These clues suggest that the lady in the portrait could be Anne Lovell, wife of Francis Lovell (later Sir Francis), a landowner who inherited the Lovell estates at East Harling from his uncle in 1524. Mr King believes that Holbein’s painted squirrel symbolises the birth of Francis Lovell’s heir, Thomas, in 1526. Francis Lovell could have met Holbein because he moved in court circles. He as appointed as Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII in 1516. He was knighted in 1528 and in 1533, he attended Anne Boleyn at her coronation and in 1539’40, accompanied Anne of Cleves on her ill-fated arrival at Rochester.
Susan Foister, the National Gallery’s curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting, said of the discovery: ‘It’s very exciting. This brings her to life. There was always something secretive and restrained about the way she looks. One longed to know who she is. This situates her exactly in the circle we would have expected to find her.’
Michael Hall, FSA, editor of Apollo, said: ‘This has been such a long-standing mystery. So many people have wondered about it. Karen Hearn, the Tate’s curator of 16th and 17th-century British art, said she’d got into the habit of looking at every coat of arms to see if they had squirrels. This is a perfect detective story.’
Mammoth catalogue will record hidden treasures of public art
The Guardian has dubbed it the ‘Pevsner of Paintings’ ‘ an ambitious plan to publish an 80-volume county by county series recording the details of every picture in public ownership in the UK.
The first volume, covering more than 2,000 paintings in publicly owned collections in Leeds, was published at the end of June by the charity called the Public Catalogue Foundation. The works described in the West Yorkshire: Leeds inventory include paintings by Vel’zquez, El Greco, Terry Frost and Bridget Riley.
Our Fellow, Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery, praised the project, saying that: ‘As an art historian, I am finding that it is possible to discover paintings I didn’t know about ‘ and am extremely pleased to find out about.’
But Fred Hohler, chairman of the Public Catalogue Foundation, warned that this was a heritage under threat and that the charity would press the Government to give regional galleries the cash to store or display paintings properly and, where necessary, conserve them. ‘The fact is, our national collection is deteriorating’, Dr Hohler said. ‘Unless we capture it pretty soon, we won’t have a record of what was there, let alone what is there’.
‘The nation’s collection is one of the richest and broadest in the world’, he added, but funding pressures meant that councils were ‘giving paintings less and less space, meaning fewer and fewer people will look at them, and finally we will forget about them altogether. Many works hang unregarded in public buildings ‘ from hospitals to council offices to fire stations. In some counties up to 90 per cent of public pictures are in storage in regional museums, often in terrible conditions. Not only are they unavailable to the public which owns them, but they can also be inaccessible to academics, with individual museums lacking the means to put out catalogues.’
The foundation’s series will carry a colour photograph of each painting and ultimately the whole catalogue will go online. Revenue from the books will be ploughed into a fund for restoration. ‘If we get it right, and sell 700 of each volume, we’ll raise ‘2.5m to ‘3m for picture conservation’, said Dr Hohler.
Temporary export bar on linen doublet dating from the 1650s
Estelle Morris, Minister for the Arts, has placed a temporary export bar on an extremely rare embroidered linen doublet dating from the 1650s. It is one of only five British doublets to survive from the period 1650 to 1660 and is, as far as known, a unique use of linen for a fashionable garment in this decade. It is also embellished with a very rare form of needlework. The agreement is described as ‘exceptional’ and ‘an essential resource for dress, textile, social and economic historians as almost nothing remains from the period and pictorial evidence is scarce due to a decline in full-length portraiture during the Civil War and Commonwealth eras’.
The export bar follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art that the export decision be deferred to enable purchase offers to be made at the recommended price of ‘25,935 (including VAT). The bar stays in force until 27 July 2004, with the possibility of an extension until after 27 September 2004 if a buyer comes forward with a serious intention to raise the necessary funds.
The doublet was in the collection of the Marquess of Lansdowne for many years and was lent to the Perth Museum until 1992, before being transferred to the Royal Scottish Museum (later the National Museum of Scotland) and then offered for sale at Sotheby’s on 7 October 2003. The doublet is made of linen and is richly embellished with embroidery in white thread ‘ a style known as whitework. It embodies couched, knotted cord applied in curvilinear patterns within rectangles running vertically down the garment. Additional embroidery in the form of satin stitch and French knots fills some of the spaces created by the lines of the couched cording, to suggest the shapes of leaves and flowers.
Interactive online map of Stonehenge
English Heritage is offering unlimited access to the Stonehenge World Heritage Site in the form of a new micro-website, launched on 11 June. Visitors can explore an area centred on Stonehenge about 5 miles in extent north to south and 3 miles east to west, that includes a number of associated archaeological sites, including more than 350 Neolithic and Bronze Age burial mounds and such large-scale ceremonial monuments such as the Avenue, the Cursus and Durrington Walls.
The new micro-site has been created by Oxford ArchDigital, the web content management system company, and it is based on an interactive map of the area. Clicking on features on the map brings up a short description, photos, antiquarian drawings and old photographs, reconstruction drawings, 360-degree panoramic photographs, video clips and aerial views. The micro-site is part of a bigger major heritage project called WOW (Window on Wiltshire’s Heritage), which is funded by the Big Lottery Fund (formerly the New Opportunities Fund). This makes the resources of the county’s galleries, libraries, museums and other centres of learning available to people via the Internet.
Viking town ‘is Ireland’s equivalent of Pompeii’
Earlier this year Salon reported on the discovery of a mid-9th-century Viking settlement at Woodstown, five miles from Waterford, as preparatory work began on the city’s new by-pass. The Waterford News (11 June) now says that it will be some weeks yet before the Irish Minister for the Environment, Martin Cullen, decides whether and how to preserve ‘Ireland’s first town’.
So far up to 3,000 artefacts have been found at the site, including nails, weights, jewellery, silverware, weapons, ceramics and ship fragments. Leading archaeologists are suggesting that the complete original town of Waterford, founded by the Vikings close to the River Suir, remains virtually intact, with dozens of streets and dwellings, just below the soil surface. It is thought that up to 4,000 people may have lived in the settlement, which measures 1.5 km long by 0.5 km wide.
Early settlers chose the site because it gave them control of Waterford Harbour and of the three-river system, the Suir, the Barrow and the Norse, allowing them ready access up river to the rich lands of the river valleys. John Maas, a local archaeologist, is describing the site as Ireland’s equivalent of Pompeii, and stressing to the Irish Government that its economic value as a tourism and learning resource could be many times greater than that of a road.
Commissioned by George IV to commemorate victory over Napoleon, London’s Marble Arch has just emerged from a three-month programme of cleaning and repair at the hands of a team of experts employed by English Heritage.
Philip Davies, the director for the South at English Heritage, said: ‘Marble Arch is one of London’s most famous and popular monuments and we are delighted to have restored it back to its original condition. A lot of missing detail has been repaired, reinstated and recarved and the spectacular bronze gates at the centre of the arch have been re-bronzed and repaired.’
He explained that this conservation programme was just the first step in a strategy to improve important parts of the capital’s heritage. ‘It is vital that we continue to invest in them, which means lighting them to improve their night-time appearance’, he said.
Marble Arch was designed by John Nash in 1828 and completed in 1832 to 1833. Made of white Carrara marble, the three archways, with their Corinthian columns, were inspired by the Arch of Constantine in Rome. The arch was moved to its current site at the entrance to Hyde Park from the entrance to Buckingham Palace courtyard in 1851.
Scottish ministers asked to invest in audit of the historic environment
The Scottish Built Environment Forum (BEFS), a coalition of heritage bodies representing Scotland’s rich historic environment, has published a manifesto calling on Scottish Ministers to take a closer look at the way Scotland’s historic environment is managed and to introduce annual auditing. The manifesto, called The Bigger Picture: Investing in Scotland’s Historic Environment, points out that Scotland’s heritage sites ‘ from burghs and castles to parks and gardens, from prehistoric sites and battlefields to historic buildings and industrial heritage ‘ are central to Scotland’s ‘4.5 billion tourism industry, but that too little is actually known about the threats and condition of this irreplaceable resource. The manifesto proposes the creation of a ‘strategic Scottish Historic Environment Auditing Framework’ to gather data, leading to an annual report of the state of Scotland’s historic environment.
Our Fellow, Robin Turner, who is the Convenor of the BEFS Historic Environment Review Taskforce which drew up the report, said: ‘we have plenty of evidence to back up the inescapable conclusion that we are putting in far less to look after the historic environment than we are taking out of it, and we should be investing a lot more’.
Copies of the advocacy document are available from the BEFS website.
New chair of the Historic Buildings Council for Wales
Alun Pugh, Welsh Assembly Minister for Culture, Welsh Language and Sport, has announced the appointment of Richard Keen as the new chair of the Historic Buildings Council for Wales. Richard is a self-employed consultant from Carmarthenshire, specialising in the heritage, landscape, culture and tourism sectors. He worked formerly for the Welsh Industrial and Maritime Museum and the National Trust, and he has a particular expertise in the industrial archaeology of Wales. He has written extensively and been involved in a large number of television programmes, particularly about Welsh industrial heritage.
Alun Pugh said: In Wales, we have a wonderful heritage and our historic buildings are a great part of this. It is important that we have advice of the highest quality in assessing these buildings and in recommending what support might be given to conservation and restoration. Richard Keen has more than thirty years experience of dealing with the history, architecture, landscapes and culture of Wales and I am sure he will lead the Historic Buildings Council well.’
Grants for archaeology in the south west
David Smith, FSA, writes with news of three recent grants made to archaeological projects in the south west made by the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, of which he is the Hon General Secretary. The grants were made possible thanks to the legacy of the late Miss Irene Bridgeman of Cheltenham, who left ‘39,000 in her will for a fund to be established in her memory. The first three projects to be supported from the fund are to reconstruct the wall decoration at Wortley Roman villa from the surviving plaster fragments, to make a photogrammetric survey of the Badminton mosaic, discovered in 2003, and to transcribe the notebooks and records of Alfred Selley, who deposited a huge collection of archaeological artefacts with Bristol Museum in the 1930s.
Hot off the press from Routledge is Forgotten Africa: an introduction to its archaeology by Graham Connah of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, at the Australian National University in Canberra. Forgotten Africa emphasises those aspects of Africa’s past only known or best known from archaeological or related evidence: human origins, the material culture of hunter gatherers, the beginnings of African farming, the development of metallurgy, the emergence of distinctive artistic traditions, the growth of cities and states, the expansion of trading networks and the impact of external contacts. The result is an eminently readable introduction to the long and momentous story of Africa and its people. Further details from the Routledge website.
John Owen is hoping to make a substantial contribution to the conservation of his local church through the sale of his newly published History of the Church of Saint Michaels and All Angels, Throwley, Kent. This contains an account of the evolution, architecture and furnishings of the church from the ninth century, together with a r’sum’ of the factors influencing this development. There is an especially detailed discussion of the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The great joys of the church, the eight tombs of the Sondes family, are also put into context. A copy of the forty-six page History (with plan and eighteen photographs) is available in the Society’s library and further copies are available from the author for ‘5.60 (including post and packing).
The final volume of a comprehensive chronicle of the History of the University of Cambridge was published in April, bringing to a conclusion what is certainly the largest and weightiest of all the books by Fellows featured in Salon so far. Edited by Christopher Brooke, the History runs to 2,500 pages and costs ‘280 for the four-volume set (with a 20 per cent discount for Cambridge graduates). The most recently published volume is number 2 in the set, and it covers the years 1546 to 1750 (636 pages, ISBN: 052135059X, ’85). Its main author, Victor Morgan, looks at relations between Cambridge and the Court and Church hierarchy, which sought to control the University in the aftermath of the Reformation. Christopher Brooke has contributed chapters on architectural history and the intellectual giants of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Christopher Brooke’s own volume, number 4 (published December 1992, 678 pages, ISBN: 052134350X, ’80), explores the extraordinary growth in size and academic stature of the University between 1870 and 1990. It looks in depth at the themes of religion and learning, and of the entry of women into a once male environment, with portraits of seminal and characteristic figures of the Cambridge scene.
Somerset Archaeological & Natural History Society is holding a Flint Day from 10.30am to 4.30pm on Saturday 24 July at the Wells & Mendip Museum. Speakers include Roger Jacobi, Chris Norman and Jodie Lewis discussing the use of flint and stone in the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. For further information e-mail Barry Lane, Secretary of SANHS Archaeology Committee:
A symposium on computer applications in archaeology, architecture and history will take place on Wednesday 28 July from 10am to 5pm at the Institute of Archaeology, 31’34 Gordon Square, London. The inter-disciplinary symposium is aimed at people from cultural institutions interested in advanced IT applications in archaeology and related fields and it aims to share the results of some ten major EU-supported projects in archaeology, history, architecture ands art history. To register, see the EVA Conference website.
Our recently elected Fellow Simon Jenkins will be giving the first SAVE Britain’s Heritage Lecture on the subject of ‘A Future from Their Past: the lessons to be learned from our built heritage’, at 7pm on Thursday 30 September 2004 at the Royal Geographic Society lecture theatre, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2AR. Tickets cost ’14 and can be ordered from Adam Wilkinson at SAVE.
Society of Antiquaries, temporary administrative assistant/receptionist
Salary ‘18,000
Lisa Elliott, the Society’s administrative assistant, is returning to Australia for six months and a temporary replacement is needed to fill her shoes for an initial period of six months from July 2004. The admin assistant is the first point of contact for enquiries, and the other main duties are dealing with room hire, preparing committee meeting papers and drafting the minutes, and providing secretarial support to the General Secretary and administrative assistance to the Publications Manager.
The skills needed in the job are computer literacy, a minimum typing speed of 55 wpm, experience of minute-taking, excellent customer service skills, good interpersonal skills and the ability to work as part of a small team, maturity of outlook and a willingness to be flexible. Patience, a sense of humour and an interest in the heritage would all be helpful. For further information, contact the Head of Administration and Communications, Jayne Phenton.