Late in 1954 it became known that plans existed for a new road across the site of Verulamium. This new highway is to enter the Roman city along the line of Bluehouse Hill, and from the angle at the entrance to the Gorhambury Drive will strike across the fields to the A.5 road at Batchwood Drive. Its line thus bisects the city, and the work will involve the destruction or sealing of important Roman sites including the northern edge of the Forum.

In opening this, my second, Anniversary Address, I will ask you to lend me your imagination: for I am in fact writing it in the capital of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan a few days after the melodramatic removal of British control from the Arab Legion. The swarming population of Amman, tense and expectant, is dry tinder to any spark that blows, and sparks are not lacking. As I drove down the main street this morning, rifle-shots punctuated the uneasy flow of traffic, and hysteria waxed and waned with an ugly uncertainty. But, having said that, I turn to more relevant matter. I was on my way to the office of a Jordanian architect to discuss with him the preparation of a building in Jerusalem to house, for the first time, a resident British School of Archaeology. He received me with charm and coffee.

The situation of the Neolithic Causewayed camp at Abingdon, discovered by the Rev. Charles Overy and made famous by the late Mr. E. T. Leeds, is well known and only requires summarizing. It lies on a spur bounded by the valleys of two brooks at the south edge of an expanse of Summertown-Radley terrace gravel, three-quarters of a mile north of the Thames. The two concentric ditches, to which reference is made below, lay between the brooks; a third similar ditch, of which pit A was possibly a section, may have lain to the south. The site was at its highest (about 202 ft. O.D.) at about the centre of arc of the outer ditch, whence there was a gentle southerly slope. The expanses of Summertown-Radley gravel in the Oxford region have been found rich in prehistoric finds, that between Radley and Abingdon being no exception.

The scene of my inquiries in Attica in 1955 was the coastal plain south of Athens, on the very doorstep of the city. The background was formed by the magnificent profile of Hymettos, with its long, impressive, but not forbidding skyline. The bare rounded mountain sides are steep but towards the foot they give place to gentler slopes composed of soil washed down from above; and even the narrow plain itself is tilted towards the sea. The soil of this zone is notably rich, terra rossa and rendzina—some of the best soil near Athens. The importance of this fact would have been as obvious to ancient farmers as it is to those who today are restoring large-scale cultivation to the zone.

Finds from the interesting pagan Saxon cemetery at Ruskington, 3½ miles north of the better-known cemetery at Sleaford, have been published piecemeal and, for the sake of completeness, it seems desirable to place on record certain objects acquired recently by Grantham Museum under the terms of the will of the late Dr. J. H. Gibson of Aldershot. It appears that the latter was in the neighbourhood of Ruskington in 1917 and acquired the objects from a local farmer who had previously obtained them from the gravel-pit north of the village of Ruskington, where burials have been recorded from time to time.

Two unique pieces of Late Anglo-Saxon silverwork of outstanding interest have recently been purchased by the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities of the British Museum. The pieces are plates from a house-shaped casket, or shrine, of a well-known British type. They formed part of the collection of a Sussex doctor and were purchased from him by the dealer who sold them to the Museum: they are unfortunately unprovenanced, but from external evidence it seems likely that they formed part of a Victorian collection. One of the pieces is rectangular and measures 12.6×5.2 cm., the other is rhomboid and measures along its longest side 12.1 cm., they differ also in their ornamentation which is carried out in a shallow carving, or graving, technique. (pl. v a).

Classical pottery such as terra sigillata has no parallel in the post-classical world, and was studied by scholars for many years before the methods of its manufacture were known. It is remarkable that practically none of the research on the technical aspect was carried out in England, and, in spite of their great interest, the processes involved still seem to be little understood here. It is the purpose of this paper to review these processes, to show how various misconceptions have arisen in regard to them, and also to suggest some more probable explanations in the light of work done recently at the British Museum laboratory.

In December 1952, while employed in levelling the ground prior to the construction of the approach to the new Cattle Market site at St. Stephen's Road, Canterbury, the driver of the mechanical excavator, Mr. Claude Jarvis, noticed a few pieces of Roman pottery and immediately informed the writer of the discovery. From then on a close watch was kept on the site for any structural remains. After a few days an extensive area of burnt brick-earth was encountered, followed soon afterwards by the tops of two walls lying parallel to each other. It was then arranged for the site to be excavated under the auspices of the Canterbury Excavation Committee, the present writer undertaking the direction of the work. The results of this investigation form the subject of this report.

This report gives a brief account of a field reconnaissance in the Levant during August and September 1955. Seven weeks were spent in ground-checking archaeological sites noticed on air photographs taken by the Royal Air Force over Greece and Rhodes during the Second World War, and later in Cyprus. Assisted by my wife, I was able in these few weeks to locate and to examine in detail a large number of archaeological features, as the consequence of having these photographs as a guide. I shall reserve for a future occasion the description of the results and discoveries from our work in Cyprus, which was based on (i) my study of some thousands of photographs which the Department of Lands and Surveys in Nicosia kindly made available, and (ii) ground-checks on foot in various parts of the island. A very helpful grant of £50 given by the Craven Committee in the University of Oxford contributed towards the cost of this short campaign in 1955. The work was in direct continuation of my field research in Mediterranean lands since 1945, with the emphasis extended for the moment to the eastern end. This was a planned sequel to discoveries which I had made years ago, and an opportunity to complete them with fieldwork on the ground had been long awaited.

In Antiq. Journ. xxx (1950), pp. 47–51, the late C.J.P. Cave, F.S.A., contributed a paper on the orientation of churches. He referred to Wordsworth's poem on Rydal chapel, written in 1823, and to the note prefixed to it. In this note Wordsworth says: ‘Our churches invariably perhaps, stand east and west, but why is by few persons exactly known; nor, that the degree of deviation from due east often noticed in the ancient ones was determined, in each particular case, by the point in the horizon at which the sun rose upon the day of the saint to whom the church was dedicated.’ The poem that follows describes a vigil on the site the night before, and in the morning the solemn fixing of the church's position by observing the rising sun.

The Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean Museum has received attention on numerous occasions; the most recent and most complete publication is that by Miss J. R. Kirk, issued by the Museum in the form of a ‘guide’. A full bibliography is there given. The figure in enamel on the obverse has been variously described by different authorities as Christ, the pope, some saint, or even Alfred himself (pl. xv a). Earlier parallels for its iconography have been cited, and Miss Kirk notes several instances in Celtic art, where similar figures are to be found, as well as a textile from Akhmin, in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, which bears the bust of a figure holding two wands in a similar position. In connexion with it she cites a suggestion put forward by Dalton that the idea of this figure holding two wands was modelled on that of the Egyptian god Osiris, who assumes a very similar position. More recently Dr. Schramm has attempted to explain the two staffs as a sceptre and a ‘baculum’, twin insignia of rule. Though Dr. Schramm's explanation is reasonable, and the ultimate derivation of the theme from an ancient Egyptian model seems perfectly possible, the more immediate ancestry of the jewel's decoration is hardly accounted for by these explanations, and what seems to the writer a more convincing iconographical prototype is here proposed. It is that the figure represents a portion of a theme which was very popular in East and West alike from the tenth century onwards, namely the ‘Ascent of Alexander’.