Let into various walls inside the church of St. Mary and St. Hardulph at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, is a group of frieze sculpture and relief-carved panels. It is now generally accepted that these are of Anglo-Saxon origin, and have been reused in the present church, of which no part is earlier than the twelfth century.

On 2nd February 1962, a group of crushed silver objects was found by Mr. W. F. Curtis at Blackdyke Farm, Hockwold-cum-Wilton, on the south-eastern edge of the Fens (TL 687883, see fig. 1). Though severely damaged and fragmented by deliberate breakage in antiquity and by the effects of burial, the objects were recognizable as Roman silver drinking-cups, some elaborately decorated. They were declared Treasure Trove on 20th February 1962, and were subsequently acquired by the British Museum.

This paper presents a fresh reading of a significant early medieval recumbent stone monument from West Kirby, Merseyside (formerly Cheshire). Rather than being a single-phased hogback, later subject to damage, it is argued that West Kirby 4 might have been carved in successive phases, possibly by different hands. It is suggested that the carvers had different abilities and/or adapted their work in response to the time pressures of a funeral or a shift in the location or function of the stone. While a single explanation for the character of the West Kirby monument remains elusive, the article proposes that, rather than ‘clumsy and illogical’, the stone was more likely a coherent but experimental, distinctive and asymmetrical, multi-phased and/or multi-authored creation. Through a review of the monument’s historiography and a reappraisal of the details and parallels of its form, ornament and material composition, the paper reconsiders the commemorative significance of this recumbent stone monument for the locality, region and understanding of Viking Age sculpture across the British Isles. As a result, West Kirby’s importance as an ecclesiastical locale in the Viking Age is reappraised.

The temple and baths dedicated to Sulis Minerva at Aquae Sulis (Bath, Somerset) are usually seen as significant in terms of Britain's ‘Romanization’. However, it is argued here that excavations carried out in the inner precinct of the temple revealed a sequence of great importance in understanding the end of Roman Britain. For the first time the documentary, stratigraphic and artefactual evidence is drawn together alongside a series of new radiocarbon dates which establish the date of the temple's demolition as AD 450–500. This raises interesting questions regarding the process of transformation from Roman to post-Roman in Somerset and beyond.

On 29th March 1770, Sir Joseph Ayloffe, Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries, read a learned paper to his colleagues on a painting, then at Windsor Castle and now preserved at Hampton Court, depicting the interview of June 1520 between Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold. Ayloffe presented a long and minutely circumstantial account of the painting, which, in view of the considerable deterioration of the canvas over the last 200 years, is of inestimable value for details concerning colour and design. He also compared the painting with such documentary evidence as was available at the time, and concluded that it was an accurate representation of major features of the Anglo-French interview. Since Ayloffe's time a mass of contemporary descriptive source material has come to light, and it has even been thought that the profusion of seemingly inconsistent details relating to the Field of Cloth of Gold renders impossible any attempt to reconcile the documentary records either one with another or with the pictorial representation. However, a close examination of the sources reveals several fundamental consistencies which enable us to reconstruct, with reasonable certitude, both the scene and the events at the Field of Cloth of Gold: and this synthesis may be used to check the value and authenticity of the Hampton Court painting as an historical document.

The Aston mirror plate and its handle were found in ploughsoil, but were derived from a cremation burial which included two pottery vessels tentatively dated in the first century A.D. The area in which the discovery was made shows considerable activity in the Belgic and Romano-British periods. A detailed examination of the mirror, using, inter alia, light-section photomicrography, enables an attempt to be made to group the known mirrors using criteria derived from the techniques employed in the decoration; the Aston mirror falls into an East Anglian Ridge/Chiltern group.

This paper describes the context and nature of an assemblage of forty-four Palaeolithic hand-axes from a Roman religious site at Witham, Essex. The hand-axes are considered to have been derived from several sources, and it is suggested that the Romano-British occupants of the site deliberately selected them for their shape and placed them in the bottom of two large man-made depressions. In the light of stone axe finds on continental temple sites, and of classical Roman texts and traditions, the possibility arises that the Witham finds may have represented ‘thunderbolts’ in the worship of Jupiter or a local Celtic equivalent.

In 1967 the Winchester Excavations Committee was again joined by the University of North Carolina and Duke University in excavations on five sites in the city, while a sixth site was excavated by the Winchester College Archaeological Society. The main season lasted ten weeks from late June to early September and an average of 165 people took part, about £17,500 being spent.

One of the outstanding features of ancient craftsmanship in gold and bronze is the decoration of ornaments and weapons with patterns of incised lines, or with dots. Hitherto very few of the actual tools by means of which this decoration was effected have been identified, though their widespread use is proved by the very large number of specimens in our museums upon which they have been employed. Indeed, by their purely conventional use of such terms as ‘awl’ and ‘celt’ archaeologists actually blind themselves to the real nature and significance of such tools, and these notes by a metallurgical worker may accordingly serve a useful purpose in drawing attention to the true character of some of them.

The existence of the Coleshill helm had been a mystery for so long that its rediscovery by the Duke of Rutland, who exhibited it before the Society on 24 November 1932, was quite unexpected (pls. XXI, XXII).

Archaeologists in France have for many years recognized hand-axes of St. Acheul facies in association with flake-implements of Levallois type, which are contemporary with the mid-Pleistocene deposits of the Somme valley. Their place in the culture-sequence is after the cold period that produced the main Coombe-rock of South-East England, and the Little Eastern or Upper Chalky Boulder-clay of East Anglia. The Coombe-rock referred to overwhelmed the Levallois II factory-site at Baker's Hole, Northfleet, Kent.

In England, however, it has taken much longer to trace these mid-Pleistocene hand-axes in contemporary beds. The first was found by the late F. G. Spurrell on the classic ‘floor’ at the base of the Crayford Brickearth, though it was not until quite recently that the correct age of the Crayford series was determined. This specimen is now in the British Museum (Natural History), but is not figured in the present note.

This article reports excavations undertaken between 1990 and 1994 on a small cliff terrace, at Tintagel Island in Cornwall. This terrace (the Lower Terrace) lies below Site C (the Middle Terrace), where a building was excavated by Dr C.A.R. Radford in the 1930s. The remains uncovered on the Lower Terrace comprise several phases of ephemeral stone and turf structures with associated hearths, floor deposits and stakeholes. These are separated by periods of shillet (tiny flakes of slate in sandy clay soil) levelling. With the collapse of the last structure the terrace was buried by layers of scree and slate slip from the slope above. Artefact groups of fire-lighting stones, whetstones and worked flint and quartz were recovered predominantly from earlier phases, together with Romano-British Native pottery. Later phases mainly comprised sherds of Imported Mediterranean pottery (84 per cent of all finds) and slate disc pot lids. The results of an extensive programme of environmental sampling clarified that a wide range of probably locally growing trees and shrubs were exploited for fuel, as well as for wattles and larger posts and beams. Tiny burnt fragments of animal and some human bone were found scattered through a handful of deposits, but the material is probably residual. A programme of radiocarbon dating was possible with the availability of charcoal material from hearths and stakeholes. This programme, using innovative mathematical modelling techniques, produced three distinct date ranges of structural activity on the Lower Terrace: 395–460 cal AD for one of the earliest phases of hearths, floors and stakeholes pre-dating the occurrence of Imported pottery; 415–535 cal AD for a later structural phase with hearths and first occurrences of Imported and Native pottery together; and 560–670 cal AD for the latest and best surviving structure, with hearths, stakeholes and a large assemblage of Imported pottery.

The small fort of the promontory type with which this report deals lies in the parish of Lezayre, on the shore of Ramsey Bay on the brooghs which form the eastern edge of the undulating Andreas plateau towards the sea. Here, in the northern part of the bay, the cliffs are built up by warped stratified sands with reddish sandy and loamy bands. Where springs caused or initiated erosion the straight north–south line of the broogh is intersected by short valleys with steep slopes and marshy bottoms. Where, as occasionally happens, two of such valleys lie near to each other, the gullies create small peninsulas with level surfaces connected only by a narrow neck with the plateau. Ideal sites for habitation above the broad sandy beach are formed by natural agencies, sites which need only a small amount of adjustment to make them easily defensible. A certain disadvantage arises from the fact that both the platform of the promontory and the surface of the plateau lie in the same level, in the present case 60 ft. above the high-water mark.

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.

In May 1927 Mr. J. R. Gabriel, of Caerleon, drew my attention to a Roman burial which had just been discovered during building operations in the village of Ultra Pontem, the bridge-head suburb of Caerleon on the southern bank of the Usk. The eastern edge of this village has long been known to impinge upon an extensive Roman cemetery, and fragments of Roman tombstones are still found here from time to time. The new discovery was made some 60 yards east of Yew Tree House and 550 yards east-south-east of the south-east end of the bridge (Ordnance Survey 6-inch map, Mon. XXIX, S.W.), during the digging of a cess-pit for bungalows then under construction on the hill-side south of the Bulmore Road. At a depth of about 2½ feet the southern side of the pit was found to consist largely of a vertical slab of stone, which, as the digging proceeded, fell downwards and disclosed a stone cist containing a lead canister (figs. 1 and 3). The cist and its contents were then left in position until Mr. Gabriel and I had seen and recorded them, and with the consent of the owner of the property (Mrs. Lewis), who rendered every assistance, both cist and canister were removed to the Caerleon Museum.

During the builders' excavation for Bucklersbury House, Walbrook, in the City of London, carried out in 1955, an immense clearance was made to a great depth in the natural soils underlying the man-made levels of London. Before this took place, scientific excavation in a limited area by Professor W. F. Grimes, on behalf of the Roman and Mediaeval London Excavation Council, had attracted a great deal of attention to the site, both from archaeologists and from the general public. His most spectacular discovery was the Temple of Mithras, which lay on the eastern edge of the site, adjoining the modern street of Walbrook. Almost of equal interest, however, to the student of Roman London, was his location of the Roman streambed of the Walbrook, which flowed in a southerly direction immediately to the west of the Temple of Mithras, about 30 yds. west of the street of Walbrook. The stream was subject to silting and its bed steadily rose, forming a thick deposit of black mud, which had an extraordinarily preservative effect on objects of metal which had been dropped in it from the banks. Iron was completely unrusted, while copper and bronze remained shining and bright.