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Alan Crocker FSA, a physicist with an interest in gunpowder, papermaking and the archaeology of Surrey, died in June. An appreciation will follow in a future Salon.
 
Gordon Hillman, a popular and influential archaeobotanist, died on 1 July. The photo from the Archaeobotanist blog taken a decade ago shows (left to right) Hillman, Mary Anne Murray, the late David Harris FSA and Sue Colledge FSA. Martin Jones FSA has written this tribute for Salon:
 
‘Gordon Hillman, one of archaeobotany’s leading lights, combined a deep understanding of plants with an unquenchable enthusiasm for discussing them with others. Many in the archaeobotanical community hold memories of the inspiration they have drawn from being around this engaging personality. He conducted research on some of the major sites connected with agriculture’s antecedents, including Wadi Kubbayana in Egypt and Abu Hureyra in Syria, and opened our eyes to the rich value of ethnographic observation. At University College London, his collaboration with David Harris led the way on research into worldwide agricultural origins. His enthusiasm for understanding human use of plants was not even dented by his battle with Parkinson’s disease later in life, when he continued to inspire academics and the public alike. He will be sorely missed, but will remain an inspiration to anyone interested in people and plants through time. All are welcome to his funeral, at 1pm on Thursday 26 July, at Hailsham Parish Church, East Sussex.’

Susan Bird, a former illustrator in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum and subsequently a freelance illustrator, ceramicist and painter, died on I July. Norman Hammond FSA, with whom she worked in Belize in the 1970s, says there will be a memorial service in St Margaret's Church, Cley-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, on 8 September.
 
Clive King, author of Stig of the Dump which features one of the most enduring childhood archaeological fantasies, died on 10 July aged 94. King’s writing typically explored an ancient past which could be discerned and imagined in modern landscapes as if it was a living world. His first book, Hamid of Aleppo (1958), is set (through the eyes of a hamster) in Syria. In The Town That Went South (1959) he imagined the lost Medieval village of Rye in East Sussex setting out Isle-of Wight style into the Channel. Stig of the Dump (1963), which you can hear as an audiobook read by Tony Robinson, features a boy who meets the Stone Age Stig in a chalk quarry in Kent. The 22 Letters (1966) follows three sons of a Phoenician master-builder across Egypt, Minoan Crete and Ugarit. The Devil’s Cut (1978) is set among early industrial canals, Ninny’s Boat (1980) in Arthur’s Britain... and so on.

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On 5 July, when he was still Culture Secretary, Matt Hancock confirmed further details of a scheme to exhibit the Bayeux Tapestry in Britain (or, as the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport’s press release put it, ‘to return it to the UK for the first time in almost a thousand years’). After attending a Digital Colloque in Paris, Hancock signed a Memorandum of Understanding with French Minister of Culture Françoise Nyssen. The deal is said to set out a phase of cross-Channel cooperation between universities and research institutes, who will work on making the Tapestry more accessible, and prepare for conservation and safe transport. While here in 2022 the Bayeux Museum will be refurbished, and though no UK venue has been formally mentioned, the British Museum seems a likely contender. It has been researched by many Fellows. Image Wikipedia.

In Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity, Eamon Duffy FSA ‘engages with some of the central aspects of Western religion,’ says the blurb, ‘between the decline of pagan Rome and the rise of the Protestant Reformation. In the process he opens windows on the vibrant and multifaceted beliefs and practices by which Medieval people made sense of their world: the fear of death and the impact of devastating pandemic, holy war against Islam and the invention of the blood libel against the Jews, provision for the afterlife and the continuing power of the dead over the living, the meaning of pilgrimage and the evolution of Christian music.’ This is ‘an absorbing collection of essays,’ writes Nick Rennison in the Sunday Times (15 July), ‘that mostly focuses on the material culture of medieval religious belief … Duffy even finds room to cast his eye over the so-called Voynich manuscript, a text written in an unknown and as yet undeciphered language, in an attempt to weigh up whether it is genuine or a bizarre hoax. Erudite but never unapproachable and laced with a dry wit, his essays are essential reading for those with an interest in how people in the past expressed their faith.’
 
Gainsborough’s House, a Grade I listed building in Sudbury, Suffolk, has been awarded £4.5m by the Heritage Lottery Fund towards a five-year project to create a national centre celebrating the artist’s life. Gainsborough lived at the family home in Sudbury from his birth in 1727 until 1740, and returned to the town for another three years after his father’s death in 1748. Sudbury and the Gainsborough family were intimately linked to the wool and silk industry; there is a spectacular 400-year-old mulberry tree in the garden. Vanners Silk Weavers, next door, have produced silk since 1740, and today work with a number of international textile designers. The HLF says the new centre will examine in greater detail why Gainsborough and his friend, John Constable, were inspired by the Suffolk landscape. The narrative will be illustrated through the museum’s art collection, with works by Gainsborough, Constable and other important artists with local links. Photo Geograph/Oxyman.
 
On 5 July the Art Fund announced Tate St Ives as Museum of the Year 2018. The other finalists were Brooklands Museum, Weybridge, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, Glasgow Women's Library, and the Postal Museum, London. The five judges included Ian Blatchford FSA. The Art Newspaper asked former judges to comment on previous winners. Anna Somers Cocks FSA, a judge in 2014 when the Yorkshire Sculpture Park won, said that ‘it could honourably win the Art Fund prize every year.’ But, she added, 2014 was a year when another institution peaked, after the Mary Rose project had opened its new museum in Portsmouth. ‘Its 19,000 artefacts had been put on display in a brilliantly imaginative way inside the hull, the whole encased by the Wilkinson Eyre, Perkins+Will building, which is wholly modern but also evokes the stern of a wooden ship. And it had all been paid for by private money and the Heritage Lottery Fund. For all these reasons, I thought it should win.’ But contemporary art in the regions beat history and archaeology. ‘I hope that the Mary Rose Museum will … put in for the Art Fund prize again,’ said Somers Cocks, ‘and next time be rewarded for an extraordinary achievement.’
 
Chris Stringer FSA and Michael Petraglia FSA are among several authors of a paper (lead writer Eleanor Scerri) likely to be read and quoted by a generation of anthropology and archaeology students. Published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, ‘Did our species evolve in subdivided populations across Africa, and why does it matter?’ brings together thinking and data from a wide range of fields, to argue that the dominant model that Homo sapiens evolved from a single, regional population within Africa has had its time. Instead they propose that we evolved ‘within a set of interlinked groups living across Africa, whose connectivity changed through time.’ In its earlier stages, H sapiens exhibited greater variety than it does today, evolving variously on an environmentally complex and changing continent. If they are right, they say, genetic models will need to adjust to a more complex view of ancient migration and divergence.
 
A major crime operation concluded on 4 July with the seizure of 25,000 archaeological artefacts said to be worth €40 million on the antiquities market. Over 250 police officers simultaneously raided 40 houses across Italy and in Ehningen, Germany, London and Barcelona. Italian Carabinieri were supported in a four-year investigation by colleagues in Spain, Germany and the UK. Twenty three suspects were detained in connection with an operation said to have spanned several EU states, and William Veres, a London art dealer, was served with an international warrant. Veres had been arrested in 2017 in Spain in another antiquities investigation by the Carabinieri. ‘How ironic,’ tweeted Mary Beard FSA @wmarybeard, ‘that the Brit arrested in Sicily for alleged “looting” is called Mr Veres. Shades of Cicero’s enemy Gaius Verres who was alleged to have done exactly the same.’ Photo Europol.

The Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded £8.6m to a variety of industrial heritage causes, led by the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers in Newcastle, which will ‘be rescued with a £4.1m grant’. Other recipients of a total of £8.6m include Blaenavon’s Townscape Heritage, Sherwood Forest’s Industrial Landscape, and Mansfield’s Market Place Conservation Area. In Newcastle, the cash will ‘revitalise the Grade II listed building and digitise the largest single collection of mining material in the world. The Institute will become the Common Room for the Great North, a public space telling the story of the North East’s industrial past, and inspiring the next generation of engineers and innovators.’
 
The Art of the Point Cloud, produced by the School of Simulation and Visualisation at the Glasgow School of Art and Historic Environment Scotland, contains a catholic collection of images generated around the world by laser scanning, sonar, CT and photogrammetry, among them historic monuments and buildings, contemporary architecture, cathedrals and churches, castles, ships, landscapes, still lifes, an octopus and the Grand Elephant of Nantes. One of these images, Kenneth Lymer FSA tells Salon, is a photogrammetric recording of a foliate head used in the elaborate decorations of the Old Toronto City Hall. The hall was designed in the North American Romanesque Revival architectural style that flourished during the late 19th century. ‘The most poignant point clouds,’ says Lymer, reveal sections of the Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh Building made between the 2014 fire and the more devastating fire on 15 June.
 
Robin Derricourt FSA has written Unearthing Childhood: Young Lives in Prehistory. This is the first book to survey prehistoric children, says the blurb, from Australopithecines to advanced Stone Age foragers, farming villages and the beginnings of civilisation. He finds kids in footprints and finger daubs, images on rocks and pots, and in the signs of play and early attempts to learn crafts. They can be seen in burials, clothing, adornment, possessions and signs of status, while the bodies themselves provide information on diet, health and sometimes violent death. The study of prehistoric childhood has extraordinary potential, says Derricourt. This will, says Clive Gamble FSA in a puff, ‘be essential reading for everyone who takes the past seriously.' Derricourt has written a blog for Manchester University Press (‘Time-travelling archaeologists visiting a forager camp or farming village would first encounter the noise of children’), and in a Q&Q, when asked ‘Is this your first published book,’ he replies, ‘My ninth, I think.’