Neil MacGregor FSA left the British Museum in December. At a goodbye do in the Great Court, he reminisced about arriving in 2002, an art historian and former Director of the National Gallery, with little knowledge of archaeology. Curators, he said, told him repeatedly that unrecognisable artefacts were ‘probably votive’.
 
‘Eventually’, he said, ‘I realised that “votive” means something very precious that was found in a bog in Norfolk.’
 
The Burlington Magazine, which he edited in the 1980s, described his gifts to the Museum as bringing ‘an intellectual rigour to its high standards of display … aimed at the widest possible audience’, and identifying its real challenges as not collecting things, but ‘how to engage with the world in new and more far-reaching ways’. The week of his retirement, the Museum posted a video on YouTube of its former director touring the 2014 exhibition, Germany: Memories of a Nation.
 
On his last day at the Museum, he spoke to BBC Radio 4’s Front Row about his final acquisition (‘He wasn’t interested in valedictory interviews,’ said presenter John Wilson), a wooden cross made on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where nearly 350 people drowned in 2013 seeking to escape oppression in Africa. The cross, Jill Cook FSA told Wilson, was made by local carpenter Francesco Tuccio with wood from the wrecked boat. As impressive for the astuteness of its selection as its sad, evocative beauty, it is Neil MacGregor’s 101st object. ‘It allows’, he said, ‘people who don’t have a voice to speak.’
 
He will be advising the Humboldt Forum in Berlin (The Independent described the move as ‘quitting while you’re ahead’, something every 69-year-old likes to hear). His presence here will remain strong, however. He will be working with the Museum on a 2017 BBC Radio 4 series, with a book and an exhibition – featuring the Lampedusa Cross – on faith and society. MacGregor’s successor, Hartwig Fischer, starts in the spring.
 

Hugh Pagan FSA has been reading the Society’s Minute Books. No ordinary records, the series begins on 5 February 1717/18, when antiquarians met in the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street to show each other Exhibits. Pagan’s interest is in numismatics. He sets out the results of his studies in ‘The role of the Society of Antiquaries of London in the advancement of numismatic research during the 18th century’, in a conference proceedings published in Vienna.
 
‘What you should visualise’, he writes, ‘is a second floor room lit by tallow candles, in which a small number of middle-aged men – minor government officials, lawyers, clergymen, medical practitioners, merchants in the City of London, and an occasional aristocrat or country landowner – sat round the tavern’s circular table and passed from hand to hand the coins, medals or other objects brought as exhibits that particular Thursday evening. The selection of exhibits seems only very occasionally to have been pre-arranged before the meeting, and it is clear from the minute books that the quality of the comments made at the meeting depended almost entirely on who was present.’
 
The Society possessed many foreign honorary members from 1736 onwards, but, he says, ‘the evidence for intellectual contact between the Society and numismatic scholars working on the European Continent is extremely scanty.’ Why was this?
 
Partly, Pagan decides, because the Society’s periodical Archaeologia, which first appeared in 1770, carried few articles about coins, and what was there was mostly British – small incentive for Continental numismatists to submit reports. Neither did William Stukeley help. His The Medallic History of Marcus Aurelius Valerius Carausius, Emperor in Britain was published in two volumes in 1757–59. Thanks to his collecting contacts, Stukeley had access to more of Carausius’ coins than the French scholar Claude Genebrier, whose book on the emperor had been published in 1740. However, says Pagan, ‘Genebrier’s book is better than Stukeley’s in almost every other respect.’
 
Nonetheless, coins were much discussed by the Society in the 18th century. ‘Between 1719 and 1753’, writes Pagan, ‘there were some 630 exhibits of coins and medals at Society meetings, involving the display of well over 1000 individual coins and medals. In 1725, the peak year for numismatic exhibits, coins or medals were shown at 31 of the Society’s weekly meetings …
at least 150 coins and medals must have been passed round the table at the Mitre Tavern.’ Pagan appends a detailed list of those who exhibited, spoke on or wrote about items of numismatic interest at Society meetings between 1718 and 1800.
 
Numismatik und Geldgeschichte im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Numismatics and Monetary History in the Age of Enlightenment: Contributions to a Symposium in Dresden Castle, May 2009), was published by the Austrian Numismatic Society in 2015. The volume is edited by Heinz Winter and Bernhard Woytek FSA, and also contains articles by Andrew Burnett FSA (‘The development of numismatics in Britain during the 18th century’), David Dykes FSA (‘The 18th-century British trade token: the contemporary catalogues’) and Robert Thompson FSA (‘Thomas Snelling, senior (1712–1773), and other scholarly coin dealers’).

Image from the Courtauld Institute of Art.
 

 
The Science argument is that impact of human activity on Earth has become strong enough for a new geologic time unit – the Anthropocene – to be recognised, as successor to the Holocene. The authors list a series of more or less simultaneous markers in the stratigraphic record to show how dramatic and visible the change is: the appearance of manufactured materials in sediments, including aluminium, plastics, and concrete; global spikes in fallout radionuclides and particulates from fossil fuel combustion; carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles substantially modified; rates of sea-level rise and the extent of human perturbation of the climate system exceeding Late Holocene changes; and biotic changes including species invasions worldwide and accelerating rates of extinction.
 
In a separate study published in Nature, and in keeping with the notion of a geologic era determined by people, German scientists calculate that human-induced global warming saw off the start of an ice age at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and that even moderate carbon dioxide emissions will postpone the next ice age by at least 100,000 years. Scientific gossip seems supportive of this spectacular interference with the Milankovitch cycles.
 

After the death of Andrew Sherratt FSA in 2006 a memorial fund was established by the Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, to support international scholarship, particularly for those at the start of their careers. The fund's purpose is to assist postgraduate students in Old World Prehistory, from academic institutions anywhere in the world, to travel or gain access to resources that would otherwise be unavailable to them.
 
The Department of Archaeology invites applications for grants from the Fund for use in 2016, for amounts up to £1,000. Applications should be received by the deadline of 29 January 2016, using a form which can be found online at the university website or accessed directly.

Decisions on the award of grants will be made by 29 February and successful applicants notified shortly after; grants should be spent by 31 December 2016. Recipients will be required to submit a short report on their project by the end of January 2017.
 

Two distinguished Fellows appeared in the New Year Honours lists 2016:
 
Sir Roy Strong FSA received a Companion of Honour for his outstanding contribution to UK cultural life (heading the list of ‘well-known names’ in the Cabinet Office press release). ‘The youngest ever director of the National Portrait Gallery,’ reads the full citation, ‘he transformed its conservative image. Also the youngest director of the V&A, his exhibitions on the destruction of the country house, the future of our churches and a celebration of British gardening significantly boosted the conservationist agenda over the last forty years. He has continued to write extensively on history, culture and garden design; the garden he created in Herefordshire has been described as one of the most innovative formal gardens of the last fifty years. He has also served for fifteen years as High Bailiff and Searcher of the Sanctuary at Westminster Abbey.’
 
Maurice Howard PSA, FSA, Director (2007) and President of the Society (2010–14), received an OBE for services to higher education and architectural heritage. â€˜As for my service to all the heritage organisations,’ he told the University of Sussex, where he is Professor of History of Art, ‘the V&A, the Society of Antiquaries, the National Trust, Historic Royal Palaces and our special link with West Dean College, I hope that everything I have done has helped build strong relationships for the University and enabled our students to get access to libraries, benefit from placements, end up getting professional jobs with such organisations.’ Howard, continues the website, ‘is principally an architectural historian of Early Modern Europe whose research has encompassed the arts of painting and the applied arts. His work has focused mainly on architecture in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.’
 
In New Zealand, the 2016 New Year Honours List featured Charles Higham FSA, who was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to archaeology.
 
Higham, reads the citation, ‘is regarded as one of the world’s leading archaeologists. [He] was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Otago in 1966 before being appointed Foundation Professor in 1968. He devoted the next decade to expanding the department and developing its international reputation. He was a foundation member of the James Cook Fellowship selection committee. He has been the acting Dean of the School of Social Sciences and a member of the Social Sciences selection panel for the Marsden Fund. He has directed archaeological research in Southeast Asia, with particular reference to Thailand and Cambodia, since 1969 and is now regarded as the leading authority on the region. His most recent research has concentrated on the origins of the Civilisation of Angkor. In 2013 his research was voted one of the top ten projects in the world at the Shanghai Archaeological Forum. He has maintained a key interest in Māori prehistory and has published on the subject. He is the only archaeologist to have delivered both the Wheeler and Reckitt lectures at the British Academy. Professor Higham is the New Zealand representative on the International Union of Pre- and Protohistoric Sciences and serves on the committee of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association.’












Pamela Jane Smith FSA was awarded an honorary Igbo chieftaincy in September 2015 during her visit to Nigeria sponsored by The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge. The title of Ola-Ocha Ndigbo Na Oyo State recognises Smith’s dedicated service to the Igbo people, and also honours her as the widow of Thurstan Shaw FSA and as a representative of the McDonald Institute. Accompanied by Marcus Brittain, also an Institute Fellow, Smith attended meetings to discuss the iconic African bronze art sites of Igbo-Ukwu in south-east Nigeria. The sites were originally excavated by Shaw with the participation of the Igbo Anozie families in 1959 and 1964 (photo above left shows Smith with HRH Eze Chief Alex Anozie). A royal burial with stores of intricate pottery, copper, fabric and elaborate bronze artwork was discovered (above right). A team of Nigerian and UK archaeologists hope to return to continue the work, interrupted by the Biafran War. â€˜Marcus and I received a wonderful welcome in Nigeria,’ writes Pamela Jane Smith. ‘The title was truly unexpected and an honour.’ Norman Hammond FSA adds that Higham’s work in Thailand had already earned him Fellowship of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1992 and a Corresponding FBA in 2000, and the British Academy awarded him the Grahame Clark Medal for Prehistoric Archaeology in 2014. The photo is from Temple World, for whom he will be leading a Mekong cruise in November.
 
The work of several Fellows was recognised at the second Shanghai Archaeology Forum in December, where Colin Renfrew FSA (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn), former Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, was given the Lifetime Achievement Award.
 
A Field Discovery Award was presented to John Chapman FSA for Early urbanism in Europe?: the Case of the Tripillia Mega-sites of Ukraine.
 
Six of the 11 Research Awards went to Fellows:
 
Ian Hodder FSA for the Çatalhöyük project: important Anatolian contributions to the development of early societies.
 
Stephen Shennan FSA for the Cultural Evolution of Neolithic Europe (EUROEVOL) project.
 
Alasdair Whittle FSA for The Times of Their Lives: high-resolution radiocarbon-based chronological analysis of the European Neolithic, through formal modelling.
 
Norman Hammond FSA for his work at Cuello in northern Belize, on economic and social origins of Maya civilisation.
 
Martin Jones FSA for his work on the origin and early spread of Chinese millets.
 
Leonardo López Luján Hon FSA for The Great Temple Project: in search of the sacred precinct of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.
 
In the photo above are Arkadiusz Marciniak, representing Hodder (third from left), Jones (sixth from left), Whittle (eighth), López Luján (10th) and Hammond (who supplied the photo, 11th).

The Prime Minister has appointed Sir Neil Cossons FSA a Trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund, for three years from 31 January. Cossons, says a DCMS/HLF press release, has been active in the fields of industrial archaeology and heritage since the early 1960s, as Director of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, Director of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and Director of the Science Museum, London. He has served as a non-executive director of British Waterways Board. He was Chairman of English Heritage 2000–07. A chairman, chief executive and board member of standing he has advised governments, museums and heritage agencies in a number of countries, conducted peer reviews of scholarship and research, chaired architectural selection panels, and published and broadcast widely on industrial history and archaeology and conservation.
 
Her Majesty the Queen, on the advice of the Archbishops of the Church of England, has appointed Sir Simon Jenkins FSA a member of The Churches Conservation Trust’s board of trustees. Journalist and writer and former Chairman of the National Trust, Jenkins has a keen interest and knowledge of historic churches, says a CCT press release. Loyd Grossman FSA, CCT Chairman said, ‘Simon Jenkins knows and loves the heritage of England's parish churches. His wide experience of the heritage movement and his outstanding writing and speaking skills will make a huge contribution to the work of the Trust,’ ‘Every house in England’, said Auberon Waugh of Jenkins’ England’s Thousand Best Churches, (1999), ‘should have a copy of this book.’
 
Simon Bradley FSA and Mary Beard FSA continue to receive accolades for their new books. Richard Joyner, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, Nottingham Trent University told The Times Higher Education that Bradley’s The Railways: Nation, Network and People was one of his ‘favourite reads’ of 2015, describing it as ‘loving, witty and informed’. In The Guardian Juliet Mabey (Publisher, Oneworld) chose Beard’s SPQR â€“ ‘exactly the sort of brilliantly researched, authoritatively written and accessible non-fiction that we particularly love to publish’ – as the book she didn’t, but wished she had. The Guardian reports studies showing that popular history writing is a male preserve, Beard being one of the few women to appear in various lists in the US and the UK.
 
Parish Church Treasures, by John Goodall FSA, was favourably reviewed by James McConnachie in The Sunday Times, which published an extract on 20 December. 
 
Michael Wood FSA has been in China. The first of his six one-hour films in The Story Of China will be broadcast on BBC2 on 21 January. A BBC press release says Wood explores the history of the world’s oldest continuous state, from the ancient past to the present day. The photo shows him with Korean scholars at the Confucian cemetery in Qufu.


Lucy Worsley FSA, Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, was a Team Captain in BBC2’s The Great History Quiz – The Tudors, broadcast on Christmas eve and available to view until 3 February for those who can access iPlayer. Two teams of broadcasting historians (the other captained by Dan Snow, President of the Council for British Archaeology) answered questions about Tudor life. The first in a new series of TV films, Empire of the Tsars: Romanov Russia with Lucy Worsley, was broadcast on BBC Four on 6 January, titled Reinventing Russia (available on iPlayer until 10 February). The second, Age of Extremes, went out on 13 January and the last, The Road to Revolution, will be broadcast on 20 January.
 
Renfrew and Bahn, the thinking archaeologists’ textbook for generations of students first published in 1991, achieves its seventh edition this week. Written by Colin Renfrew FSA and Paul Bahn FSA, it comes, says a Thames and Hudson press release, with ‘eleven brand new box features, which highlight the latest discoveries and recent scientific developments in archaeology. Also new to this edition is coverage of cutting edge survey, excavation and recording techniques plus information about new discoveries, such as a desert camp used by Lawrence of Arabia in his First World War campaigns.’ 
 

Chris Fern FSA, lead archaeologist in the Staffordshire Hoard project to catalogue and analyse the find, has written Before Sutton Hoo: The Prehistoric Remains and Early Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Tranmer House, Bromeswell, Suffolk, published by East Anglian Archaeology. About a cemetery excavated in 2000, the book contains, he says, contributions by many other Fellows. ‘The findings suggest a wealthy local population in the period just prior to the founding of the mound cemetery at Sutton Hoo. A small Bronze Age barrow and part of an Iron Age field system were also recorded. It is argued that these earthworks survived to at least the time of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery, and influenced its location and layout.’ Fern will be talking about the excavation at the Sutton Hoo Society’s annual Basil Brown Lecture, at Woodbridge, Suffolk, on 28 May.

In 1953 the schoolboy Alan Garner FSA found a wooden shovel in old copper and lead mines at Alderley Edge, Cheshire, where, according to legend, lay a sleeping king and his knights ready to save England in the last battle of the world. Nearly 40 years later, writes John Prag FSA, Garner, by then a world-famous author, presented the shovel to Manchester Museum in the University of Manchester. ‘The gift inspired a research project employing every discipline in the museum’s armoury’, says Prag, who has co-ordinated the project, ‘and many more besides.’ The Alderley Edge Landscape Project, a joint venture by the Museum and the National Trust, set out to study every aspect of Alderley’s story. Prag co-edited the first report with Simon Timberlake (The Archaeology of Alderley Edge, 2005). The Story of Alderley: Living with the Edge, edited by Prag and published by Manchester University Press, follows that up with everything else: the natural world, the story of the mines, social history and conservation, with contributions from Garner, John Adams FSA and Jeremy Milln FSA. Fellows can buy the book at a discount from Manchester University Press, quoting the online code OTH574. Garner’s shovel was radiocarbon-dated to the Bronze Age.
 
Andrew Spicer FSA, Professor of Early Modern European History at Oxford Brookes University and Literary Director of the Royal Historical Society, has edited Parish Churches in the Early Modern World. ‘This collection of 15 essays’, he writes, ‘looks at parish churches or places that assumed similar responsibilities during the early modern period. As well as its broad geographical scope, with five non-European areas discussed, the volume looks at a range of confessions with essays on Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anti-Trinitarian and Anglican places of worship.’ Further details and a more detailed synopsis can be found on Ashgate’s website.
 
Sally Badham FSA has written Seeking Salvation: Commemorating the Dead in the Late Medieval English Parish. ‘The medieval Christian faithful’, says the publisher, Shaun Tyas, ‘believed that their souls had to be purified in Purgatory before they could enter Heaven. This ground-breaking volume, which covers the period c.1300–1558, examines the responses of English men and women in carrying out good works which would attract prayers so as to improve their chances of salvation. Evidence is in part drawn from the material remains of commemorative objects paid for by better-off members of society. They sought spiritual benefits not just by erecting tomb monuments but also through many other forms of memoria to be found in our parish churches. Unfortunately, much was swept away by the iconoclasm which accompanied the Reformation. Such sources are therefore supplemented by documentary evidence, including wills, inventories and Middle English literary texts.’ A ‘spectacular section of colour photos’, says Badham, was mostly taken by newly-elected Fellow C.B. Newham.’
 
Shaun Tyas has also published Places of Worship in Britain and Ireland, 300-950, edited by Paul Barnwell FSA. Drawing on a series of weekend study conferences at Rewley House, Oxford, almost all the 11 essays are by Fellows, including Barbara Yorke, Martin Henig, Nancy Edwards, Tomás Ó Carragáin, Sally M. Foster, Jane Hawkes, Richard Morris, Rosemary Cramp, David Parsons, Michael Hare and Paul S. Barnwell. The book is the first in a series about places of worship from the late Roman period to the present. ‘Starting with evidence for Christian sites and buildings in Roman Britain, it brings together studies of religious sites in the formative period of Christianity in the British Isles, across regions with differing degrees of Roman legacy and varying histories of conversion which have left different kinds of evidence, and are therefore rarely studied together.’

The Mystery of Marquis D’Oisy, by Julian Litten FSA (and with a foreword by Sir Roy Strong FSA), sets out to explain how a man with such a name – the full Amand Edouard Ambroise Marie Lowis Etienne Phillipe d’Sant Andre Tornay was perhaps too much for the front cover – painted in Thaxted, Essex. ‘He may have claimed to be a French aristocrat of Brazilian descent,’ says the blurb, ‘but he had a Cockney accent and he was certainly a refugee from bankruptcy. He was a talented artist, but he appeared, as if from nowhere, in north-west Essex in 1917. He designed church furnishings and ladies’ dresses, painted furniture, and staged a long series of historical pageants in the East Midlands until 1936. He died in 1959.’ He was, says Strong, ‘one of those artistic hangers-on to whoever lived in the “great house”’. Litten establishes that the Marquis was in fact born in Bath, but that he was genuinely ‘a talented artist and his work deserves celebration’. Published by Shaun Tyas.
 
Ben Cowell FSA has departed his role as Regional Director – East of England at the National Trust, to be, from the first of this month, Director General of the Historic Houses Association. Before joining the Trust, Cowell had worked for ten years at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, including a two-year posting as Private Secretary to the Permanent Secretary. During this time he also went on secondment to English Heritage, where he was responsible for commissioning research into the economic and social impact of heritage and for writing the annual Heritage Counts report.
 
Cowell left the Trust with an illustrated book, by him, Stephen Daniels FSA and Lucy Veale. Landscapes of the National Trust, a collaboration with Nottingham University, explores the concept of landscape, featuring National Trust property and many of the research projects funded through the AHRC’s Landscape and Environment Programme (in which a number of Fellows were involved, for example in the Tales of the Frontier project).
 
The Telegraph described Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England (Oxford University Press), by Caroline Grigson FSA, as ‘a depressingly thorough account of centuries of suffering inflicted on our fellow creatures in the name of a good gawp … more concerned with delivering a scholarly chronology than analysis or anecdote, she shares a soft spot for the eccentric menagerie-keepers such as Lady Amelia Anne Hobart, wife of the austere Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, who sent her husband to George IV's coronation with a plume of feathers from her own ostriches.’ ‘Filled with lively anecdote and scholarly commentary,’ said The Guardian, ‘Grigson’s book is a delightful guide to our long national obsession with wildlife.'
 

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