Peter Gordon FSA, historian of education, has died.
 
The Revd David Walker FSA, medieval historian, died in December.
 
Vera Evison FSA, Anglo-Saxon archaeologist, died in March.
 
Appreciations appear in Fellows Remembered below. The section also contains a further notice on the late Lord Stewartby FSA.

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The British Museum’s Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme is working at what it describes as the world’s oldest surviving bridge. The bridge at Tello, in the south of Iraq, was built in the third millennium BC and will be preserved by British Museum archaeologists and Iraqi heritage professionals who are being trained to protect ancient sites that have suffered damage at the hands of Islamic State. It is hoped that the restoration will be a potent symbol of a nation emerging from decades of war, and could one day become the focus of a visitor centre. Built for the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, the bridge was rediscovered in 1929 and had been variously interpreted as a temple, dam and water regulator. Recent studies confirmed that it was a bridge over an ancient waterway.

On 3 April the Government confirmed a UK ban on ivory sales. Designed, to ‘help protect elephants for future generations,’ the ban will cover ivory items of all ages with a maximum penalty for a breach of an unlimited fine or up to five years in jail. The ban, said Environment Secretary Michael Gove, will be ‘one of the world’s toughest’. Following a public consultation, exemptions have been reduced; they include objects with less than 10% ivory by volume made before 1947. Items at least 100 years old can be assessed by ‘specialist institutions such as the UK’s most prestigious museums’ for their rarity and importance, and accredited museums may be exempted for certain commercial activities.

On 26 March Teresa Hall (left) unveiled a bust of Mick Aston FSA at the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol, where Aston taught for many years. Alex Peter’s bronze was cast in the Mussi artworks foundry in Berkeley, California. ‘Mick was such an amazing archaeologist in so many different ways,’ said Mark Horton FSA, a former colleague (left). ‘He was passionate about lifelong learning for all, and, of course, a great communicator.’ 

In Morocco, Nick Barton FSA is co-directing excavations at Taforalt Cave, a Later Sone Age (LSA) Ibermomaurusian site, exploring the origins of the LSA in North Africa and ancient Moroccan people. The team found remains of more than ten people, which were radiocarbon dated at Oxford University and analysed for aDNA. The Taforalt individuals derive one third of their ancestry from sub-Saharan Africans, and the team found no evidence for gene flow from Palaeolithic Europeans into North Africa. The best genetic affinity is with early Holocene Near Easterners (Levantine Natufians, 15,000 years ago), suggesting a pre-agricultural connection between Africa and the Near East. On the other hand, some of the oldest LSA finds occur in Morocco and Algeria. In a press release, Barton said, ‘The results of this study are intriguing and call for a re-think of ideas. The genetics are telling us one thing, but the archaeological dating is telling us another.’

London's Waterfront 1100-1666: Excavations in Thames Street, London, 1974–84, by John Schofield FSA, Lyn Blackmore FSA and Jacqueline Pearce FSA, with Tony Dyson FSA, was published online last year by the City of London Archaeological Trust, along with much other valuable material. It is now to be launched as an updated monograph by Archaeopress, who will also make the book available as a free PDF. It brings together archaeological and documentary evidence for Medieval and post-Medieval secular properties and a parish church on four waterfront sites: Swan Lane, Seal House, New Fresh Wharf and Billingsgate Lorry Park. The London waterfront excavations since 1972 have produced great advances in our knowledge about the nature of reclamation on the river bank and extension of properties into the river; the inclusion of thousands of artefacts and pottery sherds in the reclamation and foreshore deposits are an unequalled catalogue of the material culture of Medieval London; and the carpentry of the wooden revetment have consequences for study of Medieval buildings which have otherwise not survived. The work is described as ‘a first statement’; non-ceramic artefacts from layers after 1500 have not yet been studied, and the large amount of Medieval and post-Medieval pottery from the largest excavation, Billingsgate, ‘awaits adequate resources for analysis’.

‘Historic churches are [England’s] crowning glory,’ wrote Simon Jenkins FSA in his Guardian column on 30 March. ‘But they belong to everyone, of all faiths and none. They should be nationalised, localised and secularised, in that order. England’s churches should be liberated from England’s church.’

In 1953 the schoolboy Alan Garner FSA rediscovered a wooden shovel originally found in the Alderley copper mines in 1875. In 1991 he presented it to the Manchester Museum in the University of Manchester: this – and the discovery of a hoard of over 500 Roman coins – inspired the creation of the Alderley Edge Landscape Project, a multi-disciplinary research programme of the Museum and the National Trust, which owns most of the Edge. The Story of Alderley: Living with the Edge, edited by A J N W (John) Prag FSA, was published in 2016. It is now available as an e-book. ‘Unfortunately,’ writes Prag, ‘unlike “real” books, e-books attract VAT, so the price for this version is £60 – and worse, to my sorrow it is not possible to offer any kind of discount.’

Chris Stringer FSA is a co-author of a study of the Neanderthal face. Using three-dimensional digital models of Neanderthals, modern humans, and Homo heidelbergensis, scientists considered three hypotheses to account for distinctive Neanderthal features: stronger biting, better conditioning of cold or dry air, and heavier breathing. Few differences were found in Neanderthal ability to chew, but their nasal cavities could condition air more efficiently than H. heidelbergensis, and could move considerably more air than either H. heidelbergensis or modern humans. ‘It will be the most severe [environments] that are pruning their morphology and adapting them,’ Stringer told the Guardian. ‘We now need to read this again against the archaeological evidence to see how they are using their very powerful bodies,’ said Matt Pope FSA (not involved in the research), ‘their very energetically demanding bodies, perhaps in different ways to how anatomically modern humans are using them.’
 
With puffs from the BBC, Reuters, Baillie Gifford and the Tata Group, the Hay Festival has announced its 2018 programme (24 May to 3 June in Hay-on-Wye, Wales). Several Fellows will be appearing. Bettany Hughes FSA (left) offers Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities (26 May). Jessica Harrison-Hall FSA talks about China: A History in Objects (30 May). Keith Ray FSA and Julian Thomas FSA describe Neolithic Britain: The Transformation of Social Worlds (1 June). Barry Cunliffe FSA addresses The Ancient Celts (1 June) and On The Ocean: The Mediterranean and the Atlantic from Prehistory to AD 1500 (2 June). David Cannadine FSA presents Victorious Century, 1800-1906 (2 June). Simon Jenkins FSA talks about Britain’s Best Railway Stations (3 June). Charlotte Higgins FSA chairs two presentations, Emily Wilson giving The 2018 Anthea Bell Lecture: Translating Homer (27 May) and Edith Hall on Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (28 May), and Bettany Hughes joins John Vidal, Patrick Kzitu and Emma Taylor to talk about It Starts With A Book (26 May). Let Salon know how it was if you go.

The remains of former convicts at Dorchester prison are to be reburied in Poundbury Cemetery, reported the Dorset Echo on 23 March. The remains are said to include those of Martha Brown, whom a young Thomas Hardy saw hung for murder in 1856, inspiring his novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The last person to be buried at the yard was executed in 1941. The former Her Majesty’s Prison Dorchester closed in 2013. Would-be developers City & Country commissioned Cotswold Archaeology to investigate the site. Human remains were found in early evaluations, but as they were left in the ground, they could not be analysed and their gender and identity remain open questions. Nonetheless, the Thomas Hardy Society, led by their president Lord Fellowes, has been campaigning to have the remains, which they believe to include those of Martha Brown, excavated and reburied.
 
Future Thinking on Carved Stones in Scotland: A Research Framework, edited by Sally Foster FSA, Katherine Forsyth, Susan Buckham and Stuart Jeffrey was launched in 2016 as part of the Scottish Archaeology Research Framework (ScARF). Substantial online resources are available. The project is described in detail in a series of text files, which have now been produced as stand-alone PDFs. Listen to the Stones, by Adrian Maldonado and Susan Buckham, is a popular introduction to the carved stones based on the original text, which has its own well-illustrated file. There is also a file describing 39 case studies.
 
No UK special public exhibition made the top 20 most popular around the world in the Art Newspaper’s annual survey on 26 March. Ranked by daily visits, London’s Saatchi Gallery’s Painter’s Painters came in at number 4, and Tate’s David Hockney retrospective at number 12 – at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (which in London helped Tate Britain attract a record 1,800,000 visitors in 2017, a 60% increase). In art museum attendance, headed by the Louvre (8,100,000 visits), the British Museum came fifth (5,906,000), Tate Modern sixth (5,656,004) and the National Gallery eighth (5,229,192). While overall the Victoria and Albert Museum had a record year for visitor figures, like Tate Britain, they fell at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum and Tate Modern. ‘What is striking,’ writes Martin Bailey, is that UK figures for museums funded by central government from both the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Art Newspaper ‘show a continuous increase and then a decrease in visitors.’ While overseas visitors have been rising, it seems national attendance is falling. Sandy Nairne FSA, former Director of the National Portrait Gallery, and Mark Jones FSA, former Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, comment that rising prices and falling incomes are probably to blame.

In ‘Three for one: Analysis of three differing approaches to developing an archaeology strategy,’ Mary Teehan, Rebecca H Jones FSA and Mike Heyworth FSA consider ‘differing approaches in fighting for the greater good’. Since 2015, three different strategies for archaeology have been developed by three separate organisations in Ireland, Scotland and England, they write in Internet Archaeology 49. Why now? One reason was the recession: in Ireland there was a staggering 83% exit from the archaeology profession between 2007 and 2014, and while the UK ‘hasn't seen quite the scale of reductions as Ireland … the sector has considerably contracted and we have found ourselves in challenging and austere times.’ Wider challenges in society and technology have altered research frameworks and funding opportunities, while public interest has soared. The challenge now, say the authors, is how to sustain momentum and deliver on the promises. ‘By focusing on agreed priorities, it may be that “a rising tide will lift all boats”.’

Gibraltar: The Greatest Siege in British History, by Roy Adkins FSA and Lesley Adkins FSA and published last September (Salon 392), has now been published in north America, on the 240th anniversary of France becoming officially involved with the American Revolution. Britain then declared war on France in the summer of 1778, and France eventually persuaded Spain to join in, leading to the Great Siege of Gibraltar from June 1779 to February 1783. The American jacket uses a painting by John Trumbull on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio. The Adkins will be speaking at the Fowey Festival of Arts and Literature on 15 May.
 
Mary Beard FSA and Charlotte Higgins FSA took part in a Guardian Live discussion at Sadler’s Wells theatre, London, which can be heard as a podcast. They consider themes raised by Beard’s recent books, Women and Power: A Manifesto and two spin-offs from the BBC TV series, Civilisations: How Do We Look / The Eye of Faith. How did Beard feel in Civilisations, asked Higgins, out of her Classical comfort zone as she travelled around the world? I learnt a lot, replied Beard. Some critical responses revealed ‘a huge cultural investment in a view of ancient Greek and Roman culture as a touchstone of what “western civilisation” is, that I and my students haven’t adhered to for decades.’ • Oxford University has announced that Mary Beard will become of seven Honorary degree recipients for 2018 in June.

Pay in archaeology is often said to be low relative to the experience and qualifications required by many practitioners, but at least it seems to be equally low for everyone. On 5 April companies employing more than 250 people were required to declare figures revealing their gender pay gaps. Though not legally required to declare such figures, MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), an archaeological charity, announced a 0.1% variation in average pay. ‘A career in archaeology is so diverse,’ says MOLA in a blog, ‘with a great many areas of expertise, from archaeological illustration to geophysical survey. In terms of representation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) jobs, archaeology is leading the way. At MOLA our scientific and technical specialists, like osteologists and geomaticians, are equally split across the sexes. Our large field team undertakes the very physically demanding job of excavating archaeological sites and is made up of 50% women. Within the field team many of our most experienced and specialist staff are female, including one of our chainsaw operators [in the photo, Jess Bryan cuts up Roman timbers]. Given that our fieldwork is carried out on construction sites, which tend to be male-dominated, this is really inspiring.’
 
Journalists have been talking to David Reich, who has published Who We Are and How We Got Here, reviewing recent research into ancient DNA, much of it his own. He has many collaborators, among who are several Fellows. ‘Nobody would have believed the scale of the turnover,’ Ian Armit FSA told the New York Times about the genetic change that occurred in Britain with the arrival of Beaker culture. ‘It’s changed the game,’ said Matthew Spriggs FSA, who has worked with Reich on early Pacific migrations. ‘Most of us have thought the people who built Stonehenge were our direct ancestors,’ says Mike Parker Pearson FSA in the Daily Mail, ‘but actually this study shows that they are only distantly related to us, if at all. We now realise these people had totally disappeared from the British population within 1,000 years.' The Beaker data are ‘absolutely sort of mind-blowing,’ says Barry Cunliffe FSA. ‘They are going to upset people, but that is part of the excitement of it.’
 
Expanded Interiors (16 May 2018–January 2019) is installing contemporary artworks among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, at the House of the Beautiful Courtyard (Herculaneum) and the House of the Cryptoporticus (Pompeii). Catrin Huber, artist and Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University, has assembled a team of archaeologists and digital technologists (Ian Haynes FSA, Thea Ravasi and Alex Turner), and a contemporary art specialist (Rosie Morris) ‘to explore the relevance of Roman wall painting and artefacts for today’s fine art practice, and to test how artists can respond to the histories and complex nature of these archaeological sites within a contemporary context.’ The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In the photo are (left to right) Ravasi, Turner, Haynes, Huber and Morris.
 
The Turin Shroud remains a revered relic of the Catholic Church, despite having been shown to be Medieval in date and not contemporary with the death of Christ. Michael Tite FSA, then Keeper of the British Museum’s Research Laboratory, co-ordinated the work of three labs chosen by the Church to produce a scientific date. Tite went to Turin in 1988, and described the experience to Rob Walker for BBC Radio in 2016; the short programme has been rebroadcast on the World Service, and can be heard on iPlayer. The result was AD 1260–1390, which the Church accepted. At the press conference, Tite wrote the date on the wall behind him with an exclamation mark, which played a part in some of many conspiracy theories that developed to explain a result some people did not want, and still will not accept.
 
More than two decades after Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel-Deschamps and Christian Hillaire stumbled on one of the greatest surviving ice age cave galleries in southern France – and four years since it was designated a World Heritage Site – agreement has been reached over rights to the art. The finders had argued that they were entitled to part of the income deriving from the Chauvet cave and a nearby replica made for public access. Disputes went back to the time of the discovery, when the French government tried to appropriate the land above the cave: the owners were offered F25,000, but they asked for F70 million; the cave entrance had to be widened to allow a judge to enter, and the court awarded them F87.5 million in 2001. Meanwhile Chauvet himself got into a row with the Ministry of Culture over a videotape and photos, disputing the government’s claim that he was a state agent (a letter proving this was a fake, he said). According to the Art Newspaper the association of the Caverne du Pont-d’Arc will now pay the three speleologists €50,000 for image rights and the Chauvet name, and they will receive 1.7% of admission fees to the replica cave.
 
The Art Newspaper is celebrating its 300th edition, with editors and reporters looking back on events, ideas and memorable correspondence. At the start, says Anna Somers Cocks FSA, Founding Editor and Chairman, ‘the big news, which we put on our front page, was the reunification of the great museums of Berlin.’ ‘Shortly afterwards,’ she continues, ‘I was writing the headline, Armageddon over Eden, for an article published during the first Gulf War (the Garden of Eden supposedly having been located in southern Mesopotamia), in which we listed the sites in Iraq as of fundamental importance to the history of mankind that needed to be protected from US bombing raids. We have survived two more crises in the art market, one after the internet bubble burst in 2000, another after the much more serious financial collapse of 2008.’ But the challenges are not over, she adds: ‘I foresee that the expansionist ethos of museums, which apes the world of business, is unsustainable and potentially corrupting, or at the very least distracting from the museums’ main mission. It is clear that art is already beginning to look less deserving than other, more obviously humanitarian causes.’

In an article in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (April 2018) Thomas F Strasser and colleagues argue that some long-known, tiny rock engravings in a cave on Crete date from the Ice Age and are Upper Palaeolithic. If they are right, Curtis Runnels FSA (not part of the research team) told Norman Hammond FSA in the Times (7 April), the engravings are ‘the best candidate for palaeolithic cave art in Greece and the southernmost example of European-style cave art.’ The work is not scientifically dated, but with high resolution photogrammetry scientists were able to pick apart successive layers of scratches, finding representations of small deer among the first to be made. They argue that distinctive sweeping, unforked antler identify the animals as Candiacervus, a genus of extinct deer endemic to Pleistocene Crete – not, as had been previously suggested in less thorough studies, a local feral goat. The rule in the photo is 5 cm long.

Last October Eberhard Zangger, a Swiss geoarchaeologist and communications consultant, told the Independent newspaper that a new translation of the Luwian language could solve ‘one of the greatest puzzles of Mediterranean archaeology’. A copy of an inscription was found in the estate of James Mellaart FSA and given by his son to Zangger, President of the Luwian Studies Foundation. However on 30 March Zangger said the drawings of artefacts and translations were faked by Mellaart to support his theories about early Asia Minor. In February Zangger was invited by Mellaart’s son, Alan, to examine the late archaeologist’s study in north London. He found files which showed Mellaart had been studying the hieroglyphs, contrary to his claims, and had ‘seemingly spirited into existence a history of the Luwians’. ‘These allegations of forgery are undoubtedly justified,’ said Zangger. ‘Instead of formulating theories, Mellaart fabricated drawings of artefacts and translations of alleged documents to reinforce his theories.’

Maryport: A Roman Fort and its Community by David Breeze FSA reviews a collection of Roman inscribed stones and sculpture, together with other Roman objects found at the Cumbrian fort and now housed in the Senhouse Roman Museum, and the fort’s earthworks and a large civil settlement revealed through geophysical survey and two recent excavations. The book places the collection in context and describes the history of research at the site. Maryport, says the blurb, although at the north-western edge of the Roman Empire, provides material of international importance for our understanding of the Roman state.

Chantal Conneller FSA, Alex Bayliss FSA, Maisie Taylor FSA and Nicky Milner FSA are among authors of a paper about abrupt climate change in England aroudn 11,000 years ago, and its impact on people. Their study is based on detailed re-investigations of the famous early Holocene site of Star Carr in Yorkshire, where a large assemblage of artefacts and animal remains has been recovered from a sequence of wetland deposits at the edge of a former lake basin. Drawing on an environmental record from two sediment cores, the exceptional evidence of wooden structures and economic activity, and a large number of radiocarbon dates, the team conclude that the hunter-gatherers’ world was dominated by climatic instability. However, the people at Star Carr were ‘resilient to abrupt cooling events, [while] the major changes in activity at the site coincided with intrinsic changes in local environmental ecological conditions and not with external climate drivers… the evidence from Star Carr indicates continuity and resilience throughout at least one’ abrupt climatic event. The article is in Nature Ecology & Evolution 26 March.
 

Peter Gordon FSA has died. He was born in 1924, and was elected a Fellow of the Society in November 1991. Richard Aldrich edited In History and in Education in Gordon’s honour in 1996 (reprinted 2013). Most of what follows is taken from Aldrich’s introduction to this book.
 
On the Society’s blue election paper in 1991, Peter Gordon is described as one of only two professors in the UK in the history of education. He brought to this field expertise and experience in both history and education, making significant contributions not least through a large number of wide-ranging publications (including several books co-authored with Denis Lawton). His research into educational history of the 19th and 20th centuries was grounded in social and political context, but often emphasised the roles of individuals in reform.
 
He was General Series Editor for the Woburn Education Series, to which he contributed several volumes himself, including his first book, derived from his doctoral thesis, The Victorian School Manager: A Study in the Management of Education 1800–1902 (1974). Among other books were Curriculum Change in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1978, with Denis Lawton); HMI [Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools] (1987, with Lawton); Royal Education: Past, Present and Future (1999, with Lawton: a ‘strangely neglected’ subject, of interest because of what it tells us about how decision-makers thought about the education of leaders, and the matter of choice when that was not constrained by cost); Dictionary of British Women's Organisations, 1825–1960 (2001, with David Doughan); A History of Western Educational Ideas (2002) and Dictionary of British Education (2003, both also with Denis Lawton).
 
Gordon was born in Hull, went to India for his National Service with the Royal Air Force (1945–48), and returned to London to study at the London School of Economics and the Institute of Education. He then taught in primary and secondary schools in London, Essex and Middlesex before joining Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools in 1965. In 1973 he became Lecturer in Education at the University of London, rising to Reader (1976) and Head of a new History and Humanities Department and a personal chair (1982). He retired in 1993.
 
Beside his main educational focus, Gordon was also a researcher into family history and Trustee of the Northamptonshire Record Society. Publications included The Red Earl: The Papers of the Fifth Earl Spencer (2 vols 1981/1986), The Wakes of Northamptonshire: A Family History (1992) and Politics and Society: The Journals of Lady Knightley of Fawsley 1885–1913 (1999).

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The Revd David Walker FSA died on 20 December 2017 aged 94. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in May 1960, and resigned in March 2001. Writing in the Church Times (2 March) the Ven Robert Williams describes David Walker as ‘a man of many parts and much energy, having been an RAF pilot, university lecturer, clergyman, and author.’
 
Born in Bristol, Walker joined the RAF in 1940 and flew heavy bombers in the Burma campaign. After the war he was re-trained on jet fighter aircraft in preparation for the Korean War. He studied history at the University of Bristol, obtained a D Phil from Balliol College, Oxford, and was appointed to teach medieval history at University College, Swansea, in 1951, where he stayed for some 30 years.
 
He was President of the Bristol and Gloucester Archaeological Society, Secretary and Chairman of the Historical Association (Bristol and Swansea), and Vice-President of the Glamorgan History Society. His books include Medieval Wales (1990), The Normans in Britain (1995), and The Cartulary of St Augustine's Abbey, Bristol (1998). He was also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
 
‘From his time as a choirboy,’ says Williams, ‘David's faith was an important part of his life.’ He became the first person in the Swansea & Brecon diocese to be ordained as a non-stipendiary clergy, being both deaconed and priested in 1962. He became Chaplain to the University Air Squadron in 1964 and to the RAF in 1967. From 1972, when he was appointed a Canon of Brecon Cathedral, he played a full part in cathedral life, including much work in the Chapter Library. He became Precentor in 1979 and was Chancellor from 1990 to 1993. Alongside this, he continued parish duties at St Mary's and St James's in Swansea and, over the years, served Hafod, Manselton, and Caerethin parishes.
 
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Vera Evison FSA died on 18 March. She was elected a Fellow of the Society in May 1955, nearly 63 years ago.
 
Vera Evison was one of a number of archaeologists in the last century who worked for the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments at the Ministry of Works, excavating sites ahead of their imminent destruction by development with the voluntary support of the developers. Her speciality was Anglo-Saxon cemeteries. As was often the case with such projects, for want of funds analysis and publication of the results were not always able to follow directly on excavation.
 
Evison managed the complex task of seeing six cemeteries through to publication, mostly in monographs. These were at Buckland, Dover, a site being developed into a housing estate in 1951 (published 1987); Great Chesterford, Essex, where gravel-quarrying was taking out fields north-west of the Roman town in 1952 (published 1994); Holborough Hill, Kent, excavated 1952­–53 ahead of removal by chalk quarrying by Associated Portland Cement (published 1956); two cemeteries at Beckford, Hereford and Worcester, revealed by gravel digging and excavated in 1954 and 1958 respectively (published together with Prue Hill in 1996); and Alton, Hampshire, excavated 1959–61 (published 1988).
 
A grave at Alton contained a spectacular decorated silver-gilt buckle (right), one of many recovered artefacts indicative of gender, status and cultural values that were apparently the personal possessions of the dead. Studying and cataloguing such objects, with her own numerous drawings, became an extraordinary project for Evison. Among a series of articles mostly in the Antiquaries Journal and Archaeologia, she reported on inlaid metalwork, glass drinking-horns (both in 1955), sugar-loaf shield bosses (1963), sword-rings and beads (1967 and again in 1976), quoit brooch style buckles (1968), glass cone beakers (1972), whetstones (1975), applied disc brooches on the continent and in England (both 1978), and glass claw-beakers and button brooches (both in 1982, the latter with Richard Avent FSA). She also published A Corpus of Wheel-thrown Pottery in Anglo-Saxon Graves (1979) and Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Glass in the British Museum (2008, edited by Sonja Marzinik), work for which she was particularly well known.
 
Evison drew on some of her own excavations for The Fifth Century Invasions South of the Thames (1965). This was a controversial narrative of Anglo-Saxon settlement in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire which emphasised colonisation led by Frankish ex-soldiers of the Roman army from north France or Belgium, at the expense of traditional Jutish and Saxon homelands. Not all specialists were convinced. Reviewing the book in the Antiquaries Journal, Sonia Chadwick Hawkes FSA chastised Evison for ‘Frankophilia’ and her ‘very curious state of mind’. By contrast, Rupert Bruce-Mitford FSA (in the Archaeological Journal) congratulated her on the ‘essential value and importance of the book’.

Ian Riddler FSA, Jean Soulat and Lynne Keys FSA edited The Evidence of Material Culture: Studies in Honour of Professor Vera Evison (2016), for her ‘major contribution to the study of the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England over a period of more than sixty years.’

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Ian Stewart, Lord Stewartby FSA, who died in March, is described as ‘one of Britain’s most respected numismatists’ in an obituary in the Telegraph that is strong on political detail (5 April).
 
In 1956 he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, taking a First in Classics. His main achievements as a minister, says the Telegraph, were to prepare the ground for the demutualisation of building societies and the Trustee Savings Bank, and push through legislation to tighten banking regulation, then in the hands of the Bank of England.
 
After the theft of the oldest part of his collection of Scottish coins in 2007, Spink auctioned his English coins, many of them Anglo-Saxon, at five separate sales. The third alone involved 152 lots of gold pieces from Edward III to George III.
 

In
memory of
JOHN JAMES, F.S.A.
AUTHOR OF THE
HISTORY OF BRADFORD,
AND OTHER WORKS.
BORN AT WEST WITTON,
JANUARY 22ND 1811;
DIED AT NETHEREDGE, SHEFFIELD,
JULY 4TH 1867.
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well
 
ERECTED BY A FEW BRADFORD FRIENDS.
1885.