Out-of-London Meeting in Cardiff

We are looking forward to the forthcoming out-of-London Ordinary Meeting of Fellows in Cardiff on Thursday, 2 March. The President, General Secretary, Communications Manager and Publications Manager will be in attendance and are all looking forward to connecting with Welsh Fellows. We will hear a lecture by Fellows Paul Nicholson and Steve Mills, entitled 'Views of an Antique Land: Imaging Egypt and Palestine in the First World War'. More information about the event is on our website.

Fellows wishing to use the opportunity to be formally admitted are asked to call or email our Executive Assistant, Jola Zdunek, in advance (020 7479 7080 or admin@sal.org.uk).

We would like to thank Fellow John Hines for his generous time and effort in organising this event in Cardiff.
 

Reminder: Nominations for Council, President and Treasurer

Constable called it The Great Salisbury, and wrote of it, ‘I am told I got it to look better than anything I have yet done.’ One of his 13 monumental ‘six-footer’ canvases, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows is among the UK’s best known paintings. A new research project may change the way we think about it. On 19 February Tate published a study to which Charles Watkins FSA has contributed, suggesting the artist added the spectacular rainbow to a previously completed canvas to commemorate a friend's death.
 
In Focus: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows exhibited 1831 by John Constable, is the outcome of a Tate project prompted by the gallery’s acquisition of the painting in 2013. Amy Concannon (Assistant Curator, British Art, 1790–1850, Tate) writes about the artist and the work. Brian Young (Tutor in Modern History, University of Oxford) addresses religion and politics; Watkins (Professor of Rural Geography, University of Nottingham), landscape management, with a focus on Constable’s closely observed trees and on the Harnham Water Meadows, from where the view is seen; and the Very Reverend June Osborne, Dean of Salisbury, assesses the cathedral today.
 
There is much of interest in these detailed essays, but the point that will enter future exhibition captions is presented by John E Thornes, Emeritus Professor of Applied Meteorology, University of Birmingham. In ‘A reassessment of the solar geometry of Constable’s Salisbury rainbow,’ Thornes suggests ‘for the first time, that Constable’s remarkable scientific knowledge enabled him, at a later date, to add a rainbow that corresponds to the time of his friend Archdeacon John Fisher’s death on the afternoon of 25 August 1832.’
 
Concannon shows it is possible that there was no rainbow in the original version of the painting exhibited in 1831. Thornes argues that although Constable was ‘a perfectionist about the weather in his scenes’, this painting’s rainbow is ‘meteorologically inconsistent’. Light and shadow show the sun was not behind the artist when he painted the landscape, which it would have to have been for a rainbow to have been visible, as Constable knew; and a rainbow created by the painting’s light would have been much lower in the sky. The rainbow can only have been inserted at a later date, says Thornes.
 
It had already been recognised that the rainbow meets the horizon at Fisher’s house, Leadenhall. Thornes now argues that the rainbow would have been possible from Constable’s viewpoint on the afternoon of Fisher’s death. He finds a ‘convincing confirmation that such a rainbow is in fact plausible’ in an article by Tim Tatton-Brown FSA published in 1997. Tatton-Brown located the exact viewpoint from which Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows was painted, the Longbridge, and illustrated the point with this photo taken near sunset in late September, which, says Thornes, confirms the small size of the cathedral relative to ‘a real, possibly full, 42-degree rainbow.’
 
The painting is on display at Salisbury Museum until 25 March, in Constable in Context: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows in Perspective and will travel to the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, where it will be displayed from 8 April 2017 to March 2018.
 
Main photo: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, John Constable 1831, © Tate, London 2013, purchased with assistance from the Heritage Lottery Fund, The Manton Foundation, the Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation) and Tate Members.
 

After considerable research and conservation, Jennifer Scott FSA has identified Wedding Dance in the Open Air as a work by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564–1638). It had previously been attributed to a copyist or a follower of the Flemish master. Scott began her quest in 2014 when she was planning an exhibition at the Holburne Museum in Bath. Together with two other paintings acquired by William Holburne in the 19th century (Robbing the Bird’s Nest and Visit to a Farmhouse), the discovery makes the Museum’s the UK's largest collection of Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s work.
 
Scott told Alastair Sooke, writing for BBC Culture, that she thought the panel had ‘potential’ as soon as she saw it in the museum’s store. ‘It sounds silly,’ she said, ‘but it’s instinct. You look at something and think either, “Ooh, no,” or, “Hang on a second.” In this case, certain things jumped out through that murky surface.’ After consulting Flemish art specialist Amy Orrock and raising funds through a donor, Scott gave the picture to Elizabeth Holford, an experienced painting conservator. ‘The results’, says Sooke, ‘are spectacular.’
 
Bruegel: Defining a Dynasty is open until 4 June.

Dame Jennifer Jenkins died on 2 February aged 96. Obituaries led with her leadership of the National Trust, where she ‘oversaw the addition to its estates of well over 50 villages and hamlets and half the coastline of Britain, including the white cliffs of Dover’ (Guardian).
 
‘In the course of a career spent mostly in the voluntary sector’, said the Times, ‘she was, as the Evening Standard reported on her 80th birthday, “a member of more public bodies than anyone may care to count”: the National Trust, Historic Buildings Council, Ancient Monuments Society, Royal Parks Review Group, Heritage Lottery Fund, Architectural Heritage Fund, British Standards Institution, Design Council and the Courtauld Institute, not to mention 11 years as head of the Consumers’ Association.’ The Telegraph said that at the Trust, where she was Chair from 1985 to 1991, ‘she was widely regarded as providing a much needed shock to the system. She alarmed stuffier elements in the Trust by eschewing the chauffeur-driven car favoured by her predecessor. Lord Gibson, preferring to travel by public transport.’
 
Many Fellows will remember Jenkins’ as Chair of the Historic Buildings Council (1975–84). ‘In those years’, wrote Marc Girouard FSA to the Times, ‘she played a key role in halting the appalling destruction of the historic fabric of English towns that had raged unchecked through the 1950s and 1960s, and on into the 1970s. The HBC under her leadership was concerned with buildings of all kinds in both town and country, but her special interest was in the towns.
 
‘Legislation in 1967 had made possible conservation areas, and she worked tirelessly to make the system effective, liaising with the local authorities, visiting existing conservation areas, promoting the creation of new ones, and encouraging both with HBC grants. Towns all over England owe her a debt that can scarcely be exaggerated.’
 
Her work led to the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England in 1984. She was appointed DBE In 1985 for services to ancient and historical buildings. Photo shows Dame Jenkins with her husband Roy Jenkins, a prominent politician (Times).
 

Rachael Maskell, Labour Member of Parliament for York Central, has said ancient art and artefacts made from ivory are ‘a shameful part of our history’ and should be taken ‘off the shelves of our museums.’ ‘Why have them on display?’ she asked.
 
David Starkey FSA and Simon Thurley FSA think otherwise. On 15 February the Antiques Trade Gazette asked for comment on a proposed total ban on trading ivory in the UK, regardless of the age or nature of pieces. The ban ‘is one of the largest threats to the preservation of Western decorative art,’ said Starkey. ‘Some of the greatest artworks in the world contain ivory,’ said Thurley. ‘We need to have guarantees that pre-1947 ivory can be traded. Without the trade these items will have no value, as museums will not be able to add to their collections.’ Laura Chesters reported similar comments from two other TV presenters, Philip Mould, art and antiques dealer, and gardener Alan Titchmarsh.
 
Martin Levy FSA, Chairman of H Blairman and Sons and a member of the Spoliation Advisory Panel, wrote to Salon in 2015 to say that a Director’s Order from President Obama had ‘led to a de facto ban on the import of any ivory into the USA.’ In May last year we learnt that some 19th-century antiques containing ivory had been taken apart at the order of US customs. In October the British government proposed stricter trading rules, by making the present ban on the sale of ivory artefacts less than 70 years old subject to documentary or scientific proof.
 
Things have moved on again. On 6 February MPs considered bringing in a complete ban on ivory trading. The Westminster Hall debate responded to an e-petition, Shut down the domestic ivory market in the UK, which had received a little over the required 100,000 signatures. Luke Hall opened the discussion with a vivid summary of the extreme threat to the world’s elephant populations (between seven and ten elephants would be killed while members sat and talked, he said). He noted the difficulty law enforcement officers have in distinguishing pre- from post-1947 ivory, ‘especially as newer ivory is frequently and deliberately disguised as antique,’ and questioned how the age of all ivories could be determined (‘Radiocarbon dating every piece of ivory would be hugely expensive and significantly increase the cost of the licensing regime’).
 
Rob Marris asked, several times, how much such dating would cost. Hall said he didn’t know, and both Pauline Latham and Danny Kinahan said they had ‘no idea’. Victoria Borwick said the ‘usual cost is a few hundred pounds, but it very much depends on the complexity of the object.’ Notwithstanding, Latham said she had ‘just been emailed that it costs roughly £1,000.’ Owen Patterson noted a 2016 Carlisle Crown court case in which ‘cow bone carvings’ were carbon dated at a total cost of £1,134. ‘I have also picked up’, he added, ‘that the University of Oxford does a cheap deal on a single item for £500.’
 
Salon can reveal the true cost of radiocarbon dating. The University of Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU) charges £500 + VAT for a single sample. The Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory charges £315, with a special price of £415 for a faster four-week turnaround. Beta Analytic will date a sample within 14 days for $595 (£406 before the Brexit Referendum vote, currently £475). Discounts are available for larger batches: SUERC charges £295 a date for 40 samples or more. Questions may be asked about provenance: ‘We reserve the right to refuse material for dating if the provenance is uncertain or for other ethical considerations,’ says OARU. Selling Antiques website currently lists 126 ivory items from a number of dealers, ranging in price from £105 (a miniature carved seal, said to be Victorian) to £6,850 (a Japanese screen said to have been made in 1900); no provenance information is given for either item.
 
Latham felt that ‘Until we bring in a near total ban I fear that criminals will find a way to pretend that illegal pieces are legal.’ Rachael Maskell wanted to do more than ban ivory sales: she sought a devaluation of art. ‘We do not want these items displayed as glorious parts of our heritage,’ she said. ‘It is a shameful part of our history, and we should name it as that and realise what we did in leading the world in those trades.’ She described ‘tak[ing ivory] off the shelves of our museums’ as ‘progressive’. As she spoke, she was interrupted by Marris asking for evidence that a total ban would save elephants. ‘I will pick up those issues,’ she replied, but did not address them.
 
Tim Loughton FSA said Maskell was ‘fundamentally wrong.’ Borwick said that ‘genuine experts can tell the difference between genuine works of art… the market in the Far East is for shiny, modern, contemporary pieces. That is entirely different from the antique ivory sold by our dealers and exhibited in our museums here.’ ‘We have to reach a consensus,’ said Ed Vaizey, ‘which I think is breaking out, that antiques should be exempt from any ban.’
 
Levy has frequently defended the trade in ivory antiques in Apollo, most recently in a piece titled ‘We can preserve elephants AND conserve art’ (7 February). Commenting on the Westminster debate, he described it as ‘a reminder that we are now living in a world of “alternative facts”.’ Rob Marris asked throughout, he writes, ‘the simple question: would a ban on the movement of bona fide works of art made of or including ivory save a single living elephant? The question was not answered, nor indeed effectively addressed by any of those proposing a ban.’ ‘We agree unequivocally,’ says Levy, ‘with the “conservation lobby” … that poaching and the illicit trade in tusks is abhorrent and must be stamped out.’ ‘What came through strongly and quite properly from the debate,’ he concludes, ‘was the desire for some sort of authentication process that would give confidence that the market was not a cover for the meretricious trinkets that by and large have made up the case for alarmist television broadcasts and newspaper articles.’
 
In press statements, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum have defended their right to collect ivory. ‘Whilst the V&A is not actively seeking to collect early 20th century ivory,’ it said, ‘the Museum will consider acquiring objects dating prior to 1947 featuring or made from ivory where there is a strong link to the collection and within relevant regulations and guidelines.’ The British Museum said it ‘supports any efforts to protect elephants in Africa and Asia and to curb the illegal trade and export of ivory, but we are also clear that this should not include antique ivory works of art. There is no public benefit in restricting the display or movement of ivory works of art made before 1947 and legislation should not extend to cover actions carried out before that date.’
 
• The ‘cow bones’ Owen Patterson referred to was a coded description by an eBay seller who was convicted of illegal ivory trading last year. He claimed his carvings had been brought out of Africa by his granny in 1947, but dating by SUERC showed the pieces to be more recent.
 
The Telegraph noted on 15 February that the Duke of Cambridge had told Jane Goodall he ‘would like to see all the ivory owned by Buckingham Palace destroyed’ – the paper said this would include an ivory throne given to Queen Victoria by the Maharajah of Travancore. Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Jones, art critic, said, ‘If we stop ourselves looking at … premodern ivory we will be philistines and bigots, congratulating ourselves on a victory over art. The next step is cultural destruction. We should leave this deadly line of thinking to Islamic State.’

Photos shows smuggled ivory in transit from Nigeria to Hong Kong and China seized at Heathrow airport, and detail of a tusk depicting scenes from Buddha's life, in the National Museum, New Delhi (both from Wikimedia).
 

Neil Jackson FSA, Charles Reilly Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, University of Liverpool in London, writes about proposals to put a Holocaust Memorial and Information Centre in Victoria Tower Gardens. This is a small strip of well-used green space surrounded by trees and fronting the Thames, immediately south of the Palace of Westminster. ‘In view of these proposals both infringing a World Heritage Site and being in contravention of Westminster City Council's published position on monuments,’ writes Jackson, ‘not to mention what they might do to the park itself, I wonder if Salon would consider discussing this?’
 
David Cameron, then Prime Minister, announced in January last year that a new national Holocaust memorial would be created next to the Houses of Parliament. Few have questioned the appropriateness of the memorial, though not everyone was comfortable with the government’s headline that it would be ‘a permanent statement of our British values.’ ‘Given Britain’s awkward relationship to events in prewar Germany,’ wrote Ian Jack in the Guardian this February, ‘including the quota set on its refugees, a little less self-congratulation may be in order’; Cameron referred to modern refugees as a ‘bunch of migrants’ on the day that he launched the memorial, Rowan Moore wrote in the Observer. However, Jackson is not the only one unhappy about the chosen site.
 
A petition, Save VICTORIA TOWER GARDENS: no building in this precious London park! has to date received nearly 1,000 supporters. The Save Victoria Tower Gardens Campaign, it says, ‘is of course not opposed in any way to the creation of a Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre… It simply says that Victoria Tower Gardens is the wrong place for it.’

The Thorney Island Society, concerned with the area’s local history and preservation, and of which the Very Rev the Dean of Westminster John Hall FSA is a Vice President, finds it ‘very difficult to imagine that a project of this size and importance would not dominate the space and transform it from a tranquil local park to a busy civic space … we feel that there are more appropriate sites.’
 
On 9 February Edward Leigh led a brief debate in the House of Commons, setting out his view that the gardens ‘are insufficient for this task, while pointing out that we have a very good solution available close by, at the Imperial War Museum.’ Andrew Percy, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, responded that it had already been decided the memorial would be in the park. The Government is consulting local residents, stakeholders, Royal Parks, Westminster City Council and Historic England, he said, to ensure that the gardens’ character is maintained.
 
Short-listed entries for an architectural competition can be seen online. ‘Looking at them all,’ writes Jack, ‘I felt a sense of their failure – their littleness, their useless abstraction and vain attempt to give meaning or insight into such a barbarous thing. Perhaps there should be books, papers, photographs, interviews, film and no other memorial – the time for monuments having somehow passed.’
 
‘Given that the project has got this far,’ writes Moore, ‘the best thing might be to employ the most thoughtful team of the 10 and reconsider both the learning centre and the site.’
 

What should we do with our (or others’) slides when the time comes for disposal? Salon has shown how they can be turned into lampshades, and Fellows have been offered a collection of 4,000 photos. Paul Stamper FSA has a useful proposal:
 
‘In part’, he writes, ‘it’s the sheer number of slides which can be so daunting. I’d suggest the only way forward is to be ruthless, and to do a rapid triage. First, family slides, including ones where offspring are providing scale against ruins, should be passed to relatives. The great mass which might be termed “Where I went on my holidays” – views of Exeter cathedral or the Leaning Tower of Pisa – plus slides copied from books for lecture purposes, could (and should) be binned with the clearest of consciences. This would then leave the third category, which is material potentially of interest to posterity such as pictures of excavations, or of lost or changed vernacular buildings, townscapes and industrial landscapes.
 
‘I don’t pretend this is the entire solution. There’s then the question of finding a relevant repository to take the material, and whether it wants slides or digitised images. But at least by doing the triage what may well seem too daunting a prospect – tackling a slide collection – becomes something focussed and manageable. Lastly, we should each take responsibility for triaging our own collections. Don’t leave it too late, and don’t lumber others with the responsibility.’
 
This may offer little comfort for John Nandris FSA, who writes with a dilemma common to many retiring university lecturers:
 
‘I have by my reckoning some 10,000 colour slides resulting from my career and travels mainly in Europe from the 1960s onwards. They document that long-term change in matters of European archaeology and comparative ethnoarchaeology, which is the object of our researches. It is essentially an irreplaceable record. They formed a basis for my lectures at the UCL Institute of Archaeology over about four decades. I believe that this is a widespread problem for excavators and field archaeologists.
 
‘Such an archive needs to be digitised to be effective. This is not a candidate for do-it-yourself. Slide film degrades and undergoes colour changes. Preservation is becoming paramount. Such a collection is not just a matter of shovelling all one’s selfies into a repository. I have tried to raise funding from numerous sources without success, including donating the originals. There is the institutional problem of curating such collections.
 
‘It’s essentially a problem about data. I know that there are organisations which deal with this, for example in relation to excavations, but like the ant in the tea cup, I finally gave up exhausted.’
 
What should Nandris do? The question applies equally to digital images: to be useful, they too need to be edited, captioned and archived (though the automatic capture of date and location at least solves what can be a big issue for old slides).
 
In earlier times at excavation and restoration projects, colour slides were often the only record of important transitory details; collections such as Nandris’ can contain views of life and landscapes long gone (he attached a summary list whose themes include ‘Gypsy smiths’, ‘The social role of Music & musical instruments’ and ‘Material Culture and Symbolic Values of the Romanian shepherd’).
 
In England local museums and Heritage Environment Records would be an obvious likely repository, but they are struggling without this new challenge. Researchers might actively seek slides from multiple sources specific to a site or topic of interest. But part of the problem is that we have very little idea of what is out there. How much? How important? Where? There is scope for a nationally funded project to consider the resource and its challenges, with some urgency.
 

Ivor Noël Hume FSA, pioneering historical archaeologist, died in February.
 
Charles Truman FSA, curator, art historian and dealer, died in February.
 
Appreciations appear in Fellows Remembered below.
 
Alan Biggins FSA, medical research scientist, archaeologist and geophysical surveyor, has died.
 
Iain MacIvor, formerly Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments for Scotland and a former Fellow, has died.
 
Appreciations will appear in the next Salon.

John Goodchild, who was not a Fellow, died on 6 January aged 81. ‘John was a colossus in the field of West Yorkshire and industrial history,’ writes Richard Knowles FSA, ‘and his loss will be irreplaceable to researchers at both local and national level. Whilst he lectured and wrote on innumerable topics, his most lasting legacy will be his vast collection of manuscript and related material which is the most substantial of its kind in private hands. Goodchild became founding Curator of Cusworth Hall Museum, Doncaster, in 1966. Returning to Wakefield as District Archivist, he became Principal Local Studies Officer. On retirement he established the John Goodchild Collection beneath Drury Lane Library, Wakefield; the collection is currently housed in the new Local History Centre in Kirkgate. It includes material from the 12th century onwards, and is especially rich in the 18th and 19th centuries: there are over 1,000 boxes of manuscripts alone. Knowles’ obituary of Goodchild was published in the Guardian on 22 January.
 
The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies has published Kane From Canada, the memoirs of George Kane (1916–2008) edited by Mary Kane and Jane Roberts FSA. Kane, says the blurb, ’was at heart a farm boy from Saskatchewan.’ He looks back on his family background and schooldays, and university in Vancouver, Toronto, and Northwestern universities, before setting off for London on an Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire graduate scholarship in 1938. He never lived in Canada again. Kane spoke rarely about his wartime years as an Army officer, but the greater part of his memoir focuses on 1939–1945, on POW life in Germany – and escape attempts. Kane later won international acclaim as a medieval scholar. The final chapter, to 1965, includes discussion of the origins of his Piers Plowman editions. Kane taught at University College London, and later held chairs at Royal Holloway (1955–65) and King’s College (1965–76). He then moved to the University of North Carolina, where he held the William Rand Kenan Jr Professorship of English (1976–87).
 
Crypts of London is by Malcolm Johnson FSA. The story really begins, says the blurb, when, against the wishes of architects such as Wren and Vanbrugh, clergy, churchwardens and vestries interred wealthy parishioners in their crypts to earn money. By 1800 there were 79 church crypts in London. Interments in inner London ended in the 1850s; since then, 52 crypts have been cleared, and five partially cleared. Many have a new life as chapels, restaurants, medical centres and museums. With rare illustrations, this study reveals the history hidden beneath London’s churches. Malcolm Johnson is a retired priest with a PhD from King’s College, London. His St Martin-in- the-Fields was published in 2005.
 
On 8 February the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) committed £3.8 million to a new five-year Bats in Churches partnership between Natural England, the Church of England, the Bat Conservation Trust, Historic England and the Churches Conservation Trust. The project will trial new techniques to help reconcile protecting bats with the effect of their droppings, which can ‘restrict activities, damage historic artefacts and put a strain on the volunteers who look after the buildings.’ Commenting on the announcement in the Times, Clive Aslet (a former Country Life editor) referred to Parish Church Treasures by John Goodall FSA. ‘You’ve only got to look at [the book] to see the marvels of craftsmanship contained in churches,’ he writes. ‘Those who want to see more bats and badgers’, he says, ‘aren’t generally the ones paying for them. If conservationists had to pay for the damage caused by bats would they be so clamorous?’ Jean Wilson FSA, President, Church Monuments Society, claimed in a letter to the paper that the damage bats do to churches had been ‘played down’ in the HLF announcement. ‘The extent of the irreparable damage to monumental brasses,’ she says, ‘is well documented. Bat faeces stain alabaster, marble and tiling. Bat urine damages wall paintings and screens.’ Photo Hugh Clark/Bat Conservation Trust.

Big Saves: Heroic Transformations of Great Landmarks, by Marcus Binney FSA, is published by SAVE Britain's Heritage. It is, says Diana Tyson FSA, ‘proof of how with energy and imagination, and above all with love, new, exciting and successful futures can be found and structured for the nation's historic buildings.’ Under themes such as Defence Buildings, Markets and Hospitals, the book, says Tyson, ‘describes how buildings which might have been doomed to dereliction and demolition have been given a new lease of life. The many twists and turns of their fates are recorded, with sometimes hair-raising last-minute rescues. Their new lives are enormously varied and inventive, and include their becoming mixed residential and commercial units, hotels or museums, or rediscovering their original uses as cinema, theatre or event hall. Perhaps the culmination of the struggle is Battersea Power Station, in Binney's words, “the Mount Everest of Preservation”.’

Danielle Schreve FSA and Chris Stringer FSA joined presenters Brian Cox and Robin Ince, and comedian Ross Noble, in The Human Story: How We Got Here and Why We Survived, an episode in BBC Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage first broadcast on 13 February. Stringer is among scientists quoted in an interesting piece on BBC Earth (15 February), in which Richard Gray writes about the evolution of the modern human face. Specialist opinion, says Stringer, is moving from the view that Homo heidelbergensis was the common ancestor for H sapiens and H neanderthalensis, to giving that role to H antecessor, whose remains were first identified at Atapuerca in Spain.

Major Transitions in Human Evolution is a discussion meeting issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, edited by Robert Foley FSA, Lawrence Martin, Marta Mirazón Lahr FSA and Chris Stringer FSA. The editors discuss evolution in their introduction. Is there a major evolutionary divide between early and later hominins? (No.) Was change stepped or gradual? (It’s complex.) Why is Africa so prominent in the story? (Climate and geography seem to be part of the reason, but we’re not there yet, though Africa really does seem to be important.) And what parts did genes, phenotypes and behaviour play in the changes? ‘There cannot be a single cause of human evolution,’ they conclude, ‘because it consists of many independent transitions,’ affected by changing climate, cultural and social context, genes and behaviour, to name a few factors. ‘Bringing these all together is a major challenge to the field.’ Foley, Mirazón Lahr and Stringer also each contribute an article, and Mark Collard FSA is among authors who write that a link commonly made between population size and cultural complexity in hunter-gatherer societies does not stand up.
 
Who knew that Britain’s first monorail hovertrain was made in Swindon by Vickers? It ran on an experimental concrete track in the Cambridgeshire Fens, reaching 100 miles per hour before the project was squashed by Michael Heseltine, the new Minister for Aerospace, as too expensive; one of the research teams migrated en masse to Canada. This archetypal British industrial story is told in a short film produced with Nick Edwards through the Cambridge Archaeological Unit. Chris Evans FSA introduces the film as he stands in front of a lichen-covered concrete monolith, one of the rail’s supports discovered in situ in a muddy meadow by Eddy Edwards.
 
The Ince Blundell Collection of Classical Sculpture: Volume 3 • The Ideal Sculpture, by Elizabeth Bartman FSA, is the first catalogue of this material since 1929; it includes the first modern published photos of almost all the works. Henry Blundell, of Ince Blundell Hall outside Liverpool, says the blurb, formed his important antiquities collection in the late 18th century. More than 500 marbles – the UK’s largest collection of Roman sculptures outside the British Museum – were assembled primarily in Italy during Blundell’s Grand Tour visits. The statues are typical of those that would have decorated Roman houses, villas, public spaces and even tombs, although their precise origins are largely unknown. Most are likely to have come from Rome, and at least one was found at Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. The book aims to rehabilitate the reputations of a collector and a collection that have largely been ignored by art-lovers and scholars in post-war Britain.
 
Julian Richards FSA (pictured) has made a video to explain his views on the proposed road tunnel past Stonehenge. Concerned that the tunnel's western end would open ‘in the middle of the most important barrow cemetery in this pristine landscape’, he would rather the route stayed close to the present A303 (the proposal moves it south to avoid an area of complex archaeology around an existing roundabout). Worries about that portal (but not the route) were the principal point of a joint announcement from Historic England, English Heritage and the National Trust on 8 February. ‘While the design and position of the western portal needs improvement,’ said Duncan Wilson FSA in a release, ‘we welcome Highways England’s willingness to listen to this. We will provide constructive advice on how this can be achieved.’ A public consultation closes on 5 March.

It’s not every day the Society of Antiquaries makes the Morning Star, the Daily Mirror or the Daily Mail, still less all at once, which is what happened on 6 February (at least, online). The Stonehenge Alliance, supported by the Campaign for Better Transport, protested outside the Society’s premises at Burlington House, where Highways England was holding an event as part of the public consultation over the Stonehenge tunnel. ‘I think the proposal we are being offered is a really old-fashioned one,’ said broadcaster and former Time Team presenter Tony Robinson. ‘It assumes what needs to be protected is that little clump of stones.’ ‘As anyone who has watched Time Team will know,’ he added, ‘the context is all in archaeology. If you were going to protect Buckingham Palace, you wouldn’t put a tunnel in halfway down the Mall.’ Photo Gazette & Herald.

On 2 February 48 university presidents and chancellors wrote to President Trump ‘to urge [him] to rectify or rescind the recent executive order closing our country’s borders to immigrants and others from seven majority-Muslim countries and to refugees from throughout the world. If left in place, the order threatens both American higher education and the defining principles of our country.’ For a few days the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Massachusetts removed from display ‘all work created or donated by immigrants.’ Out went a portrait of George Washington by Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller; Wertmüller migrated to the US in the 1790s, and the painting was donated by an immigrant family (photo from CNN). Meanwhile from Lichfield, England, Donaeld The Unready (@donaeldunready) has been thinking about Making Mercia Great Again. ‘Canute. What a loser. Can't even hold back the sea. It's just water. We're going to be so tough on the sea. Canute was too soft. Sad,’ has been retweeted 9,400 times.
  
In Travels with an Archaeologist: Finding a Sense of Place, Richard Hodges FSA ‘explores sites across the globe and ponders the relationship of the individual with the past and the present of the past in its ruins, monuments and traces of distant worlds and civilisations.’ Archaeology, says Hodges, is about hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting and touching past textures in our time. With these senses, in the company of friends, new places are created from old ones. Ahead of its publication in April, Mary Beard FSA describes the book as ‘a wonderful and intriguing collection of his postcards … An insider's view of archaeology for the curious!’ Travels with an Archaeologist, says Graeme Barker FSA, ‘takes us on a magical mystery tour through some of the world's most fascinating ancient places and landscapes, in the company of one of my generation's most influential as well as charismatic archaeologists.’

Jacques Heyman FSA writes to say that the American Academy in Rome has selected John Ochsendorf, a preservation engineer, historian and educator, as the 23rd Director of the Academy. Ochsendorf was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2008 for his pioneering work using comparative cultural and historical studies to explore pre-industrial engineering traditions – an ‘outstanding award’, says Heyman.

Michael Fisher FSA has written Guarding the Pugin Flame: John Hardman Powell, 1827–1895. Powell, says the blurb, more than adequately filled a huge gap in the realm of Gothic-revival art and design left by the premature death of A W N Pugin in 1852. Pugin’s sole pupil, Powell became chief designer for the Birmingham firm of John Hardman & Co, who manufactured metalwork, stained glass and other furnishings for Pugin and architects influenced by him. Powell was also married to Pugin’s eldest daughter, Anne; they had 12 children. Powell’s free-spirited artistic temperament led him to apply Pugin’s ‘True Principles’ of medieval art and design in innovative and imaginative ways. Researched from newly discovered original sources, this book examines Powell’s rich legacy of stained glass and metalwork – found in cathedrals, churches and great houses across the UK and overseas – and the ideas which shaped it.
 
The People of Early Winchester (Winchester Studies 9.i) by Caroline Stuckert traces the lives, health, and diseases of Winchester's inhabitants from Roman times to the 16th century, as seen in their remains. The study is unique, says the blurb, in providing a continuous story rather than a series of isolated studies, with over 2,000 skeletons from a Roman Cemetery at Lankhills, and a large sample of Anglo-Saxon burials. The population had an underlying continuity, concludes Stuckert, in spite of massive culture change between the Roman and Early Saxon periods. However, reported Norman Hammond FSA in the Times on 11 February, one group of people stood out. ‘It was small, predominantly male, and increased in number through time. Caroline Stuckert and her collaborators believe that they were German warrior immigrants crossing from the Continent and marrying into the local population.’ ‘The results of archaeology and of genetics, independent of each other, reveal the same story,’ said Martin Biddle FSA. ‘Thus the English people emerged.’

Ivor Noël Hume FSA died on 4 February aged 89. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in January 1967, an honour he held for one month and 50 years. Born in London, he made a distinguished impact at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, where he was Chief Archaeologist from 1957 to 1988. He was a gifted communicator, who, as Bill Sullivan wrote in Making History, ‘profoundly influenced the field of historical archaeology and inspired generations of students both casual and professional.’
 
His autobiography, A Passion for the Past: The Odyssey of a Transatlantic Archaeologist, was published in 2010. ‘When the author began his career,’ says the blurb, ‘historical archaeology did not exist as an academic discipline. It fell to Noël Hume’s books, lectures, and television presentations to help bring it to the forefront of his profession, where it stands today.’ Reviewing The Virginia Adventure (1994) in the New York Times Book Review, historian Arthur Quinn wrote that Hume ‘is now unquestionably the foremost colonial archaeologist of his generation.’
 
The New York Times’ obituary by Sam Robert (19 February) led on his discovery at Carter’s Grove, a 17th-century plantation near Williamsburg, of the remains of Wolstenholme Towne. The fortified settlement was founded in 1619 for the Virginia Company of London, but within three years it had all but gone. As many as 400 English were left dead after an attack by native Americans, a massacre verified by Hume’s excavations.
 
Hume was working as a stage manager in London when he heard on the radio about a man finding artefacts in the Thames. He took himself to the mud, and showed his finds to Adrian Oswald FSA, the head of the Guildhall Museum. He helped the museum record war-damaged sites, and in 1949 took over from Oswald. His excavations for the museum included waterlogged depsoits on the Walbrook at Bucklebury House and a Bronze Age timber and wattle platform at Syon Reach, and he worked on the Roman Temple of Mithras. In 1956 he went to Williamsburg, drawn by an invitation to study wine bottles recovered from the site.
 
He directed ten major excavations at Williamsburg, including the Anthony Hay Cabinet Shop, the Public Hospital site, and the James Anderson House. After retirement from Williamsburg, Hume began a major field project on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, America’s first attempted English settlement. His excavations found the scientific centre of Thomas Hariot, who had reached the New World in a voyage sponsored by Walter Raleigh.
 
Hume was a founding director of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology and, in America, the Society for Historical for Archaeology. His Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America (1969) remains a key reference work. He met his first wife, Audrey Baines, at the Guildhall Museum, where she worked as a volunteer. She became a distinguished Williamsburg archaeologist in her own right, and died in 1993. He later married Carol Grazier.
 
Photos show Hume on site for the Guildhall Museum (Museum of London), in 2003 (at top) and with President Richard Nixon and Pat Nixon in 1981 (Making History).

*

Charles (Charlie) Truman FSA died on 10 February aged 67. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in January 1986. An authority on gold boxes, silver and Renaissance jewellery, Truman had a distinguished career at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), Christie’s and Asprey, and as an independent consultant. Richard Edgcumbe FSA, Senior Curator of the V&A’s Metalwork Collection, has written this tribute of a man he describes as a ‘towering decorative arts figure and a great character’:
 
‘Charles Truman rejected the destiny in Law which had been mapped out for him, and worked as a volunteer in the archive of the Furniture and Woodwork Department at the V&A, before winning a post as a Museum Assistant in the Metalwork Department in 1971. Efficient and irrepressible, he was a popular colleague and an inspiration to visiting students. He was promoted to Assistant Keeper in the Ceramics Department in 1977. He had eagerly taken the chance to work with Shirley Bury on the redisplay of the gold boxes in the Jewellery Gallery, and this led to his assisting Serge Grandjean of the Louvre in the catalogue published in 1975 of the gold boxes at Waddesdon Manor.
 
‘Four years later appeared a slim article in the Connoisseur on Reinhold Vasters, unmasking him as a pre-eminent designer of fake Renaissance goldsmith’s work. “It is hoped,” wrote Charlie, “that this article may bring to light more pieces attributable to this extraordinary workshop.” It was a decisive moment in the reappraisal of 19th-century faking. The reverberations continue in museums and auction houses to this day; any Renaissance-style jewel without a pre-19th century provenance meets a sceptical reception. Charlie contributed further to the debate in sections of Princely Magnificence, an exhibition led by Anna Somers Cocks FSA at the V&A in 1980, and of the catalogues Renaissance Jewelry in the Alsdorf Collection (Art Institute of Chicago 2000) and The Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2012).
 
‘Charlie moved from the V&A to head the Silver Department at Christie’s in 1984, the year he co-authored with Somers Cocks the catalogue of Renaissance jewels, gold boxes and objets de vertu in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. He was made a Director of Christie’s in 1985.
 
‘In 1990 he was appointed head of the antiques department at Asprey. He catalogued the gold boxes in the Gilbert Collection in two volumes, 1991 and 1999, and edited Sotheby’s Concise Encyclopedia of Silver in 1993. From 2000 he worked independently and as a consultant, the generous ally of many museums and collectors. He was a founder Director of C & L Burman (Works Of Art) Ltd, Chairman of the British Antique Dealers’ Association and of the Silver Society, and a Liveryman of the Goldsmiths’ Company.
 
‘In the new Europe Galleries 1600–1815 at the V&A sits one of many examples of his remarkable visual memory: a French gold eggcup of 1762 which he recognised in an auction in 2002 as a close parallel to a large design in an album from the workshop of Jean Ducrollay in the V&A’s Print Room.
 
‘Kenneth Snowman, the doyen of gold box scholars, described Charlie in 1990 as possessing “a splendid nose for rooting out anything which is not as it should be”, a superb judge of discrepancies and false marks. The eminent German scholar Lorenz Seelig, responsible for the rediscovery of Hanau as a centre of production, describes Charlie’s gold box catalogues as “indispensable Bibles”.
 
‘Charlie brought to his analysis of an object an acute mind and an experience gained over 40 years as a curator, auctioneer and dealer. His object descriptions, honed in the sale room and in his magisterial catalogues of four great collections, are succinct, clear and original. We see a box through his eyes, understanding why a mark can be judged to be doubtful and why an enamel was a later addition. A lid will normally open 45 degrees beyond the vertical. If it does not, a reason should be sought.
 
‘Yet he was not only concerned with detail. All his catalogues are prefaced by essays on aspects of box manufacture, design and collecting which are masterpieces of synthesis. The 39 pages which introduce the magnificent Wallace Collection Catalogue of Gold Boxes (2013) are a finely judged survey of the current state of knowledge.
 
‘Charlie’s books will live within arm’s reach of every curator of gold boxes, but he will be missed sorely as a witty, sometimes outrageous, colleague and a friend of enormous energy and great courage. In 2012 he was an expert witness in a case concerning the Coleridge collar of Ss. The judge felt that Charlie’s characterisation of an opposing argument as “absolute insanity” was “unduly colourful”, but trusted Charlie’s judgement and agreed that his opinion reflected “the commercial reality”. Fearless in the justification of his professional opinions, his courage during the recent years of illness has been even more remarkable. Nothing has deterred him from answering a plea for advice, and his appreciation of the research of other scholars and students has unfailingly been expressed in the most generous terms.’
 
Photo taken by Peter Kelleher at the opening of the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Galleries at the V&A, 2009.
 

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