Looking Ahead: Autumn 2017

I just wanted to draw Fellows' attention to the information regarding autumn events and activities at Burlington House for Fellows. In particular, please note the memorial services we will be holding in September for both Dai Morgan Evan, FSA, and Geoffrey Wainwright, Hon VPSA, which will be held on 11 September and 19 September (respectively). We'd be delighted to have you there. Please contact us to let us know you plan to attend.
 

Our Summer Exhibition is Now Open!

The exhibition is now officially open to the public until Friday, 25 August, and we hope Fellows will bring family and friends to explore our collections. We are offering short, informal gallery talks on Tuesday afternoons (14.00-14.30) and two late-night openings on 11 August and 25 August with live Tudor music, Library tours, and fantastic creative workshops - completely free!

We had a full house for the private view of our free summer exhibition, Blood Royal: Picturing the Tudor Monarchy, which showcases our collection of medieval and Tudor royal portraits alongside material from the Library and Museum collections, including our postmortem inventory of Henry VIII and an Elizabethan map of an area near Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

We are grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for supporting this project. We are delighted that a number of Fellows have given generously of their time to help write interpretation, film video highlights for objects on display and participate in special programming such as gallery talks (Tuesdays, 14.00-14.30) and museum lates (11 August and 25 August). We would particularly like to thank Fellows Mr Peter M Barber, Dr John PD Cooper and Prof Glenn J Richardson, who have worked closely with Society staff to undertake research into the collections and produce the exhibition.

Plan your visit to the exhibition. Can't make it? Watch Sir Roy Strong's introduction to the exhibition (below) and explore the objects online.

Fellows Remembered below contains an obituary for the late Stanley Jones FSA, a notice on the late Richard Burleigh FSA, and further notices on the late Frank Herrmann FSA and the late Jo Draper FSA.

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Clive Gamble FSA, ‘one of the world's best-known and most influential archaeologists,’ has been awarded an honorary degree by the University of London. Founding Director of the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins, University of Southampton (1999), says the citation, ‘he has pioneered the study of early human settlement and migration from a multidisciplinary perspective, with a particular focus on landscape, environment and place. Bridging the sciences and the humanities, Clive's work on early human history is distinguished by its combination of empirical precision and conceptual innovation. He is as well known for his theoretical and synthetic writings as for his specific research contributions, and has won numerous prizes and awards.’
 
Made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000, Gamble has held Fellowships at the Research School of Pacific Studies at ANU in Canberra, the National University of La Plata, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and Boston University. He joined the department of Geography at Royal Holloway in 2004, and returned to Southampton in 2011, retiring in 2016 (while continuing to work). He is a Trustee of the British Museum and President of the Royal Anthropological Society.

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When NASA sought applications for its astronaut programme in 2015, it’s probably fair to say it didn't expect to hear from archaeologists. “Space archaeology” has come into use as a phrase to describe studying satellite imagery for researching remoter landscapes; the ability to compare shots taken years apart has proved valuable in areas of cultural destruction. For Alice Gorman FSA and Justin Walsh, however, it means climbing aboard a virtual spaceship with a view to conducting fieldwork beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Gorman, an archaeologist at Flinders University, Adelaide who blogs about exploration and science fiction at Space Age Archaeology, and Walsh, an anthropologist at Chapman University in California, are interested in astronaut culture. They are creating a virtual model of the International Space Station, using NASA data of every artefact sent to the station and photos taken on board. This will allow them to study astronaut behaviour as they might examine an archaeological site on the ground, reports Megan Gannon on Space.com, in an unusual multigendered, multiethnic, multinational and multilingual environment.
 
Mike Smith FSA is among 28 authors who published a new discovery from Australia in Nature on 19 July. Chris Clarkson and colleagues continued from earlier excavations in northern Australia at Madjedbebe (formerly known as Malakunanja II), going deep into human artefact-containing deposits accumulated over millennia in a rock shelter. The big question, is how many millennia? Current convention says people first reached Australia around 50,000 years ago, though controversial claims say this occurred as much as 60,000 years ago. Archaeologists agree that the new arrivals were anatomically modern humans, who ultimately could be traced back to Africa. The new study, using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), finds artefacts at a probable age of 65,000 years ago. The event, says Chris Stringer FSA, ‘marks a watershed in human evolution, because the journey required ocean-going watercraft and multiple island-hops. In terms of technology and planning it clearly demonstrates the high capabilities of the people who first accomplished it.’ Modern DNA, says Stringer, suggests humans reached Australia 50,000 years ago. If the Madjedbebe claim is to stand up, that would imply these early colonisers died out.
 
Lived Experience in the Later Middle Ages: Studies of Bodiam and Other Elite Landscapes in South-Eastern England, is edited by Matthew Johnson FSA. Between 2010 and 2014 he led a team of scholars from Northwestern University and the University of Southampton, to conduct topographical, geophysical and building survey at four late Medieval sites and landscapes in south-eastern England: Scotney, Knole and Ightham, all owned and managed by the National Trust. Studies were also undertaken into documentary, map and other evidence. A particularly important element of the research was to synthesise and re-present ‘grey literature’ at the sites. Central to the volume, says the blurb, are the linked ideas of lived experience and political ecology in presenting a new understanding of late Medieval sites and landscapes.

Neil MacGregor FSA has extended his contract as Director of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, until it opens in 2019. Appointed initially for two years as one of three founding Directors, reports the Art Newspaper, MacGregor says he would be happy to stay on after that in an advisory role. ‘Setting up this unique cultural project continues to be a wonderful task from my point of view,’ he adds.
 
Peter Rowley-Conwy FSA, Dale Serjeantson FSA and Paul Halstead have edited a collection of papers in honour of Tony Legge, who died in 2013. Economic Zooarchaeology covers many topics, writes Serjeantson, ‘mirroring Tony’s own wide interests in archaeology and the range of people with whom he collaborated all over the world’. Thirty three papers cover method and theory, animal bone identification, human paleopathology, animal use in prehistoric South America and dog cemeteries. A long-running controversy over milking animals and the use of dairy products, the ecological impact of hunting by farmers, and much else are also discussed. The international list of contributors includes the editors, Legge himself (on research he was doing when he fell ill), and Richard Bradley FSA, Charles Higham FSA,
David Jacques FSA, Mark Maltby FSA, Roger Mercer FSA, Sonia O’Connor FSA, Terry O’Connor FSA, Alan Outram FSA, Harvey Sheldon FSA and Tony Waldron FSA.

The University of Liverpool is running a Historic Built Environment Knowledge Exchange project (HistBEKE). Funded by Historic England, its aim is to help those who work with historic buildings better understand the stuff they deal with. The project would like to know about specialists’ work and their present knowledge, to which end it has launched an online survey, open until 25 August 2017. This should help it decide how to run workshops in the autumn, which will be described in a blog in due course. Questions to Stella Jackson, Research Assistant, at Stella.Jackson@liverpool.ac.uk.
 
The Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (CIfA) has published A Review of the Standard of Reporting on Archaeological Artefacts in England. It commissioned Alice Cattermole Heritage Consultancy to review artefact studies associated with archaeological excavations. A thousand unpublished and 61 published specialist reports were checked against a detailed list of criteria devised to assess content and quality. The outcome was grim. Not one report in the sample met all the quality criteria; approaching half (44%) met fewer than half, and 6% fewer than a quarter.
 
John Titterton FSA is part of a team which has produced the Ashbourne Treasures Exhibition, in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. He writes: ‘This exhibition has been achieved with Heritage Lottery funding, and has brought together a number of items relating to the history of Ashbourne which are unlikely to be seen together again in the foreseeable future. Among them are part of an Anglo-Saxon cross shaft and Man of Sorrows and St Michael, a wooden painted panel c1500 (in St Oswald’s church), and (in Ashbourne Library) the helm of Sir Thomas Cokayne, the Magnificent c 1537; the Foundation Charter from Queen Elizabeth I's Grammar School 1585; a miniature of Elizabeth believed to be by Nicholas Hilliard or his school; and the Ashbourne Bushel (English standard measure), cast in 1677. The exhibition is open until 28 September, and is spread over three sites whose hours are not identical. See online for details.
 
‘I welcome Michael Gove’s recognition that Brexit will enable the UK properly to reward environmentally responsible land use,’ writes Duncan Wilson FSA in a letter to the Times on 25 July, ‘and that future subsidies will be linked to benefits for society.’ As Chief Executive of Historic England, Wilson is particularly aware that ‘our environment includes both natural and historic features’. More than eight out of ten scheduled monuments are on farmland, he says, and our rural heritage produces significant economic benefits. Gove is the Environment Secretary, with responsibility for handling the loss of £3 billion of agricultural subsidies when Britain leaves the European Union. Since 2006, says Wilson, £28 million a year has been spent on the historic environment through the Common Agricultural Policy. ‘Mr Gove now has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remove the inefficiencies of the CAP’, he adds, ‘and replace it with a better targeted scheme that will help to protect and pass on England’s extraordinary legacy of rural heritage.’
 
Paul Bahn FSA, a successful writer of archaeological books, including a multi-editioned text book co-authored with Colin Renfrew FSA and titles on Easter Island and Ice Age art, has written The First Artists: In Search of the World’s Oldest Art with Michel Lorblanchet. The latter is a former Director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and has worked throughout his career with early art in Europe and Aboriginal art in Australia. This thoughtful book takes a global perspective on early art, assembling many case studies as it moves from natural rocks through finely shaped stone tools, scratches and colours, simple drawings and carvings, and recognisable representations of animals. The latter make a thin showing as the authors argue for a focus away from French and Spanish caves, and dismiss dates that would make the art at Chauvet (France) as old as 36,000 years. ‘We shall strive to avoid imposing any personal point of view’, say Bahn and Lorblanchet in their introduction, as they set out on ‘an enquiry, an investigation, with the (we hope) objective viewpoint of the archaeologist.’
 
Historic England Research Issue 6 is dedicated to the Stonehenge landscape, where Historic England has been pursuing a variety of successful research projects. Mark Bowden FSA summarises a new survey of Vespasian’s Camp, the only major Iron Age monument in the World Heritage Site (its Roman name is 16th century). Other articles cover aerial mapping using photos and lidar, geophysical survey and excavations south of the A303 road, new evidence for diet, food and farming from Middle Neolithic pits (an era apparently devoid of cereals, while there are remains of sloe, crab apples and hazelnuts), bronze age earthwork and palisade land boundaries, illustrating ancient landscapes, and excavation ahead of new Army housing north and east of the WHS, where a striking number of unexpected discoveries were made. ‘Despite this being one of the most intensively studied archaeological landscapes in the country,’ says Duncan Wilson FSA in his introduction, ‘continuing investment in research is delivering important new insights and narratives. This, in turn, will create even greater public interest, engagement and enjoyment of a monument and landscape that continue to exercise an unparalleled hold on people’s imagination.’

Marcus Binney FSA is among a group of architectural writers who have written to the Times (31 July) to protest about a threat of demolition and redevelopment to the ticket concourse at Southwark Tube station in London. Designed by the late Sir Richard MacCormac, they say, the concourse is part of a series of new stations on the Jubilee Line, ‘hailed in 1999 as the biggest architectural sensation of their kind since the Moscow Underground’. They call on Karen Bradley, Culture Secretary, to survey the Line, and ‘assess which of the recent stations should be preserved and celebrated as architectural masterpieces for future generations to enjoy.’ Historic England recently rejected Southwark station for listing. The Twentieth Century Society is appealing the decision. ‘It is alarming’, says Binney in a release from SAVE Britain’s Heritage, ‘when fine buildings come under threat so soon after they were completed. As Richard MacCormac is sadly no longer with us to speak for his station it is doubly important that the rest of us make a stand to save it.’
 
The Anglo-Saxon Fenland, by Susan Oosthuizen FSA, challenges what she describes as the standard view that the early Medieval fenland was dominated by the works of European colonists in a largely empty landscape. Using existing and new evidence and arguments, says the blurb, she offers an alternative interdisciplinary history of the Anglo-Saxon fenland. The fen islands and the silt fens show a degree of occupation unexpected a few decades ago. Dense Romano-British settlement appears to have been followed by consistent early Medieval occupation on every island in the peat fens and across the silt fens, despite the impact of climatic change. This was a society whose origins could be found in prehistoric Britain, and which had evolved through the period of Roman control and into the post-imperial decades and centuries that followed.
 

Richard Burleigh FSA died on 23 February aged 85. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in May 1974. His daughter Julie Leah has kindly sent us the part of his eulogy which, she says, ‘relates to his academic side’:
 
‘One of Dad’s contributions to the World was his writing; many scholarly articles relating to his work at Hinkley Point, the British Museum, where he worked in the Radio Carbon Laboratories for 20 years, and later the Museum of Mankind. This involved collaborations with many other academics across the world. Mum patiently proof-read late into the evenings when every full stop and comma had to be exactly right.
 
‘Once retired and then moved to Dorset, he became increasingly interested in literary figures, the Dorset poets and writers in particular, and he applied his love of writing articles to Literary Societies. He was a member and supporter of 18 societies, all linked to literature, conservation (of nature and buildings) and archaeology. He was a founder member of the George Burrow Society (he was proud of the fact that he shared his birthdate, the fifth of July, and school with George Burrow), Editor of the William Barnes Newsletter for 16 years, the Secretary of the Powys Society, an early member of the Dandelion Group, Sabine Barring Gould, Sylvia Townsend Warner, National Trust – the list goes on. All people and organisations he admired.
 
‘He also worked at Lawrences auction rooms, and was a volunteer at Beaminster Museum. In all the activities he applied the same methodical (some would say obsessive) approach and a sense of fun, usually involving a trip to the nearest pub, mainly for a pint, a bowl of soup and what he liked to call “idle chatter”.
 
‘One of his loves was woodwork and, as well as fabulous DIY constructions, in later years his obsessions became with racking and shelving in order to collect and display his wonderful book collection.’

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Stanley Robert Jones FSA died on 9 July aged 90. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in May 1965 (52 years ago). Nat Alcock FSA and Bob Meeson FSA have written this obituary:
 
‘Stanley was the last survivor from the “heroic age” of discovering vernacular architecture, and it is with the greatest regret that we have to bid farewell to him and to that era – so soon after the death in August 2016 of the other great survivor, his long-term collaborator John (J T) Smith FSA.
 
‘Stanley was born in Birmingham, living in Acocks Green until he joined the Navy at the end of the Second World War and for National Service. Returning, he gained an Art Teaching Diploma at the Birmingham School of Art, and then took a degree course at the Royal Academy Schools. Art teaching was to be his career, firstly at Plymouth (1958) and then Sheffield College of Art (1961). Stanley was an outstanding painter and teacher, but it is his unparalleled contribution to the recording of vernacular and church architecture that is recognised here

‘A seminal moment came in about 1951 when, following up a request for volunteers on an archaeological dig, he met J T Smith. Very soon afterwards they began their fruitful collaboration, and Stanley’s interest in and understanding of historic buildings developed apace. Together, for several years in the 1950s, they ran field courses at Barford in Warwickshire, sending the students out to look at local houses. This developed into the extremely successful series of courses held at Brecon for local teachers, whose results appear in the seminal series of papers on Breconshire Houses in Brycheiniog (1963–72).
 
‘His earliest publication in the field, in 1954, was the description of a medieval timber-framed house in Cricklade, jointly with J T Smith. The Staffordshire and Leicestershire volumes of the Victoria County History benefited from his remarkable church plans and incomparable succinct descriptions; he also wrote up the houses of Tewkesbury for the Gloucestershire VCH. He recorded threatened buildings in Coleshill and Coventry, Warwickshire (mostly since demolished), and the latter led to the ground-breaking publication by Jones and Smith on “The Wealden houses of Warwickshire and their significance” (Transactions and Proceedings of the Birmingham and Warwickshire Archaeological Society 79, 1960).
 
‘When he was proposed for Fellowship of the Society in 1965, his blue paper was signed by an exceptional group of eminent architectural historians and archaeologists: Maurice Barley FSA, A R Dufty FSA, W F Grimes FSA, Eric Mercer FSA, Iorweth Peate FSA, C A Raleigh Radford FSA, J T Smith FSA, C F Stell FSA, A J Taylor FSA and Margaret Tomlinson FSA.
 
‘Stanley published numerous building surveys in Montgomeryshire Collections, and county journals throughout the Midlands and further afield, the most notable of which included the Bishop’s Palace, Hereford, and the Manor House, Wasperton, West Bromwich Manor and Medbourne Manor (all base-cruck halls). He has also been closely involved with advice and guidance on the restoration of Middleton Hall, Warwickshire. Much of what he recorded but did not publish has been placed on record in public collections.

‘His major work in more recent years had been the Survey of Ancient Houses of Lincoln, combining his drawings and building recording with documentary history by Kathleen Major and others. The first volume, Priorygate to Pottergate, appeared in 1984, and the series continued until the last, Steep, Strait and High (co-authored with Chris Johnson), was published in 2016 – the culmination of 30 years commitment to the buildings of one historic city.
 
‘Stanley was a kind, modest, quiet and unassuming man, who continued to work until close to the end. In the field of vernacular architecture, noone has combined intellectual rigour and artistic felicity to greater, more inspiring effect.’

Left is a print of Old Berry Hall, Solihull, which Jones used for Christmas cards. The oil at the top, showing the front of Sheffield Midland Station and titled Hopeless Dawn, Sheffield, was painted by Jones in the early 1960s. He had arrived from Devon to be interviewed for the teaching post he subsequently took up at the Sheffield College of Arts and Crafts. It now hangs in the Weston Park Museum, Sheffield.


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Frank Herrmann FSA, who died in April, has received an obituary in the Telegraph (20 July). Headlined ‘publisher, auctioneer and author’, it opens by saying he was also a collector, ‘but described himself simply as a “book man” – his own works included a successful series of children’s stories about a giant from Essex and an acclaimed history of Sotheby’s.’
 
‘Sotheby's: Portrait of an Auction House (1980) took seven years to research. Herrmann discovered a collection of sale catalogues stored in the British Library and interviewed numerous experts, porters and dealers: “I frequently felt like some military intelligence officer trying to piece together a true picture of a major conflict.”
 
‘Herrmann's good humour’, concludes the paper, ‘was married to a forthright nature; he proved a great enabler of others and a journalist once described him as an “affable Maecenas”.’

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Jo Draper FSA died in June, aged 68. ‘I was immensely saddened,’ writes Martin Henig FSA, to hear of her death ‘at such a comparatively young age’.
 
‘For a number of years,’ he continues, ‘I stayed with her in the house where she lived with her husband in Dorchester, in order to write up numerous Roman and Medieval small finds from the county. She was enormously hospitable and knowledgeable, and a wonderful editor, and her quiet erudition is apparent in everything she wrote, whether it was on archaeology, folklore or Thomas Hardy. Amongst other works she published the excavations from Hill Farm, Gestingthorpe, Essex, which had been eccentrically excavated by the local farmer and landowner who had produced an extraordinarily rich and important collection of finds. It was Jo’s editorship, and assembly of experts, which made this the important report that it is.
 
‘While in Essex Jo and I decided to look for an interesting nearby round church. We asked directions and were told to continue to the top of a very high hill: the land looked pancake flat, especially to Jo used to Dorset. We found no “very high hill” but discovered the church! We both collapsed in a gale of laughter. Her humour was infectious.’

• Excavations at Hill Farm, Gestingthorpe, Essex, by Jo Draper (1985). Harold Cooper moved to Hill Farm in 1945, and started excavating after he found some Roman tile in a ploughed field. He continued for 30 years, opening a museum at the farmhouse. He died in 2013.

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