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Ashley Barker FSA, architect and historic buildings specialist, died in March.
 
The section also contains further notices on the late Roger Mercer FSA and the late Peter Kidson FSA.
 
Ralph Solecki, an American archaeologist who with his wife Rose Solecki excavated a significant collection of Neanderthal remains in the Shanidar Cave, Iraq, in the 1950s, has died at the age of 101. He graduated from Columbia University where he spent his career until retirement in 1988. As well as the scientific importance of his discoveries at Shanidar, they gained public fame from his imaginative presentations. Pollen from flowering plants was found in the soil around one skeleton, which he saw as evidence that garlands had been placed in the grave, deducing the male had ‘soul’; seven of the eight plant species, he argued, had medicinal properties. The burial inspired writer Jean Auel to create her character Iza, a ‘medicine woman’, in novels such as The Clan of the Cave Bear, though the pollen has also been explained as having seeped through the soil from above. Christopher Hunt FSA, Graeme Barker FSA and Tim Reynolds are leading new excavations at the cave. Photo by Mahmoud Khudhir Sulaiman shows Solecki in 1953.
 
John Curtis FSA has written of the achievements of the late Lamia al-Gailani, ‘the doyenne of Iraqi archaeologists and experts in ancient Mesopotamia’, in the Art Newspaper (18 March): ‘Gailani studied briefly in the University of Baghdad and later at the Universities of Cambridge (BA) and Edinburgh (MA), before finally writing a PhD thesis at the Institute of Archaeology in London University, completed in 1977, on studies in the chronology and regional style of Old Babylonian cylinder seals. For the last 10 years of her life, Gailani was much involved in the project to establish a new museum for Basrah,’ after the original ‘had been looted in the aftermath of the First Gulf War and about half the contents stolen.’ Gailani ‘was a key member’ of a steering committee – which became the Friends of Basrah Museum – established in London ‘to complete what was by now perceived as a British legacy project… The project had an early boost with a generous donation from BP, and with this and other funds raised in the UK it was possible to renovate the building [a former palace of Saddam Hussein’s] and install an exhibition in one of the galleries, dedicated to the history of the Basrah region, that opened on 27 September 2016.’
 
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Fifteen new Fellows were elected on 21 March:
 
Edward Banning (early agriculture in the Near East).
 
Caroline Barron (ancient history and Latin epigraphy).
 
Mark Beattie-Edwards (maritime archaeology).
 
Claire Breay (archives, early manuscripts).
 
Adam Brumm (early humans in south-east Asia).
 
Julia Crick (medieval palaeography).
 
Paul Fox (cultural property protection and representation of armed conflict).
 
Krista Kesselring (Tudor England).
 
Brian Martin Lodwick (religious history and architecture in Glamorgan).
 
Timothy McCann (archives).
 
Charles O'Brien (architectural history).
 
Melanie Pomeroy-Kellinger (archaeology and heritage management).
 
Esther Renwick (community archaeology in Shetland).
 
Edmund Simons (archaeology and heritage management).
 
Tim Thomas (archaeology and historical anthropology of Oceania).
 
For details see Ballot Results. Further details can be seen in the Ballot Archive (Fellows only).
 
As always, I'm particularly keen to hear about the activities of new Fellows, please email Salon at saloneditor@sal.org.uk.

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His Royal Highness the Prince Charles, the Duke of Rothesay, has agreed to take on the Patronage of the Swandro-Orkney Coastal Archaeology Trust. The Trust was formed in 2016 to respond to marine loss of archaeological sites along 980km of coastline. Steve Dockrill FSA, the Trust's Chair, said in a statement, ‘The work of the Trust, and in particular our current research excavation investigating both the archaeology and the processes of erosion at the multi-period site at the Knowe of Swandro in Rousay, brings together two of His Royal Highness' interests. The Prince has long campaigned to raise awareness of the dangers of global warming and climate change, and read archaeology and anthropology as a Cambridge undergraduate. We hope that having such a distinguished Patron will raise the profile of the Trust and also make more people aware of the threat to our heritage posed by global warming.’ The Knowe of Swandro consist of a Neolithic chambered tomb and a succession of settlements with stone-walled buildings of Iron Age, Pictish, Viking and Norse times, exposed on the beach and disappearing into the sea.
  
Paul Craddock FSA has received the 2019 Colonel James Tod award, which honours nationals foreign to India in recognition of 'distinquished sevice of permanent value and understanding of the spirit and values of Mewar’. The award was made by the Maharana at Udaipur in Rajasthan and follows the publication of Early Indian Metallurgy (2017). This reports the survey and excavation of early silver, lead and zinc production at mines in the Aravalli Hills of North West India. Silver was produced on a colossal scale, writes Craddock, at a number of mines operated by the Mauryans in the last centuries of the first millennium BC. Zinc oxide was also being produced at Zawar and there, in the first millennium AD, the scientific laboratory procedure for the distillation of zinc was developed into a commercially viable method for the large scale production of the metal, the first industrial high temperature distillation technology. Photo shows (L–R) ‘Maharana’ Arvind Singh Mewar, his son Lakshyaraj, Paul Craddock and K Kasturirangan
 
Matthew Johnson FSA has revised his Archaeological Theory: An Introduction for a third edition. It’s extensively changed throughout, he writes, including a completely new chapter on ‘The Material Turn’, and heavily revised chapters on ‘Gender and Identity’ and ‘Archaeology, Politics and Culture’, as well as a rewritten ‘Conclusion’ and updated ‘Further Reading’. The publisher describes the book as ‘A lively and accessible introduction to themes and debates in archaeological theory for students of all levels,’ with ‘informal and easy-to-understand prose, as well as examples, cartoons, and informal dialogues’. The front cover, says Johnson, features his ‘favourite Nash, after Battle of Britain’: painted in 1935, Equivalents for the Megaliths was inspired by concrete markers placed at the Sanctuary, Avebury, after excavation by Maud Cunnington and her husband Ben Cunnington FSA in 1930.
 
 Charlotte Higgins FSA has been selected by Elif Shafak, a novelist, for the National Centre for Writing and the British Council as one of ten ‘exciting women writers in the UK’. ‘Charlotte Higgins,’ said Shafak in a statement, ‘is an author with magic in her pen. From ancient subjects she conjures living text: vast conversations about who we are today and why the stories we tell really matter.’ Commenting on the honour, Bidisha, a journalist, wrote of Higgins’ book Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, that it 'delves into Britain’s Roman past archaeologically, geographically and culturally and examines the stories subsequent centuries of British writers have told themselves about the Romans’ presence in the land. Higgins also taps into a longstanding British literary preoccupation with landscape and the natural world – a Romantic longing for communion with the earth.’
 
Londoner Petre Romeo Cazan has been sentenced to 7 years and 6 months in prison for theft and criminal damage at seven churches in Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Hampshire in 2016. Cazan climbed drainpipes to access church roofs, throwing lead to the ground which was collected in a waiting van. He took his phone with him, allowing police to map his presence in the relevant places at the right times, paid large sums into his back account within days of the offences, and left a record of his vehicles on number plate recognition cameras. As if that wasn’t enough (he also left a cigarette butt with his DNA on it), he had to abandon his van at St Laurence's, Foxton, Cambridgeshire, when it sunk into wet ground under the weight of lead. By the time he was apprehended he had caused nearly £190,000-worth of damage. Mark Harrison FSA coordinated the preparation of impact statements for the sentencing process, to highlight the offences’ heritage elements; reference was made to sentencing guidelines from another case of heritage theft. Photo shows All Saints Church, Marsworth, Herts, which suffered damage costing £40,000, including to historic stonework (photo Gary Mudd/BBC).

Erin Griffey, who was elected to the Society on 14 February, has been interviewed by the University of Auckland, where she is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History. The honour, says the blog (15 March), recognises her world-leading research on Queen Henrietta Maria of France (1609–1669), wife of King Charles I and queen consort of England, Scotland and Ireland. Griffey started researching the Stuart court after moving from London to Auckland in 2002, and realising ‘what a widely influential and deeply polarising historical figure’ Henrietta Maria was. Griffey says ‘she is honoured to become a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. “It has an esteemed history with such brilliant scholars and a strong sense of community and purpose.” She will be formally admitted to the Society during a trip to London later in the year.’
 
Graham Connah FSA, now a Visiting Fellow in Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra, has written From Cambridge to Lake Chad: Life in archaeology 1956–1971. The 15 years of the title span the moment he ended full-time service in the Royal Navy, returning home to a Dorset where he no longer felt he belonged, to leaving Lagos, Nigeria to join Isabel McBryde FSA at the University of New England in Australia. With much detail and many illustrations (often his own photos), Connah records his time at the University of Cambridge, excavating with Paul Ashbee FSA in Wiltshire; his first job in Africa as a field archaeologist for the Nigerian Federal Department of Antiquities and his excavations at Benin City; return to England (‘It appeared in that summer of 1962 that Cambridge no longer had anybody interested in African archaeology.’); more Benin excavations, and so on, with anecdotes of many people – those he got on with and those he didn't – and places, including through the Nigerian Civil War, ‘when archaeological work continued with difficulty’.
 
In a recent Salon I wrote about planning applications for film sets to be made on Salisbury Plain, and explained how due process was successfully assessing the locations and requiring survey and recording ahead of works where necessary – or, as the Daily Mail had reported it, ‘Battle erupts over Steven Spielberg plans to film WWI epic.’ On 19 March MailOnline reported that ‘Steven Spielberg wins battle to build WWI trenches and farmstead near Stonehenge after tests find Hollywood epic “1917” poses no threat to 5,000-year-old site.’ 'It shows that the process works,’ said David Dawson FSA, Director of Wiltshire Museum. 'The archaeological evidence has been called and none of the work on the sites will be damaging. Everyone is a winner.' Assessed sites will be subject to archaeological watching briefs.
 
The peer-reviewed Journal of Forensics Sciences has published an article by Jari Louhelainen, of Liverpool University, and David Miller reporting on their ‘investigation of, to our knowledge, the only remaining physical evidence linked to [the “Jack the Ripper”] murders, recovered from one of the victims at the scene of the crime. We applied novel, minimally destructive techniques for sample recovery from forensically relevant stains on the evidence and separated single cells linked to the suspect, followed by phenotypic analysis… To our knowledge, this is the most advanced study to date regarding this case.’ They pin the murders on Aaron Kosminski, a Polish barber, as Louhelainen had done in 2014 for a book written by Russell Edwards, when his evidence was dismissed by observers. It’s not clear that he and Miller have anything new. They do not publish in full the alleged DNA data (obtained from a shawl whose connection with the murder is not explained), which Turi King FSA told the Times (19 March) ‘was highly unusual’. ‘I’m very concerned about naming Kosminski as Jack the Ripper without more evidence,’ said King.

Ashley Barker FSA died on 11 March aged 91. He was a Lifetime Fellow of the Society, having been elected in January 1966.
 
Ashley Barker, the last Surveyor of Historic Buildings to the former Greater London Council (GLC), graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London with its highest award, the AA Diploma Honours.

By the mid 1960s, when Frank Kelsall FSA (1964) and Malcolm Airs FSA (1966) joined Barker’s team, the GLC’s pioneering Historic Buildings Division, inherited from the former London County Council (LCC) in 1965, had two sections: a works department which looked after the council’s own properties, and a statutory section which dealt with planning and listed buildings. The Division had been previously dominated by architects, but was now bringing in historians. Barker, then Deputy Surveyor to W A Eden FSA, an architect who led the statutory section and whom Barker succeeded to become Surveyor around 1970, was helping to achieve things which shaped the future of the London scene, and acted as a model for historical building preservation across the country. He later wrote, in the Architects' Journal (1985), that ‘in the final result we are not so much aware of old and new co-existing side by side as of one single lively identity embodied in the still recognisable historic streets’.
 
Barker, says Kelsall, was ‘an outstandingly good witness at public inquiries’ and instrumental in the LCC/GLC’s pioneering approach to preserving relatively modern buildings, at a time when some of London’s grandest Victorian edifices were under threat: St Pancras railway station hotel survived, the Natural History Museum’s great hall was not filled with small galleries and Covent Garden was saved, but there were losses, notably the entrance to Euston railway station. ‘The GLC’, writes Airs, ‘was far in advance of anywhere else in the country in establishing a specialised division in protecting the historic environment, and both Eden and Barker after him were key figures in the conservation cause.’
 
‘I look back fondly’, writes Kelsall, ‘on the days when Ashley led a committed team through what many people regard as the conservation movement’s finest time – what one writer has called “the heroic period of conservation”. I devilled for the evidence for many public inquiries, and listening to Ashley give evidence at inquiry was a revelation; he was probably the finest expert witness I’ve heard. That experience served me well in later years when taking on the same role in inquiries in Liverpool, Manchester and elsewhere. He could describe and assess the merits of often complex buildings with such precision and clarity that one felt bound to agree with him.’
 
The GLC was abolished by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1986, but the Buildings Division survived by being absorbed by the new English Heritage. ‘Successfully keeping his GLC team together and moved into English Heritage,’ writes Kelsall, ‘must count as one of Ashley’s greatest achievements.’ Barker stayed for two years. In the Spectator in 1988, in a characteristically polemic attack on ‘the emasculating, undermining, enervating power of civil servants’ he feared were suppressing English Heritage’s independence, the late Gavin Stamp FSA regretted the resignation of Ashley Barker from the London Division. ‘The official reason for this melancholy event,’ wrote Stamp, ‘is that he wishes to return to private architectural practice before he is too old, but it is impossible not to conclude that Mr Barker is distressed at seeing the decline of the division he has built up. … Lord Montagu quite rightly wants English Heritage to be “a centre of excellence on, and spokesman for, conservation matters”. If so, perhaps the administrators should have considered modelling the rest of English Heritage on the London Division rather than vice versa.'
 
Ashely Barker was Chairman of the Canterbury Cathedral Fabric Advisory Committee, a member of the St Paul's Fabric Advisory Committee and Director of the Heritage of London Trust. He was awarded OBE in the 1975 New Year Honours. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
 
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The Times (14 March) has published an obituary of the late Roger Mercer FSA, who died last December. He spent his career, says the paper, ‘protecting and studying the monuments and landscapes of prehistory with great energy and military precision, transforming many of Scotland’s ancient monuments.’
 
One of his most notable excavations was at the neolithic Grime’s Graves flint mines in Norfolk. ‘The first sight that many visitors had of him was a slightly rotund figure at the bottom of a deep, hourglass-shaped shaft … Access here was by ladder: a visiting royal party had to descend in order of precedence, regroup in the shaft and re-emerge in the same order, much to Mercer’s amusement.
 
‘A larger-than-life character, he believed that hard outdoor work should be accompanied by fun. He knew that an army marches on its stomach. Catering – sometimes prepared by his wife, Susan, who spent her honeymoon on the neolithic settlement at Carn Brea – was always exemplary, but living conditions could be rudimentary.
 
‘While he was at the inspectorate of ancient monuments, one of his charges was the defence ministry landholding on Salisbury Plain. Mercer was keen that tracked vehicles should no longer be driven there because of damage to burial mounds. After a good lunch in the mess, and content with progress, he was escorted to the training ground only to see a tank roar over a round barrow. “Don’t worry,” said an officer, apologising. “I’ve got his number.”’
 
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Nicola Coldstream FSA has written an obituary for the Guardian of the late Peter Kidson FSA, who died in February. He was, says Coldstream, ‘an outstanding historian of medieval architecture whose work and teaching inspired successive generations of scholars,’ and ‘one of the most stylish writers on art history of his generation’.
 
‘Both in the seminar room and on visits to buildings Peter demanded rigorous observation and analysis. He treated his doctoral students, of which I was one of the first, with the same wry detachment with which he observed the modern world, never imposing his own opinion, but allowing his students to pursue their studies as they wished, provided they could defend their position. If they could, all well and good, especially if the encounter was accompanied by the exchange of amusing gossip.'
 

                                                                  JOHN S.C. LEWIS, FSA
                                                                  General Secretary and Returning Officer
                                                                        March 2019