Excavations at Hembury (Devon) in 1980–83 have revealed a new Neolithic earthwork to the north of the causewayed enclosure excavated by Miss D. M. Liddell in 1930–35. The eastern defences of the Iron Age hillfort have been examined for the first time and a sequence of box rampart followed by dump rampart demonstrated. The latter phase of construction is datable to the second or first century b.c. On the Roman conquest of the region the northern end of the hillfort was occupied by Roman troops who constructed a series of regular planned timber buildings, including a structure identified as a fabrica. This occupation probably ended in the 60s a.d. and thereafter the hillfort remained in disuse.

Two years ago, as I entered my first Anniversary, I contemplated the portraits of my predecessors; like the ghosts in Ruddigore, many generations of them stepped from the wall to tell me my prerogatives and duties and obligations and how little chance I had of meeting them with credit; and now the moment has come when I too am a portrait and step back into the wall to haunt my successors. This has prompted me to ponder a little more deeply the nature of our craft and of our kind. I am myself a historian, and make no further excuse for quoting, not for the first time, a favourite description of the historian at work, from Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie.

Hazleton North Cotswold-Severn tomb was totally excavated between 1979 and 1982. It was shown to be a laterally chambered cairn of complex cellular construction with a blank dry-stone forecourt wall. The two chambered areas, located centrally within the cairn, contained well-preserved burial deposits. Below the cairn the buried soil contained evidence for previous Mesolithic and Neolithic occupation.

Two La Tène I swords found in the River Thames more than a century ago are in the remains of iron scabbards decorated with dragon-pairs. These designs, which have only recently been revealed, are similar to those on La Tène scabbards throughout Celtic Europe from France to Romania: ninety examples can now be listed, and half of them have been added in the last decade. The discovery of dragon-pairs in the Thames emphasizes the links that must have existed between Britain and the rest of the Celtic world in the decades around 300 B.C.

G. E. Fox's reconstruction of fragments of painted plaster found in house XIV, I at Silchester is subjected to new scrutiny, and it is argued that, rather than belonging (as Fox thought) to a dado, they derive from two separate all-over patterns of the type described by German writers as Tapetenmuster. It is suggested that the decorations come from the adjacent rooms 22 and 29, and, by comparison with other examples of similar patterns in other parts of the Roman Empire, that they probably adorned the walls rather than the ceilings.

This paper examines the two dominant cults of Sky and Fertility in the Romano-Celtic world. There are no literary allusions to a link between the two concepts, but a substantial body of archaeological data does exist which testifies to a close iconographic association between the images and symbolism reflecting beliefs in celestial and fertility powers. The most important material evidence consists of a group of small clay statuettes representing female figures decorated with what are probably solar symbols. Allied to this is evidence for an association between the Celtic Mother-Goddesses (the Deae Matres) and cosmic motifs, particularly the solar wheel. It is also possible to identify traces of a fertility aspect to the cult of a male solar divinity. Whilst the simplistic argument for a divine ‘marriage’ between sky-father and earth-mother (Hatt 1965) is not here advanced, there is, nevertheless, strong evidence from Gaul and Britain that the two major cults of the Romano-Celtic world were clearly intertwined. This association need not be such a paradox as it might seem; the sun, like the rain, was essential for crop-growth, and the iconography appears to demonstrate acknowledgement of, and gratitude for, this interaction between natural—or supernatural—phenomena.

Conservation in 1980 of the wall-paintings in the upper chamber of the south porch at Breamore church, where the notable Anglo-Saxon stone rood is sited, led to an archaeological study of the associated parts of the building. It was established that the rood is not in its primary location over the south door, but was only erected there in the fifteenth century. It is argued that the rood originally occupied a position over the western arch into the nave of the Saxon church, being enclosed within a chamber, now demolished. The Norman south doorway and added porch appear to be a refurbishment of an original entrance to the nave, although probably not the principal one, which, it is argued, lay at the west end. In the fifteenth century the church was repaired piecemeal, and this involved the demolition of the Saxon north porticus and western chamber, the partial reconstruction of the south porch and a lowering of its roof pitch, and the resiting of the displaced rood sculptures in the south wall of the nave above the porch. In the early sixteenth century the walls of the porch were raised, creating an upper storey which functioned as a chapel, probably dedicated in honour of St. Mary the Virgin. The rood then became a devotional object within the porch chapel, and an elaborate scheme of landscape painting was applied as a background, and was continued on the west wall of the chapel. The remaining areas of wall plaster in the chapel were painted with guttée-de-sang and sacred monograms. Later in the sixteenth century the Anglo-Saxon sculptures were deliberately defaced and their remains hidden by a layer of plaster. The re-exposure of the rood and paintings took place at an unrecorded date in the nineteenth century; the upper floor of the porch was removed in 1897, revealing the chapel to view from below.

Fresh examination of the detailed zoo- and anthropomorphic motifs on some early Kentish jewellery suggests that they were deliberately designed to deceive the eye. A recurring device is the use of images which have more than one meaning, depending on the angle at which they are viewed. It is suggested that ambiguity may have been a characteristic feature of Style I art, and that the use of this style may have had more than a purely ornamental function.

The provenance and purpose of the Barnabas Altarpiece, acquired in 1971 by the Kimbell Art Museum and exceptional for being a large early gothic retable on panel, has baffled art historians since 1950, when it became better known;it has since been dated to 1250-60. It was catalogued in 1972 on rather slender grounds as being English (a view that has become increasingly suspect) and it was proposed in 1965 that a bishop Barnabas (at that time not identified) was the donor. The panels are of willow, a wood occasionally used in medieval times for large panels in Mediterranean areas around the Gulf of Lyons, but never in northern Europe or Spain. A priest named Barnabas was made bishop of Osma by King Alphonso of Castile to whom he was physician. He held the see until his death in c. 1351 and founded a chaplaincy in the cathedral in 1350. However, neither that date nor the identification of the panels as willow is consistent with the hypothesis that he was the donor. It is here proposed that the panels were made in the south of France and that the inscription—Barnabas: Eps—applied to St. Barnabas, the apostle born in Cyprus and the first of a long line of archbishops; furthermore that this altarpiece was painted by a southern French artist for a church in Cyprus, probably that dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul in the royal complex at Nicosia which included the castle/palace and Dominican monastery. It had been the wish of St. Louis, while making preparations in Cyprus in 1248/9 for his crusade, that a new monastic church should form the royal mausoleum for the Lusignan dynasty.

Ten medieval ribbed mortars from British collections, only three with known provenances, are described, and their relationship with the Hispano-Moresque and Islamic series of such vessels discussed. They have been sampled for analysis of the alloys used in their manufacture, most being found to be alloys which would today be referred to as ‘leaded bronze’ or ‘leaded gunmetal’. The Deptford mortar, however, was found to be made from an impure copper, and the Coity vessel from a ‘leaded brass’.

York cathedral shows virtually no signs of the existence of chantry chapels or shrines, although there is documentary evidence for as many as sixty altars, dedicated to a bewildering variety of saints and often serving as multiple chantries. There are the remains of a shrine of St. William and possibly also of shrines at the tombs of Archbishops Richard le Scrope and Henry Bowet, but there are no stone chantry chapels like those found at St. Albar's Abbey or Winchester Cathedral, while any wooden parclose screens have long since vanished. This paper is an attempt, based on documentary and physical evidence, to show the location of altars within the cathedral church. Many of these altars were originally founded in the great Romanesque choir which was rebuilt after 1360, and they were suspended in 1364 until repositioned in the new building.

On 23rd December 1685 Arnold Quellin, Carver, signed an agreement with Patrick, Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, to provide statues of the four Stuart kings and a bust of the Earl himself, to be completed by 1st June the following year for a fee of £160. Although Quellin died in September 1686, the contract was evidently completed since all four statues and the bust are recorded at Glamis Castle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two of the statues, the James I and Charles I, as well as the bust are still at the castle today. Of the missing statues, one, the James II, is known from an engraving to resemble closely the James attributed to Grinling Gibbons which now stands in front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, itself one of a series of statues of monarchs depicted as Roman conquerors. The other, the Charles II, may possibly have been similar to the Quellin Charles now at the Guildhall.

The document and statues provide new evidence of a sculptor popular in his day, whose reputation has been largely obscured by the fame of his master, Grinling Gibbons.

Excavation within part of the former library at Audley End House, Essex, in 1979 brought to light debris from the plaster ceiling erected between 1753 and 1762, and much workshop debris relating to the decorative plasterwork executed throughout the new Great Apartments by Joseph Rose senior, to the designs of Robert Adam, in 1764-6. The latter material is used to demonstrate in detail the technology of decorative gypsum plasterwork. This is contrasted with the methods used by the stuccoist Thomas Clayton at Châtelhérault, Hamilton, Lanarkshire, c. 1742-6, and the eclectic technology evidenced in the earlier library ceiling at Audley End. Finally, the development of the technology of decorative plasterwork in Britain between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is reviewed in the light of information currently available.

William Morris owned a volume, bound in red morocco and now preserved at Kelmscott Manor, which contains copies of four early printed Italian writing-manuals of the sixteenth century, i.e. La Operina and Il modo de temperare le Penne by Vicentino (Arrighi), Lo presente libro by G. A. Tagliente, and Thesauro de Scrittori by Ugo da Carpi. The article depicts the technical and social environment in which Italian writing-manuals originated, traces the complex printing history of the works mentioned above, and identifies the editions and dates to which they belong. It then shows how the ‘Kelmscott volume’ influenced the contributions of Morris, Emery Walker, Edward Johnston and, more recently, Alfred Fairbank in the fields of manuscript copying, type-design and italic handwriting.

Fifteen drawings of Maya carvings presented to to the Society's Library in 1854 depict stone stelae and wooden lintels from Tikal, Guatemala, stelae from Ixkun and Ixtutz, Guatemala, and a temple at Tikal. Thirteen of the drawings can be assigned to specific monuments with certainty and the other two with some probability. Examination of the paper and other details suggests that the drawings are copies from lost originals, except for two drawings which may themselves be original. Annotations on the drawings are probably by Modesto Méndez, leader of the expeditions which explored the sites in 1848 and 1852. The drawings of Tikal were originally by Eusebio Lara, while those of Ixkun and Ixtutz may be by another artist.