Presenting research conducted by the ‘St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster’ project at the University of York, this article focuses on the Great Seal devised in 1649 and re-issued in 1651 to enable the Commonwealth to function following the execution of Charles i. As a familiar and ancient image of monarchy, the Great Seal posed an obvious challenge to the authority of the Rump Parliament. A radical new design, authorised by parliamentary committee and executed by engraver Thomas Simon, replaced royal iconography with images of popular sovereignty and nationhood: a map of England and Ireland on the obverse of the Seal, and the interior of the House of Commons chamber (formerly St Stephen’s Chapel) on the reverse. The result was a striking evocation of political authority located in the House of Commons and deriving from the English people. Engravings of the Commons chamber, in circulation since the 1620s, are identified as a probable source for Simon’s work. The Great Seal also re-asserted England’s dominion over Ireland and the waters surrounding the British Isles. Overall, this article argues for continuity as well as alteration in the iconography of the Great Seal of England, at a time of revolutionary political change.

This paper describes the results of the surveys carried out along Ras Muari (Cape Monze, Karachi, Sindh) by the Italian Archaeological Mission in Lower Sindh and Las Bela in 2013 and 2014. The surveyed area coincides with part of the mythical land of the Ichthyophagoi, mentioned by the classical chroniclers. Many archaeological sites, mainly scatters and spots of fragmented marine and mangrove shells, were discovered and AMS dated along the northern part of the cape facing the Hab River mouth. The surveys have shown that fisher and shell gatherer communities temporarily settled in different parts of the headland. They began to exploit the sea resources during the Neolithic. However, the most important discovery consists of a unique fishers’ settlement with rectangular stone-walled structures located on a limestone terrace near Sonari (SNR-1), the first ever found along the northern coast of the Arabian Sea. The AMS dates show that it was settled mainly during the first half of the third millennium cal bc when the Indus Civilisation flourished in the area. Considering the importance of the discovery, all the material culture remains from the Sonari sites have been described and analysed in detail and, whenever possible, framed into the different phases of environmental changes and human adaptation to the coastal environment that have been interpreted thanks to a good series of AMS dates from marine and mangrove shells.

This paper reviews the Society of Antiquaries’ Evolution of the Landscape project, which started in 1974, and the project’s Sarsen Stones in Wessex survey. The survey was an ambitious public archaeology undertaking, involving c 100 volunteers led by Fellows of the Society during the 1970s. Its aims, objectives and outcomes are described in this article. The survey’s unique dataset, produced for the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset, has now been digitised. Drawing on the dataset, the paper situates the Evolution of the Landscape project in the context of later twentieth-century British archaeology. It demonstrates the importance not only of individual Fellows, but also contemporary movements in academic and development-led archaeology, to the direction of the Society’s activities in this formative period for the discipline today, and shows how the Society’s research was engaged with some of archaeology’s most pressing cultural resource management issues.

Parramatta was the second British settlement established in mainland Australia, and for a time was the largest. Its burial ground and monuments, the oldest surviving British cemetery in mainland Australia, provides important evidence for the aspirations, attitudes and practices within this fledgling community. It reveals the role of improvement concepts and practices in popular as well as governmental culture, representing an experiment in secular control over burial decades before the urban non-denominational cemetery first appears in England. The primary chronological focus here is from the foundation of settlement in 1788 to c 1840, by which time free settlers as well as emancipists had transformed Parramatta from a convict settlement into a colonial town.

Iona was a major European intellectual and artistic centre during the seventh to ninth centuries, with outstanding illustrated manuscripts, sculpture and religious writings produced there, despite its apparently peripheral location ‘at the ends of the earth’. Recent theological discourse has emphasised the leading role of Iona, and particularly its ninth abbot, Adomnán, in developing the metaphor of the earthly monastery as a mirror of heavenly Jerusalem, allowing us to suggest a new appreciation of the innovative monastic layout at Iona and its influence on other monasteries in northern Britain. The authors contend that the unique paved roadway and the schematic layout of the early church, shrine chapel and free-standing crosses were intended to evoke Jerusalem, and that the journey to the sacred heart of the site mirrored a pilgrim’s journey to the tomb of Christ. The key to this transformative understanding is Charles Thomas’s 1956–63 campaign of excavations on Iona, which this article is publishing for the first time. These excavations were influential in the history of early Christian archaeology in Britain as they helped to form many of Thomas’s ideas, later expressed in a series of influential books. They also revealed important new information on the layout and function of the monastic complex, and produced some unique metalwork and glass artefacts that considerably expand our knowledge of activities on the site. This article collates this new information with a re-assessment of the evidence from a large series of other excavations on Iona, and relates the results to recent explorations at other Insular monastic sites.

This paper presents the results of a case study of wax seals dated between 1225 and 1250 from St Ethelbert’s Hospital, Hereford. When medieval matrices were impressed into soft wax, handprints were often left on the reverse of the seal. The use of modern forensic techniques to capture and compare these prints provides evidence about the process of sealing and its relationship to the individual matrix owner. Seals with the same print on the reverse could be impressed with different matrices, and impressions of the same matrix have different prints on the reverse. The impressing of the matrix was not, then, as has been claimed, the responsibility of the matrix owner as the only way to impress their identity into the wax. This evidence allows a reappraisal of administrative developments in sealing, and the separation of the process of sealing from both the performance of livery of seisin and the seal owner.

The Royal Armouries possesses two scythe blades of pre-mechanised manufacture, mounted axially on straight hafts to form weapons. An inventory of 1686 lists eighty-one scythe blades at the Tower of London (by 1694 described as booty captured from the Duke of Monmouth’s rebels at Sedgemoor) and the surviving pair was probably among them. The Duke’s shortage of standard-issue equipment made improvisation essential, and the choice of re-hafted scythe blades owed to their widespread, well known and effective use by irregular forces in Britain and Europe since the late Middle Ages. Monmouth’s ‘sithmen’, some hundreds strong, took part in skirmishes and in the battle of Sedgemoor itself. Of interest to the Tower authorities as curiosities and for their propaganda value, the scythe blades were displayed, in diminishing numbers, from the seventeenth until the nineteenth century, and these two until the 1990s. In the future they will be displayed again, representing Monmouth’s rebels and countless others, and a weapon type that deserves a greater level of study and recognition.

Between 1840 and 1846 the Scottish physician David Boswell Reid produced a scheme for a central ventilation system serving the Palace of Westminster. This scheme included a proposal for a sophisticated ventilation and climatic control system in the House of Commons. Although the plans for a central system were abandoned after six years, Reid was able to implement his idea within the confines of the House of Commons. Existing literature on Reid’s involvement in the design of the Palace of Westminster has focused largely on his difficult relationship with the architect Charles Barry, but his actual contribution to the design of the ventilation system has remained largely unexplored. Neither his unfinished early proposal nor his final design for the House of Commons has been studied in any depth before. This paper retraces the evolution of Reid’s original plans, and provides a systematic reconstruction of the ventilation system implemented inside the House of Commons between 1847 and 1854. The historic system is now completely lost, but new archival research, involving the study of several hundred letters, sketches and plans, has yielded detailed insights into its design and how it performed historically. In addition to revealing the ventilation system’s physical arrangements, research has uncovered how scientists and engineers had evaluated its design empirically from a human and technological perspective. As such, this paper provides a new perspective on antiquarian studies and illuminates how architectural technology in the mid-nineteenth century was shaped, evaluated and refined based on environmental performance. Although environmental factors, such as climate or air purity, were more transient dimensions of architecture, in the case of the House of Commons this paper shows that they were key drivers of architectural form.

This paper presents the results of a multidisciplinary project that has revealed the location, extent and character of the winter camp of the Viking Great Army at Torksey, Lincolnshire, of ad 872–3. The camp lay within a naturally defended area of higher ground, partially surrounded by marshes and bordered by the River Trent on its western side. It is considerably larger than the Viking camp of 873–4 previously excavated at Repton, Derbyshire, and lacks the earthwork defences identified there. Several thousand individuals overwintered in the camp, including warriors, craftworkers and merchants. An exceptionally large and rich metalwork assemblage was deposited during the Great Army’s overwintering, and metal processing and trading was undertaken. There is no evidence for a pre-existing Anglo-Saxon trading site here; the site appears to have been chosen for its strategic location and its access to resources. In the wake of the overwintering, Torksey developed as an important Anglo-Saxon borough with a major wheel-thrown pottery industry and multiple churches and cemeteries. The Torksey evidence allows for a radical reappraisal of the character of Viking winter camps, and the legacy of the Viking Great Army for Anglo-Saxon England.