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Christopher Harlow FSA died on 6 May aged 94. Elected a Fellow of the Society in January 1974, he wrote his B Litt thesis at the University of Oxford on The Punctuation of Six of Aelfric’s Catholic Homilies in the Earliest Manuscripts (1955).
 
John Dunbar FSA, architectural historian, died in May.
 
An appreciation appears in Fellows Remembered below, along with one for Alan Crocker FSA who as announced previously died in June.
 
Anne Olivier Bell, a ‘Bloomsbury group matriarch and editor of Virginia Woolf’s diaries who was also one of the wartime “Monuments Men”’, as a Guardian obituary by Charles Saumarez Smith FSA is headlined (19 July), died on 18 July aged 102. ‘She was closely involved in the foundation of Charleston farmhouse,’ writes Saumarez Smith, ‘the home of Bloomsbury art and ideas near Lewes in East Sussex, as an independent trust in 1980, and was supportive of everyone who wanted to study Bloomsbury, exercising a fierce and critical eye over their texts.’ Her mother Brynhild Olivier, says the Times (21 July) was ‘a cousin of Laurence Olivier (Anne became known as Olivier, pronounced Olivia) and a member of the Neo-Pagans, a group that embraced socialist sympathies and naked bathing. Its members included the writer Lytton Strachey and the First World War poet Rupert Brooke, who courted Brynhild before falling for her sister.’ ‘During the war,’ says the Telegraph (20 July), ‘she worked alongside Laurie Lee in the Ministry of Information, before joining the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program, a US-led initiative to locate and return cultural treasures looted by the Nazis. In 2007, her contribution to this complex task was formally honoured at a ceremony by the then US Ambassador, Robert Tuttle.’
 
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Maev Kennedy FSA, for long Arts and Heritage Correspondent at the Guardian and currently billed as a Special Writer, leaves the paper at the end of August. ‘I will still be doing some arts and archaeology freelance journalism,’ she writes, ‘as well, I hope, as writing a book or so.’ Many archaeologists, and anyone with an interest in archaeology, will hope the Guardian will continue to take some of her work, which has a deserved reputation for intelligent and easy-to-read telling of often complex stories, typically informed by site visits, without added tangential spin. My photo shows her interviewing the late John Ashdown-Hill FSA in 2015, at the reburial of Richard III’s remains; she co-edited The Bones of a King: Richard III Rediscovered with Lin Foxhall FSA (2015). Kennedy tweets at @maevesther13 and is on Facebook at www.facebook.com/maev.kennedy.

Bryan Appleyard interviewed Sir David Attenborough FSA for the Sunday Times magazine (22 July), in an ‘unlovely, hot portable cabin’ at Charleston Festival, East Sussex; ‘I have a busy life,’ says Attenborough, ‘good people, good friends I’ve worked with for 20 years.’ Mary Beard FSA helped Tom Robinson with a session on BBC 6 Music on 29 July; when the station tweeted a couple of days ahead, ‘What song should be on a playlist inspired by ancient history and why?’, enough suggestions came in to fill at least a year’s programming (photo shows Beard in the Guildhall, Lincoln with a sword presented to the Mayor by Richard II in 1386, tweeted by Councillor Rosanne Kirk @Rosiecosy). On Radio 4 Neil MacGregor FSA recalled asking E H Gombrich for a quotation to adorn the National Gallery’s new Saisnbury Wing, and getting the response, ‘To which languages am I restricted?’ ‘He taught us how to look,’ added MacGregor, and ‘gave us the idea that there was a story of art’ (The Story of EH Gombrich, 28 July).
 
Friends of the late Pamela Tudor Craig FSA have written a pamphlet of tributes on her involvement with the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium, which she founded in 1983. Written by Susan Powell FSA, W Mark Ormrod FSA, Christian Steer FSA, and Caroline M Barron FSA, Pamela Tudor Craig and the Harlaxton Medieval Symposium also contains an essay on the origins of the symposium by Tudor-Craig herself together with a bibliography of her published writings. The conference on themes of Medieval history, art, literature and architecture is held annually held at Harlaxton College, Lincolnshire, and has been published since 1989 as Harlaxton Medieval Studies. The next one will be on The Medieval Book as Object, Idea and Symbol (22–25 July 2019).
 
The Heritage Lottery Fund has given the National Trust £1.6 million towards a project in Surrey, which is linking the site at Runnymede where Magna Carta was signed in 1215 with Ankerwycke the other side of the River Thames, home to a ruined Benedictine priory and a yew which the NT describes as its oldest tree – it started growing 2,500 years ago. There will be improved pathways and interpretation, a new ferry crossing, new trails and an upgraded towpath. With Hew Locke’s The Jurors, Mark Wallinger‘s new Writ in Water, and Geoffrey Jellicoe’s memorial to President Kennedy (a landscape enriched with symbols, and a stone inscribed with a passage from the Declaration of Freedom from Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, below) – not to forget Edward Maufe’s 1957 memorial to Magna Carta itself – the woods and meadows are a celebration of freedom, of speech and of the person.
 

 
In what may be her last piece for the Guardian’s The Past and the Curious, part of its network of science blogs which is closing down at the end of August after eight years, Mary Shepperson writes about the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (17 July). In 1929, she writes, an appeal fund was launched in London, a month after the Wall Street crash, by the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lady Astor and Major-General Sir Percy Cox. Parliament gave it £4,000 in 1947, Max Mallowan became director, and the school set to digging up Nimrud. It was never a simple life, and after re-invention as the British Institute for the Study of Iraq in 2007, it widened its remit to embrace Iraqi heritage and culture, and Iraqi specialists. Now ‘it’s still very much alive,’ Shepperson concludes, ‘and perhaps more relevant than ever.’

The Senhouse Roman Museum recently won the Visitor Attraction of the Year award in the Cumbria Tourism Awards. The core of its collection, begun by the Senhouse family in the 1570s, is a unique group of sculpture from the adjacent Roman fort and civil settlement at Maryport. ‘For a small independent museum,’ writes Pete Wilson FSA, Chair of the Senhouse Museum Trust, ‘this is an immense achievement. Not only does it recognise the importance and appeal of the collections, but also rewards the dedication and hard work of the museum staff and volunteers. The award also emphasises that the Senhouse Museum is a key element of both Cumbria’s visitor offer and that of the wider Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site.’ For more information see online.

Places of Worship in Britain and Ireland, 1150–1350, edited by Paul Barnwell FSA, is the third in a sequence of books based on weekend conferences at Rewley House in Oxford, and concerning places of worship in Britain and Ireland from the late Roman period to the present. This one covers the rise of the great cathedrals, the spread of reformed monasticism (including nunneries), the coming of the friars and the spread of the parish system into every corner of Britain and Ireland. As important as the emergence and spread of the Gothic style was the evolution of church plans to accommodate new forms of worship driven by developments in theology and liturgy. Contributors include John Harper FSA (ritual and music), Richard Halsey FSA (cathedral extensions), Cathy Oakes FSA (Benedictines), Glyn Coppack FSA (Cistercians), Richard Oram FSA (Premonstratensians in Scotland), P S Barnwell FSA (English parish churches and conclusion), and Richard Fawcett FSA (Scottish parish churches).
 
Commenting on the industrial dispute involving archaeologists in Ireland, the Prehistoric Society says it ‘strongly supports the right to fair pay and conditions as highlighted in the current dispute between Unite, on behalf of the Union of Irish Archaeologists, and their archaeological employer. We believe that engaging with the process, as several Irish archaeological companies have done, is the constructive way forward. Honouring the rates of pay proposed by Unite will benefit all archaeologists and allow our profession to meet the considerable challenges ahead.’ The Prehistoric Society emphasises ‘the need for archaeological bodies such as ours to address the urgent demands of skills and training and the pay and conditions that must underpin’ projects in the UK, including ‘HS2 along with many road schemes, flood works and broadband rollout’.

In Constable's Skies, Mark Evans FSA writes about two great English passions: the weather and John Constable. The book includes a guide to where to find his work around the world. ‘The unprecedented fidelity of Constable’s painted skies,’ says the blurb, ‘is proven by reference to contemporary weather diaries.’ Evans elaborated on this to the press. ‘Art historians,’ wrote Dalya Alberge in the Sunday Telegraph (22 July) ‘have long thought that the menacing clouds and windswept trees in three of John Constable’s late watercolour sketches mirrored his dark emotional state after the death of his wife.’ They may have done, Evans told her, but that was because that’s how the skies then happened to look, and were documented in the London Literary Gazette.
 
An exhibition opening at the Dulwich Picture Gallery on 26 September will create ‘a visitor experience akin to witnessing a Quentin Tarantino film,’ says Jennifer Scott FSA, the gallery’s Sackler Director. Guest curated by Edward Payne and Xavier Bray, Ribera: Art of Violence will be the UK’s first show dedicated to Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), a Spanish Baroque painter, draughtsman and printmaker whose work has been selected for its ‘arresting and provocative’ impact. Eight monumental canvases will be displayed with significant drawings and prints to explore the theme of violence in Ribera’s art. These will show his interest in saintly martyrdom and mythological violence, skin and the five senses, crime and punishment, and the bound male figure. The exhibition will bring together works from seven countries including major European and North American institutions. Many will be displayed here for the first time. There will be ‘one example of human remains in the form of tattooed skin,’ warns the gallery. Photo shows Crucifixion of Saint Peter, mid-1620s (Museo de la Real Academia de Bella Artes de San Fernando, Madrid).
 
The Beano celebrates 80 years this week, with an edition guest-edited by David Walliams, currently my daughter’s second favourite author (after Jeff Kinney). This July is also the tenth anniversary of a Beano that featured archaeology on the front cover. It was on the occasion of the Council for British Archaeology’s National Archaeology Week in 2008 (as chortled by Dennis the Menace). This had begun in 1990 (the year Mike Heyworth FSA, now Director, joined as a bibliography officer) as National Archaeology Day. It was later renamed the Festival of Archaeology, which ran for two weeks last year, an umbrella for over a thousand independent events across the UK. It’s not happening this year, as the CBA works on its fundraising appeal. It has been awarded a Resilient Heritage grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to help it engage with its audience and raise money.

Simon Kaner FSA is one of 15 authors of a paper about early pottery production in Japan, suggesting it was closely linked to intensified fishing at the end of the last Ice Age. In West Asia the origins of pottery lie with early farmers around 10,000 years ago – there is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic, first identified by Kathleen Kenyon FSA, when plants and animals were being selectively changed by people without pottery. Potting appears in East Asia earlier, and is associated with hunter-gatherers. How did this happen? The scientists looked at Jōmon vessels, which first appear around 15,000 years ago, and whose function has been questioned. Organic residues were sought in over 800 sherds from 46 sites, and a strong and consistent association was found with processing aquatic resources. After the start of the Holocene 11,500 years ago, pottery production and shapes and sizes grew, at the same time as a rise in intensified fishing, the start of shellfish exploitation, and the appearance of more settled communities. The research was conducted at the University of York’s BioArCh and the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures at the University of East Anglia. ‘The impact of environmental change on the use of early pottery by East Asian hunter-gatherers’ is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, is by James Stevens Curl FSA. It is, says a puff from David Watkin FSA, ‘the most gripping and complete account of how architecture and urban planning were corrupted in the 20th and 21st centuries leading to a catastrophic deterioration of the built environment … [it] should be read ... by everyone concerned about the erosion of civilisation itself.’ Curl, says the blurb, ‘traces the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture from 1918 to the present, arguing that, with each passing year, so-called “iconic” architecture by supposed “star” architects has become more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity.’ 'This excoriating volume,’ says Jonathan Glancey in the Telegraph (29 July), ‘will delight anyone who feels that modern architecture has been little more than a cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on citizens for whom Gothic cathedrals and Georgian terraces are adventures enough in brick, iron, steel and stone.’

These bits (‘samples’) are from a wrecked boat on the mudflats at Tankerton, Kent, near Whitstable, and as well as the wood include a piece of leather, fragments of caulking and a plum stone, according to Wessex Archaeology’s Facebook page. Mark Harrison FSA told Maev Kennedy FSA at the Guardian (16 July) that his local history group was looking for exploded world war two pillboxes when they found the wreck. Historic England (where Harrison is Head of Heritage Crime & Policing Advice) asked Wessex to investigate. Harrison appealed for help on social media, and the next day 30 people turned up. They found the remains of a single-masted, carvel-built merchant ship built, possibly in Holland, in the late 16th or early 17th century. The ship was probably involved in the local copperas trade, Mark Dunkley FSA told Kent Online (16 July). Along with a second ship on Camber Sands in East Sussex, it is now protected. ‘These two very different ships are equally fascinating and will shed light on our maritime past,’ said Duncan Wilson FSA, Chief Executive of Historic England.
 

John Dunbar FSA died on 6 May aged 88. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in January 1961, 57 years ago. Geoffrey Stell FSA, who worked under him at the Royal Commission on the Ancient Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) for 21 years, has written a substantial obituary which will appear later in the year in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. He has kindly sent Salon this shorter tribute:
 
‘John Greenwell Dunbar FSA was a towering figure in the transformation of Scottish architectural scholarship in the second half of the 20th century, and co-founder and doyen of the modern discipline in Scotland. His research led the way by example, while his conduct and management style marked him out as an archetypal gentleman-scholar, ever a model of thoughtful empathy, integrity and clarity in his dealings with friends, colleagues and the academic world.
 
‘He was born in London to a Scottish father and a Yorkshire mother. He continued his education in Hampstead (rowing on the Thames with Roger Bannister) after work took his father to Scotland, and attended his National Service with the British Army of the Rhine in Germany (1948–49). He read Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, where his personal tutors included historians Christopher Hill and Archie Duncan, and graduated in 1952.
 
‘In 1953 he was appointed to the staff of RCAHMS in Edinburgh. He was to serve there for 37 years, the last 12 (1978–90), as Secretary – that is, Chief Executive – of a body which by then employed around 100 staff.
 
‘In 1948 a Royal Warrant had given the Commission discretion to include in its county Inventories structures of a date later than 1707. The Commission decided to selectively extend its remit only to 1850, but even that represented a massive increase in scope. Additionally, from the publication of the Inventory of Selkirkshire (1957), detailed accounts of monuments were grouped by types not parishes, allowing introductory essays to be more analytical. These new approaches were applied to revisions to accounts of the Border counties, most notably Peeblesshire (two volumes, 1967), and Stirlingshire (two volumes, 1963) and, from 1959, Argyll and the western seaboard.
 
‘In August and September 1960 and 1962, John and his friend Billy Boal, architect with the Ancient Monuments Branch of the Ministry of Public Building and Works, mounted an expedition to survey castles in the Cilicia region of Turkey. Sponsored by the Carnegie Trust and the University of Edinburgh and supported by the British Institute at Ankara, they headed a team consisting of Clare Dymond, Audrey Henshall FSA, Donald Scott, Susan Sinclair and Priscilla Telford.
 
‘As a writer and researcher, John Dunbar was a master craftsman. In a public service ethos he tended towards caution and sound, rather than adventurous, conclusions. His academic reputation rests on two main areas: Scottish Medieval castles and palaces; and Scottish domestic architecture – and architects and craftsmen – of the early modern era.
 
‘His first book, The Historic Architecture of Scotland (Batsford 1966), echoed the Commission’s analytical approach; recognised as a landmark publication, a second edition appeared in 1978 as The Architecture of Scotland. He edited, with J Imrie (1982), Volume II of Accounts of the Masters of Works for Building and Repairing Royal Palaces and Castles (1616–49). His Rhind Lectures were published as Scottish Royal Palaces: The Architecture of the Royal Residences During the Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Periods (1999). He contributed generously to general works of reference, including Howard Colvin’s A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600-1840 (1978 and 1995).
 
‘John’s work on Early Classicism in Scotland will endure. A lifelong interest in a significant group of early modern Scottish architects led to studies including Sir William Bruce, 1630–1710 (1970) and Minerva’s Flame: The Great House of James Smith of Whitehill (c 1645–1731) (1995).
 
‘In the early 1960s he began the restoration of Patie’s Mill on the banks of the River North Esk at Carlops. He turned what since 1800 had been a water-powered woollen manufactory, meal mill and poultry farm, into “a much loved home and garden.” The entrance arch keystone of the stone garage bears the inscription, “JGD EMB 1974”, a gift from his RCAHMS colleagues to mark his marriage to Elizabeth Mill Blyth.
 
‘John had a wry sense of humour. At the end of his preface to Scottish Royal Palaces, he paid fulsome tribute to “the tolerance and understanding shown over the years by my wife, Elizabeth, who, like an early reviewer of 1066 and All That, ‘looks forward keenly to the appearance of the author’s last work’”. Sadly, it was indeed to be his last single-authored book, but we all enjoyed sharing the gentle domestic joke.
 
‘John Dunbar was also an Honorary Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. He was appointed OBE.’

The photo (RCAHMS 1989) is from Canmore.
 
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Alan Crocker FSA died on 22 June aged 82. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in November 1999. David Bird FSA has kindly written this tribute for Salon:
 
‘Alan Godfrey Crocker FSA was a Professor of Physics at the University of Surrey. He was one of the team who had first worked at Battersea College of Technology, its precursor, and was keen to use archaeology and history to leaven the inevitably scientific bias of the new university. In the 1970s he excavated at the Medieval moated site in the royal park at Guildford, and encouraged the writer to set up a series of lectures on archaeological subjects, which later became focused on industrial archaeology and still continue (although no longer at the university). These talks served to provide a suitable environment for the creation of the Surrey Industrial History Group (SIHG) under the umbrella of the Surrey Archaeological Society (SAS), where it remains. Alan encouraged other archaeological activity at the university which included working with the late Tony Clark FSA on the development of geophysical survey methods.
 
‘He was a former President of SAS and most recently an Honorary Vice-President, a key founder member and long-time Chairman of SIHG, as well as a Chairman of the Surrey Local History Committee. With Glenys, his wife, he put Surrey’s industrial history on the map, and carried out nationally important research into gunpowder production and paper-making, both well-represented in the county. This led also to a passion for watermills and the eventual preservation of the water turbine from Catteshall Mill near Godalming, the largest and best-preserved of its type in the country, now at the Ironbridge Museum. The results of this research were published in a series of important papers.
 
‘Alan instituted SIHG’s annual presentation of a plaque for the best industrial heritage project which continues to this day. There is a great deal more to Surrey’s industrial heritage than might be expected, reflected in one of Alan’s favourite quotations about the valley of the Tillingbourne, with its many mill sites, which he studied in some detail. It figures in one of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides:
 
‘This valley, which seems to have been created by a bountiful providence, as one of the choicest retreats of man, which seems formed for a scene of innocence and happiness, has been, by ungrateful man, so perverted as to make it instrumental in effecting two of the most damnable of purposes; in carrying into execution two of the most damnable inventions that ever sprang from the minds of man under the influence of the devil! Namely, the making of gunpowder and of banknotes!’
 
‘Alan was a genial and well-liked presence at a wide range of SAS activities. Even recently he could be found demonstrating the art of making paper from rags at a Society symposium where he won the prize for the best display. He will be greatly missed.’