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.

Rib vaults appear in English architecture at the end of the eleventh century and by the early part of the next had spread throughout most parts of the country and across the Channel into Normandy. Rib construction was pioneered by the builders of great churches, first apparently at Durham, and was then developed and elaborated at sites such as Winchester, Gloucester, Peterborough, Lessay, Saint-Etienne in Caen, and many others. Although it is impossible to pinpoint the precise moment, by the second quarter of the twelfth century ribs were also being constructed in smaller churches in many areas of England and Normandy. Anglo-Norman parish church masons might construct ribs under towers or in porches, but the majority of survivals are in chancels, where the presence of ribs was clearly the result of a desire to distinguish and embellish the functionally most important and most sacred part of the church.

The use of heraldic decoration in medieval books has been somewhat neglected, only a few have been the subject of detailed studies and some of these are less than satisfactory. The Tickhill Psalter group had the advantage of having been the first to use the medieval rolls for comparanda, although the importance of the background decoration and line fillers as part of the overall pattern was not realised, accordingly a re-examination of all of these books is desirable. Unfortunately the book also gave renewed currency to the erroneous identification of the heraldry in the so-called Grey–FitzPayne hours at Cambridge which has long been regarded as closely dated to 1308 and hence a key manuscript for the chronology of the early fourteenth century books.

Where we are able to combine external sources of the ‘medieval’ period with local African ones – oral and linguistic, ethnographic and archaeological – we can begin to discern the place of Africa, or of parts of it, in world history. At the same time, we begin to gain chronological perceptions for regions where otherwise we are apt to fall back on synchronic notions of ‘traditional’ cultures and societies living as if in a permanent ethnographic present. The occasional allusion bearing a calendar date of universal applicability presses questions of correlation over broad distances, in a way that radiocarbon measurements (which we should hesitate to call ‘dates’) cannot do. Notwithstanding the importance of the latter technique for the study of the African Iron Age, the individual results are inherently imprecise (whether ‘calibrated’ or not) and, being run on specific samples, bear frequently an uncertain relationship to the historical event or episode in question.

The evolution of the single-storeyed mortared stone cottage in the western highlands of Scotland seems to mirror that of the upper strata of late seventeenth and eighteenth century clan society in the region, and in particular to reflect a little of the disintegration of that society after the two failed Stuart uprisings and its consequent gradual integration with the lowland economy. An analysis of the architectural history of the Ferry House (let to the ferryman as a combined inn and home for his family) at Port Appin provides a foundation for the survey. The earliest part of the building, probably thatched, may well date from the 1740s but already it had lintelled hearths with flues in each gable wall - a lowland urban feature. A major extension with a slate roof was built in about 1770 and the earlier part was probably also slated at this time and subdivided inside to provide rooms for wealthier guests. Thereafter only relatively minor internal improvements were made, in the newer half, until the early 1950s when piped water was introduced and a separate bathroom and kitchen built. The cottages were sold to incomers not long after.

A study of other ferries in the area confirms that mortared cottages almost identical to those in Port Appin, and in identical situations, are still to be found at two of these. The one on the south side of the abandoned Rugarve ferry over Loch Creran can also be dated to between about 1750 and 1770 from historical evidence. Also at Rugarve, on the north side, are the remains of a more primitive thatched drystone cottage, probably an early ferry house, which is smaller than the others and lacks hearths with chimneys.

There has been much discussion by archaeologists in recent years of the reasons for which ancient hoards may have been deposited and not recovered. There is an apparently clear Roman definition of treasure in the Digest: Thesaurus est vetus quaedam depositio pecuniae, cuius non extat memoria ut iam dominum non habeat. There have been increasing difficulties, however, in interpreting this statement and the versions of it which have been incorporated into modern law. In England and Wales, for example, the uncertainties have even led to a replacement of the medieval law of Treasure Trove with a Treasure Act more suited to present-day conditions. In spite of the fact that most discoveries of treasure were made by chance, without adequate records, much of the argument revolves round the details of the deposits, from which attempts are made to infer the motives of those who made them. This speculation cannot be supported by direct evidence, and so, because our own particular interest is in hoards of Roman silver plate, we felt that it might be helpful first to review briefly some of the ancient documentary evidence for hoards of silver plate which the owner intended to recover, from literature and papyri, and then to publish two such hoards with detailed documentation, one from England in the seventeenth century and one from Germany in the twentieth century, which reveal some of the motives, hopes, actions and accidents which actually occur in such circumstances.

A geological and geomorphological survey, combined with sedimentological results, has provided a detailed, trans-zonal famework in which to examine the significance of an eclectic variety of artefactual and documentary evidence relating to prolonged human activity on the tidal stream known as Magor Pill.

The shoreline, underlain by estuarine silts and peats of the Flandrian Wentlooge Formation, has retreated by a minimum of some 800m since Iron Age-Roman times, leaving exposed on the modern foreshore the earlier but silted-up courses of Magor Pill. As the coast retreated, fishing stakes, one a double row from the tenth century, were set up on the widening lower foreshore. The palaeochannel deposits yielded small amounts of stratified Iron Age, Romano-British, medieval and early modern occupation debris, together with woven baskets and hurdles related to the early modern and probably also medieval fishing activities in the area. One of the palaeochannels contained the wreck of a medieval, clinker-built boat carrying high-grade iron ores. By far the largest amounts of occupation debris, however, were transposed and mixed into semi-mobile foreshore gravels. This material demonstrates that there was a thriving Romano-British settlement at Magor Pill, apparently in sea connection with the southern shores of the Bristol Channel. From the eleventh to the early fourteenth century, there existed a port to which much pottery from various English sources was imported. In early modern times at Magor Pill, a vigorous outward trade in store cattle to west and south-west England was balanced by pottery imports chiefly from Devon and Somerset. Coastal erosion not only destroyed the primary evidence for these activities, and the wetland landscapes in which they occurred, but also forced, probably in late medieval times, the repositioning inland of the (?) Romano-British sea defences of the area. As part of the general process of reorganizing the defences and drainage of the wetland, the seabanks along Magor Pill and its tributaries were shortened in a number of stages and the outfalls moved further seaward.