Palaeo2020

The Society held a fantastic conference focused on discussion and debate of the ways we can meet challenges currently facing Palaeolithic Archaeology in Britain today, covering a review of the current landscape, comparisons with work completed in Northern France, opportunities for further research, debate over future research frameworks and suggestions for creating better professional networks. The conference was organised by Fellows Dr Matthew Pope and Prof Clive Gamble. The organisers had the following to say about the conference:

The Society of Antiquaries provided the perfect independent platform to bring Palaeolithic archaeologists and Quaternary scientists, together with the wider heritage community, to discuss challenges in the protection and study of our earliest archaeology. A full house drew participants from across the UK and included archaeologists from northern France, who have tackled comparable challenges in advance of major infrastructure projects.

At a time when we are facing so many pressures on research funding and the erosion of public heritage services, the speakers and discussions articulated the need for all those interested in our earliest prehistory to refocus their aims, extend their ambition and present a unified approach to its investigation. The Palaeo2020 meeting couldn’t have been a better start to this process, one which sits at the heart of the Society’s core values of protecting our common global heritage, and widening access to, and participation in, the study of the deep human past.

Fellows can catch up on the proceedings and social conversations via our #Storify article, which pulls together the online comments from Twitter and recordings of the proceedings. You can visit Twitter directly and follow the continuing conversations from the conference using #Palaeo2020, or you visit our past event page for the conference to watch recordings of the proceedings. 



The conference was followed by a reception, which also celebrated the publication (by Oxford Archaeology) of Lost Landscapes of Palaeolithic Britain.


 

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John Schofield FSA, Secretary of the City of London Archaeological Trust (CoLAT), writes to invite applications for small- to medium-sized grants to support archaeological work and related documentary research in the City and its environs, as in previous years. The grants will be for one year only from 1 April 2017, with a deadline for applications (with required references) of Friday 23 September 2016; CoLAT will meet to decide the grants in early December. Application forms and guidelines for revised procedures can be found on the CoLAT website, which has been enhanced with examples of recently funded CoLAT research and other information. Guidance can also be obtained from john@jschd.demon.co.uk.
 

In August 2013 the Churches Conservation Trust (CCT) appealed for information about two painted oak panels ‘viciously hacked out’ from a 15th-century rood screen in Holy Trinity Church, Torbryan, Devon. Neil Rushton FSA told the BBC the screen was of 'national, probably international, importance: the 15th-century artistry is of an extremely high standard and it’s unique, it’s priceless and irreplaceable.’ The Trust installed an electronic alarm system to protect what remained; media publicity attracted 20 million unique visitors to its website.
 
‘The police are looking into the theft’, reported the press after the event, ‘and may have a lead.’ The missing panels were offered for sale online, and identified by a private collector. An 18-month investigation was launched by West Mercia Police and the Metropolitan Police Art and Antiques Unit, and the panels – along with other stolen antiques – were found in a raid on south London premises in May 2015.
 
In early May this year the culprit was in Hereford Crown Court, sentenced to three years and eight months for fraud, specimen theft charges and dealing in tainted cultural objects. Christopher Cooper, who pleaded guilty and helped return items to their owners, had been running an antiques business on eBay. He was convicted for a succession of thefts over three years, from which investigators estimated he had made £150,000.
 
The Torbryan panels will be returned to the church in the summer, after conservation funded by a CCT campaign.
 

In July last year, Martin P Levy FSA shared his fears that attempts to save elephants might hinder American museums seeking to collect works of art. ‘Fellows may be aware’, he wrote, ‘that the generally effective operation of Cites (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), which entered into force in 1975, is under siege. … in February 2014, President Obama issued Director’s Order 210, which has led to a de facto ban on the import of any ivory into the U.S.A. While presumably Fellows and all fair-minded members of the public support the conservationists’ battle to preserve the African elephant, surely none would agree that there is a correlation between the present-day illicit slaughter, and the admiration or study of a mediaeval ivory diptych, an ivory baroque cup or the ivory mounted cabinet, commissioned by the antiquarian Sir Horace Walpole for Strawberry Hill.’
 
In the following Salon Jeremy Montagu FSA and Julian Bennett FSA offered supportive observations. Now, on 20 May, a Times leader, headed ‘Destroying ivory antiques will not help save Africa’s elephants’, commented on something worse than a curb on collecting. Elsewhere in the paper, Simon de Bruxelles reported that four London antique dealers, in the US for a trade fair in Miami, were ordered to ‘use hammers and pliers to destroy treasures worth tens of thousands of pounds after falling foul of stringent American import regulations’.
 
Paul Bennett Antiques was asked to remove ivory insulating discs from tea and coffee pot handles in two 19th-century tea sets.
 
John Bull Antiques said ten items were ‘seized’, including a silver figurine of a Tower of London Beefeater made by German silversmith Berthold Muller: ‘… they gave me some tools’, said Ken Bull, ‘and insisted I remove it there and then, so I had to cut off the hands and head of the silver Beefeater. The American authorities have gone overboard.’ Mr Bull was also asked ‘to break the ivory ruler from an 18th-century draughtsman’s set’.
 
The Antique Enamel Company destroyed ivory inlay from 18th-century gold boxes. They were also ordered to remove feathers from an 18th-century Swiss gold and enamel mechanical singing bird, because they could not prove the feathers were not from an endangered species.
 
The import and export of ivory is tightly controlled in the West, explains The Times. In Europe there are no restrictions on antique ivory worked before March 1947; a Cites Article 10 licence is required for trading worked items later than this; trade in raw ivory of any age is banned.
 
‘Alas,’ said The Times, 'destroying art will no more save Africa’s elephants than passing laws. The only solution is to educate those who buy new ivory about the brutal realities of elephant poaching and the possibility they may soon, in Africa, be extinct. America’s desire to be vigilant in combating the illegal ivory trade is admirable. But nothing will be achieved by hacking the head off a model beefeater.’
 
On 11 May in the same paper, de Bruxelles reported that the Egyptian statue of Sekhemka, sold by Northampton Borough Council in 2014, ‘is now almost certainly in a private collection in the United States’. The Times responded with another leader likely to have been popular with some dealers, headed, ‘The Sekhemka Solution’. ‘Every piece, however famous or significant in every collection’, it proposed, ‘could be rotated through storage for a year. If no one asks to see it in that time, then it can safely be sold to raise funds for audio-visual displays, digitally interactive exhibitions and space for corporate events. The National Gallery could live for years off the proceeds from a single Uccello. The British Museum has walls full of lucrative and repetitive Assyrian lion-hunts.’
 
Responding, I wrote to the paper to point out that Northampton council had not raised the reported £15.76 million by selling Sekhemka, but closer to £7 million (‘the rest went to the Marquess of Northampton and on fees’). Peter Saunders FSA, Curator Emeritus, Salisbury Museum, said the sale of Sekhemka ‘endangers this country’s magnificent tradition of public generosity in gifting objects to collections. Donors will think twice if they lose their trust in museums to cherish donations as intellectual, artistic and academic property, and fear collections are to be used as goody bags to be plundered for monetary gain when times get tough.’
 
The photo of a silver Beefeater is from The Times (BNPS). Subscription needed for Times website.
 

Celts, the National Museum of Scotland’s major temporary exhibition done with the British Museum (until 25 September), now has a prehistoric companion, Stone Age Jade from the Alps (20 May–30 October). The display showcases the Museum’s collection of Neolithic jade axe blades found in Scotland. They are joined by a new sculpture by Tim Pomeroy – called Axehead.
 
The ground or polished stone axe blade was the great emblem for neolithic Europe. They are found in their thousands across Britain, in a wide variety of tough and mostly local rocks, though many travelled some distance from their quarries. The jade blades are different from this mass, especially at greater distances from their sources – as here in Britain, where well over a hundred have been found. Then they are all beautifully shaped and finished, in both ways differently from native products, which can themselves be very fine. There is no question of their antiquity. A jade axe fragment was discovered by archaeologists in a Neolithic tomb at Cairnholy in Dumfries and Galloway, and – a quite exceptional find – a complete blade was excavated by Bryony Coles FSA and John Coles FSA in 1973, beside a wooden trackway constructed in Somerset in 3807/3806 BC (such a precise date comes from tree rings).
 
For some years Alison Sheridan FSA, Principal Curator of Early Prehistory in the Department of Scottish History and Archaeology, has been working with the French-led Projet Jade to document and scientifically source jade blades across Europe – they are mostly jadeitite, omphacitite and eclogite. It has been a long and very successful project, pioneered by Pierre Pétrequin (of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and University of Besançon) and his wife Anne-Marie Pétrequin. One of their achievements was to find neolithic jade quarries high in the Italian Alps.
 
Pomeroy, a Scottish artist now based on the Isle of Arran, describes the neolithic blades as ‘works of both immense skill and of a highly developed, visual, manual and spiritual sophistication. As an artist I am inspired by these qualities,' he says in a press release. 'I have always been interested in notions of utility, the Sacred, and power and how these properties combine within the contexts of art and ritual.’
 
The artist's 'exquisite sculpture will ... highlight the ways in which these ancient and precious artefacts continue to inspire and fascinate us today,' says Sheridan.
 
Photos show Sheridan with neolithic blades, and Pomeroy with his sculpture and a prehistoric blade from Greenlaw which inspired him (NMS).

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Dan Hicks FSA writes to say he has just bought a second-hand copy of Pattern of the Past: Studies in Honour of David Clarke (1981, edited by Ian Hodder FSA, Glynn Isaac and Norman Hammond FSA), and finds it had once belonged to the British field archaeologist Paul Ashbee FSA. Ashbee’s work focussed on prehistoric burial mounds, though he also had a hand in the British Museum’s excavations at the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Sutton Hoo, and was president of the Just William Society. He was born in Kent, and the subject on his bookplate is a famous Kent monument, Kit’s Coty House, the exposed megalithic remains of a neolithic burial chamber. Kit’s Coty was among the first ancient sites to be protected by the state, on the advice of General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, and today retains railings controversially erected in the 1880s to prevent vandalism. Photo Historic England.
 

Roland Smith FSA has sent us this interesting essay on the subject of horse racing.
 
‘I have to take issue with you about your item on Leicester City FC. It is your view that the bookmakers’ odds at the start of the season (5,000/1) for Leicester City FC to win the Premier League this year were absurdly good and the bookmakers were “not thinking straight”. Oh for a world where bookmakers offer absurdly good odds! Of course, most winning punters feel they have got a good deal in hindsight but the bookmakers, the consummate calculators of risk, have been offering four-figure odds for the so-called “small clubs” to win the Premier League for years with no-one claiming they have lost their ability to judge risk.
 
‘In fact the pay out on Leicester City FC is the best news story the bookmakers could wish for – the small punter taking the bookies for a large wad of cash. Meanwhile the huge sums lost on the bets on the other clubs more than compensates! Of course, bookmakers do lose on individual or groups of bets – but more often when the favourite, rather than rank outsider, wins. This year they reportedly had the worst Cheltenham Festival in living memory when a string of highly fancied favourites romped home, only to recoup some of their losses when the outsider Rule The World won the Grand National a few weeks later.
 
‘So does any of this have anything to do with the historic environment? Well… bookmakers are significant contributors to the sport of horse-racing, and there would be no horse-racing or racecourses without them. That is important, as Britain has some of the most historic and diverse racecourses in the world. From the “soup-plate” course of Chester, the Roman circus-esque course at Redcar, Fontwell’s figure-of-eight course or the glorious beauty of the downland setting of Goodwood, many are sporting landscapes of considerable antiquity.
 
‘Chester racecourse was founded in 1539, Epsom in 1661, Ascot in 1711 and York in 1730. They owe their origins to a wide variety of circumstances, including royal patronage, military connections or the whim of a rich landowner; hence many are located in historic parkland. Many have, within their settings, significant ancient sites, such as the Neolithic causewayed enclosures of The Trundle and Whitehawk Camp at Goodwood and Brighton racecourses respectively, while the Devil’s Dyke separates the Rowley Mile and July courses at Newmarket. Britain’s racecourses are some of the oldest, largest and most diverse sporting landscapes in Britain.
 
‘This does not mean they are immune from loss. The racecourses of Folkestone and Hereford were both closed in 2012, although the latter is re-opening later this year. In fact the country is littered with “lost” racecourses, such as Lincoln, Manchester, Birmingham and Hurst Park, Surrey, which all closed in the second half of the 20th century. So our racecourses are worth cherishing and protecting, and when Fellows place their Scoop 6 or Yankee bets at their turf accountant on a Saturday, they are, in a small way, supporting these historic sporting venues.’

Detail from a 19th-century Ordnance Survey map shows the Neolithic earthworks at Whitehawk just south of the Grandstand and paddocks at Brighton.

• Catherine Johns FSA admits that she, too, winced at my earlier use of 'careen'. ‘It is only fair to add’, she continues, ‘that although in British English it still retains only its rather specialised definition of turning a ship on its side to work on the hull, it has long been routinely used in American English in the sense of moving rapidly in an uncontrolled manner. I suspect we will see it gaining ground with this meaning in British English too.’
 
Her main reason for contacting Salon, however, was to ‘add a non-scholarly footnote’ to the appreciation of the late Marion Archibald FSA by Leslie Webster FSA.
 
‘As one grows old,’ she writes, ‘and more and more friends and colleagues reach the end of their lives, it is sometimes quite odd things that trigger memories: a really good meringue always makes me think of Marion. One of the many pleasures of attending a Christmas party in the Coins & Medals Department was that Marion would bring in some of her delicious home-made meringues.’
 
• Lascaux bins continue to emerge. Simon James FSA has one in his home study. Paul Stamper FSA, remembering his mother acquiring one because of his young interest in archaeology, found that she still has it in daily use, for ‘filing her confidential post destined for the bonfire – aka anything with her name on, like Reader’s Digest flyers.’