Two years ago, as I entered my first Anniversary, I contemplated the portraits of my predecessors; like the ghosts in Ruddigore, many generations of them stepped from the wall to tell me my prerogatives and duties and obligations and how little chance I had of meeting them with credit; and now the moment has come when I too am a portrait and step back into the wall to haunt my successors. This has prompted me to ponder a little more deeply the nature of our craft and of our kind. I am myself a historian, and make no further excuse for quoting, not for the first time, a favourite description of the historian at work, from Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie.

Hazleton North Cotswold-Severn tomb was totally excavated between 1979 and 1982. It was shown to be a laterally chambered cairn of complex cellular construction with a blank dry-stone forecourt wall. The two chambered areas, located centrally within the cairn, contained well-preserved burial deposits. Below the cairn the buried soil contained evidence for previous Mesolithic and Neolithic occupation.

This paper examines the two dominant cults of Sky and Fertility in the Romano-Celtic world. There are no literary allusions to a link between the two concepts, but a substantial body of archaeological data does exist which testifies to a close iconographic association between the images and symbolism reflecting beliefs in celestial and fertility powers. The most important material evidence consists of a group of small clay statuettes representing female figures decorated with what are probably solar symbols. Allied to this is evidence for an association between the Celtic Mother-Goddesses (the Deae Matres) and cosmic motifs, particularly the solar wheel. It is also possible to identify traces of a fertility aspect to the cult of a male solar divinity. Whilst the simplistic argument for a divine ‘marriage’ between sky-father and earth-mother (Hatt 1965) is not here advanced, there is, nevertheless, strong evidence from Gaul and Britain that the two major cults of the Romano-Celtic world were clearly intertwined. This association need not be such a paradox as it might seem; the sun, like the rain, was essential for crop-growth, and the iconography appears to demonstrate acknowledgement of, and gratitude for, this interaction between natural—or supernatural—phenomena.

Fresh examination of the detailed zoo- and anthropomorphic motifs on some early Kentish jewellery suggests that they were deliberately designed to deceive the eye. A recurring device is the use of images which have more than one meaning, depending on the angle at which they are viewed. It is suggested that ambiguity may have been a characteristic feature of Style I art, and that the use of this style may have had more than a purely ornamental function.

The provenance and purpose of the Barnabas Altarpiece, acquired in 1971 by the Kimbell Art Museum and exceptional for being a large early gothic retable on panel, has baffled art historians since 1950, when it became better known;it has since been dated to 1250-60. It was catalogued in 1972 on rather slender grounds as being English (a view that has become increasingly suspect) and it was proposed in 1965 that a bishop Barnabas (at that time not identified) was the donor. The panels are of willow, a wood occasionally used in medieval times for large panels in Mediterranean areas around the Gulf of Lyons, but never in northern Europe or Spain. A priest named Barnabas was made bishop of Osma by King Alphonso of Castile to whom he was physician. He held the see until his death in c. 1351 and founded a chaplaincy in the cathedral in 1350. However, neither that date nor the identification of the panels as willow is consistent with the hypothesis that he was the donor. It is here proposed that the panels were made in the south of France and that the inscription—Barnabas: Eps—applied to St. Barnabas, the apostle born in Cyprus and the first of a long line of archbishops; furthermore that this altarpiece was painted by a southern French artist for a church in Cyprus, probably that dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul in the royal complex at Nicosia which included the castle/palace and Dominican monastery. It had been the wish of St. Louis, while making preparations in Cyprus in 1248/9 for his crusade, that a new monastic church should form the royal mausoleum for the Lusignan dynasty.

On 23rd December 1685 Arnold Quellin, Carver, signed an agreement with Patrick, Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, to provide statues of the four Stuart kings and a bust of the Earl himself, to be completed by 1st June the following year for a fee of £160. Although Quellin died in September 1686, the contract was evidently completed since all four statues and the bust are recorded at Glamis Castle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two of the statues, the James I and Charles I, as well as the bust are still at the castle today. Of the missing statues, one, the James II, is known from an engraving to resemble closely the James attributed to Grinling Gibbons which now stands in front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, itself one of a series of statues of monarchs depicted as Roman conquerors. The other, the Charles II, may possibly have been similar to the Quellin Charles now at the Guildhall.

The document and statues provide new evidence of a sculptor popular in his day, whose reputation has been largely obscured by the fame of his master, Grinling Gibbons.

Excavation within part of the former library at Audley End House, Essex, in 1979 brought to light debris from the plaster ceiling erected between 1753 and 1762, and much workshop debris relating to the decorative plasterwork executed throughout the new Great Apartments by Joseph Rose senior, to the designs of Robert Adam, in 1764-6. The latter material is used to demonstrate in detail the technology of decorative gypsum plasterwork. This is contrasted with the methods used by the stuccoist Thomas Clayton at Châtelhérault, Hamilton, Lanarkshire, c. 1742-6, and the eclectic technology evidenced in the earlier library ceiling at Audley End. Finally, the development of the technology of decorative plasterwork in Britain between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is reviewed in the light of information currently available.

Fifteen drawings of Maya carvings presented to to the Society's Library in 1854 depict stone stelae and wooden lintels from Tikal, Guatemala, stelae from Ixkun and Ixtutz, Guatemala, and a temple at Tikal. Thirteen of the drawings can be assigned to specific monuments with certainty and the other two with some probability. Examination of the paper and other details suggests that the drawings are copies from lost originals, except for two drawings which may themselves be original. Annotations on the drawings are probably by Modesto Méndez, leader of the expeditions which explored the sites in 1848 and 1852. The drawings of Tikal were originally by Eusebio Lara, while those of Ixkun and Ixtutz may be by another artist.