This Anniversary Address affords me the privilege of expressing the Society's congratulations to two of our Officers who have received Honours during the past year. Congratulations, first of all, to Miss M. V. Taylor, Vice-President, whose C.B.E. is specifically awarded for services to archaeology. Her long, distinguished, and selfless labours for Romano-British archaeology have made her a national figure, and the Haverfield Library at the Ashmolean Museum a clearing-house of knowledge. Congratulations to Sir James Mann, our Director, whose knighthood implies recognition of outstanding services to scholarship in Medieval and Renaissance craftsmanship and art; also of his services as Keeper of the Wallace Collection and as Master of the Tower Armouries—which have been so ably reorganized by him since the war.

Owing to the war I was unable to prepare for publication an account of the 1939 excavations at Atchana on which I had read a paper to the Society; the report was begun but never finished. Since then there have been fresh excavations (in the spring of 1946), but as the new work was on a comparatively small scale and was planned as a complement to the 1939 season, even covering in part the same area, it is far better to treat of the results of the two seasons together. I propose therefore in this report to describe the private houses and the Palace of Yarim-Lim, of which the former were entirely and the latter was mainly excavated in 1939, and to reserve for a subsequent report the description of the Temple site discovered in 1939 but thoroughly excavated in 1946, and of the stratigraphical results obtained mostly in the latter season.

With the outbreak of war in September 1939 many of the staff of the Ministry (then H.M. Office) of Works concerned with ancient monuments were drafted to other work, military or civil. Yet the tasks falling to the lot of their fellows, who were left at their normal desks, so far from decreasing, as their colleagues of other divisions often blandly suggested, were soon increased very far beyond their normal peace-time scope. It is true that work on the preservation of the structures of guardianship monuments dwindled slowly until it became insignificant in amount, but it never entirely ceased, because of a firm determination not to destroy the cadre of skilled foremen and masons which it would be extremely difficult to replace. The supervision of this work, therefore, remained as one task even in war-time.

The Colchester Celtic mirror has been known to students of the period since a photograph of it was published by Henry Laver in the Proceedings of our Society (x·x, 1905, p. 213) as one object in an important grave-group. Laver noted that the back of that portion of the mirror-plate which is preserved is ‘ornamented with a spiral pattern’, but this pattern is not to be seen in the reproduction. Another reference in the literature is that by R. A. Smith, Archaeologia, lxi, 338, who mentions ‘traces of engraved scrollwork’ and an ‘imbricated filling, not of the usual basket-pattern’. Mr. E. T. Leeds produced another group photograph of the find; Celtic Ornament, fig. 10 and p. 30.

The writers of this article collaborated for the purpose of studying the ornament, and of reconstructing the complete design, if that should prove possible. The incised work was found to be very difficult to follow owing to a pustule-like corrosion all over the mirror fragment. Thus, as one of us remarked after the first attempt, ‘it is only here and there, either in a strong cross-light, or with the lens, that one can see and copy it’.

Thereafter both of us worked on the mirror fragment, and gradually the pattern emerged; it is reproduced in fig. 1. This drawing is necessarily an imitative representation of the original; it records not only actual marks on the bronze, but also direct inductions, such as the continuation of a partly preserved curve or circle, a line drawn on one side to match a line preserved on the other, and the development of the ‘matting’ or hatching from intermittent appearances. We have thought it well to indicate corrosion, but the dense obscurity of the original due to this cause cannot be reproduced.

Portions of the rim of the mirror survive. This is as usual a separate strip of metal bent in a C-shape round the edge of the plate. The handle of the mirror is an attractive variant of a familiar design which can be better appreciated in the drawing than in the photographs previously published.

This paper is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the procedure whereby the king's works were ordered. There is reference to surviving accounts, to the wardens and viewers, followed by a discussion of the masons. The second part is concerned with Edward the son of Odo, and the Exchequer of Works set up by the king to handle funds for the rebuilding of the abbey church.

Although fishing, together with most of its principal appliances, was found to be of almost universal occurrence by European explorers as they penetrated the remoter parts of the world, it seems to have appeared as a specialized activity comparatively late in the history of the hominids. Whereas even the anthropians had added the resources of hunting to the vegetarian diet of their simian forebears, it was left to Homo sapiens in his evolved form to explore the possibilities of fishing. Thus the fisherman is entitled to regard his pastime as deriving from an economic activity peculiar to Neoanthropic Man. It is true that a few fish-bones were found with Neanderthal remains at Devil's Tower, Gibraltar, which yielded ‘very few fish remains, mostly indeterminable’; but these may not have been introduced by man and, if they were, need not indicate more than the gathering of an occasional fish from the sea-shore, from which in the form of limpets and mussels the inmates of the rock-shelter derived a large proportion of their sustenance.

The archaeology of Stockbridge Down owes much to the interest of the late Colonel Sir Norman Gray Hill, Bt., M.C., M.B., who was killed in an aeroplane accident in 1944. This piece of downland, recently presented to the National Trust by Miss Rosalind Hill, has, as a result, yielded information of outstanding interest, and it remains for the present writer, who was associated with the work, to record his last find, a Beaker burial at the spot marked y on the sketch-map (fig. 1).

During the autumn of 1946 a hoard of bronzes was discovered during excavation for foundations in the bottom of a down-land valley in the parish of Sompting, near Worthing. The site is a point approximately 300 ft. north-east of Hill Barn and 1,500 ft. south-west of the south-west edge of Lancing Ring, and is on property belonging to Hill Barn Nurseries. The bronzes were unearthed by a mechanical excavator at a depth of about 5 ft. in a valley-bottom accumulation of brown clayey mould. How much of this material is natural hill-wash and how much the result of cultivation of the valley in ancient and modern times it would be difficult to say. The depth at which the bronzes were found suggests that some of the soil may have been ploughed down into the valley bottom at a later period.

Among the numerous country palaces sold, desecrated, or destroyed after the execution of Charles I in 1649, the features of Greenwich, Richmond, and Nonsuch are perhaps the most familiar by reason of the various representations of them which have survived. Nevertheless, in spite of the complete dissimilarity of their appearance, views of Richmond and Nonsuch have more than once been mistaken for one another. The difference in design is well shown in the two somewhat archaic engravings of the palaces inset in the top corners of the map of Surrey in Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine (1611). Yet an oil-painting of Nonsuch, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and attributed to David Vinkeboons (1578–1629), was wrongly described as a view of Richmond (of which there is a companion painting in the Fitzwilliam) when it was engraved in 1765 and published in Vetusta Monumenta (ii, pl. XXIII) in 1789. Sir A. W. Clapham was the first correctly to identify the Nonsuch painting, which has also been called Theobalds Palace.