Roger Leech

The Excavation of a Romano-British Farmstead and Cemetery on Bradley Hill, Somerton, Somerset

Bradley Hill, 8·8 km (5½ miles) north-west of Ilchester, is a low hill projecting northwards from the Lower Lias plateau between Somerton and Langport and is capped by a thin band of Rhaetic clay. The site of the Romano-British farmstead, 53 m (175 ft.) above sea level, is in a prominent and exposed position at NGR ST 4800 3034 (FIG. 1; PL. XVIII A). There are extensive views in all directions, particularly over the valley of the River Cary to the north and over the great expanse of Kings Sedgemoor to the west. On the hilltop plateau, the calcareous ploughsoil was 0·20 to 0·25 m in depth, except around the sites of the Romano-British buildings.

The Excavation of a Romano-Celtic Temple and a Later Cemetery on Lamyatt Beacon, Somerset

The summit of Lamyatt Beacon was totally excavated. The earliest structure was a Romano-Celtic temple, built in the late third century, in use into the early fifth century, and of square plan with two annexes on the east side. To the south was a sunken-room. Finds from related features and from looting of the site included many votive objects. Probably of later date than the temple were a small building to the north and a cemetery of at least sixteen burials, aligned east-west with heads to the west.

The Prospect From Rugman's Row: The Row House in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century London

Study of the development of the town house in London has focused mainly on the period following the Great Fire, and only latterly for the first time on the medieval period. The differences between building practice and concepts in London before and after the Fire have been over emphasized, obscuring a pattern of evolution and continuity in which phenomena generally taken to be of the mid- or later seventeenth century have rather earlier origins. Timber-framed row houses built in the last decade of the sixteenth century conformed to a well established medieval pattern. The first brick row houses of the early seventeenth century, including some of back to back plan, were part of this same tradition. The emphasis on improvement characteristic of many later building promotions was already evident in early seventeenth-century estate management. The term ‘terrace’ has been misused, giving the mistaken impression that the brick houses of post-Fire London were somehow a new phenomena. The large scale speculative ...

Glastonbury Abbey: Archaeological Investigations 1904–79, by Cheryl Green and Roberta Gilchrist

obverse and reverse legends for each coin, but the image quality is disappointing. The same is not true of the content. The entries are as full as reasonably possible, and the introductory material in Volume 65 (Part I: ‘Anglo-Saxon Coins to 1016’), on which the current catalogue is based, is meticulously researched. The current volume also includes detailed corrigenda to a handful of points in the earlier volume. The collections published here are significant, and the gathering together in one place of all theNorwegian finds means that this important body ofmaterial as a whole is readily available to researchers for the first time. The SCBI format precludes a detailed discussion of the significance of the finds, but Screen has convincingly presented her analysis of the material elsewhere, and here she provides important foundations for the future study of the collections but also of the various coin types represented within the corpus. This is particularly timely for the study of Cnut’s coinage. The discovery in December 2014 of a large hoard of pennies of Cnut from Lenborough in Buckinghamshire, and the continued presence in the coin market of parcels from an even larger Cnut hoard, means that major reassessment of Cnut’s coinage is now needed. This volume will be an essential tool in taking forward any studies in that field.

The Chesapeake House: Architectural Investigation by Colonial Williamsburg, edited by Cary Carson and Carl R. Lounsbury

notes that the great majority of the inventories from Dorset and Somerset were destroyed in 1942. The many papers contained within the volume are of such a uniformly high standard that it might seem invidious to highlight just a few. But of particular interest to this reviewer were the papers concerned with urban housing in the south-west, by Parker and Allan, and by Thorp on the houses of Exeter: the grand halls surviving into the post-medieval period as large ceremonial spaces, and the small houses which possess only one room on each floor (such as no.1 Frog Street) could find a context in the ‘hallhouses’ and ‘shophouses’ of late medieval and early modern Bristol. Brears’s paper on ‘Boiling Furnaces, Smoking Chambers and Malt Kilns’ similarly brought to mind the boiling furnaces installed in the houses alongside John Wood’s Exchange, built in Bristol c. 1740. The papers contributed to, or by, Brears are especially noteworthy, all exemplars of a useful melding of archaeological and documentary sources. His review of ‘Culinary Artefacts in West Country Households, 1550–1700’ provides an excellent focus on ‘understanding of past ways of life’ (p. 256), and provides a good general introduction to the subject for any aspiring post-medieval archaeologist. A further paper by Brears and Thorp examines the relationship between the decorated plaster ceilings of no. 144 Fore Street in Exeter and the oval tables that might have been placed beneath. The banquet and fish dinners shown in the two oval medallions are argued to mirror the meals consumed at the tables below, providing insights into the diurnal and seasonal ordering of meals. As a compendium of recent contributions to the historical archaeology of South-West England, the book serves also as a useful introduction to cutting-edge post-medieval archaeology, ranging from issues of identity, visualization, and approaches to art history, to the practical analysis and discussion of vernacular buildings, ceramics, and metal ware. As such, this book might suitably appear on any appropriate undergraduate reading list. Historians doubting the value of archaeology for the recent past would also be well-advised to look at this volume. Many readers may feel sad that they missed this conference, but this volume of papers will be a good substitute.