Series: Council for British Archaeology Occasional Papers

This Guide describes briefly those collections of topographical illustrations - that is, drawings, prints and photographs - to be found in public repositories, and also in a few private collections, in Britain. Since the appearance of the first edition of William Camden's Britannia in 1586 and of William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire in 1656, writers on antiquarian, topographical and local historical subjects have taken it for granted that their work required illustration. The fashion for travelling for travel's sake began, by the 18th century, to produce journals with illustrations and also drawings without verbal description. The English took particularly to the use of water colours for drawings since that medium was especially suited to work in the open air. English antiquaries also led the way in working out what would now be called a typology of medieval building styles-the familiar sequence of early English, Decorated, Perpendicular-as Nikolaus Pevsner has shown in his Some Architectural Historians of the Nineteenth Century (1972). Behind the evident scholarship of Victorian Gothic buildings lies a great body of sketchbooks, many of which survive in national and local repositories. Britain therefore possesses a unique heritage of drawings of places and buildings whose scale, value and location has been unknown and which therefore could not be systematically used. In the most comprehensive work on water colours, Martin Hardie (Water Colour Painting in Britain, 3 vols, 1966-8) wrote of the two streams in the British tradition, 'the one relying for its main interest on a careful and realistic recording of places and buildings; the other depending not so much on topographical interest as on the sentiments aroused by the painter's personal interpretation of some aspect of nature seen or imagined'. He was more interested in the latter, and only a small minority of the artists named in this Guide achieve a mention in his three volumes. Other art historians, less judicious in their approach, may use the word topographical in a pejorative sense: for example 'most of the drawings Hilton did along the road are executed in a very topographical style and none have any great artistic merit' (J Warburg and Courtauld Inst 35 (1972), p 353). For the student of the past, whether of the landscape or of the buildings, the values of a Martin Hardie are reversed. Indeed, there is a growing realisation of the value of pictorial evidence, as may be seen from two such different publications as the volume on City of York (11) The Defences (Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, HMSO 1973) and G L Fairs, History of the Hay [on Wye] (London 1972). In 1958 a research committee of the Council for British Archaeology, whose members included H M Colvin, J T Smith and the writer, resolved to prepare a guide to collections of topographical illustrations. A questionnaire was compiled and the returns collected by J T Smith. There was a gratifyingly high rate of return, and only one major group of repositories - cathedral libraries - was overlooked. Nevertheless it was evident from a scrutiny of the returns that to produce a guide of reasonably uniform quality would require further correspondence with librarians, curators and the like, or else personal visits to the places in question. It was not until 1969 that the writer was free to start on a programme of visits - indeed a series of itineraries - which were completed in the spring of 1973.

Draft proposals for an integrated structure for archaeology in Britain, prepared by a joint working party of RESCUE and CBA, envisage the establishment of a National Archaeological service operating through regional offices, staffed by professional archaeologists, and cooperating closely with existing bodies concerned with archaeology at national and local authority level. The draft is also published in Archaeology in Britain 1973-4 (Counc Brit Archaeol Rep 24), pp 81-98, together with the texts of Dept of the Environment statements of 20 Sept 1973 and 23 May 1974.

This is an account of an archaeological project, and of life and death in East London during the 18th and 19th centuries. The project took place at Christ Church, Spitalfields between 1984 and 1989. It centered around the excavation of vaults beneath the church, and analysis of the skeletons and artefacts within them. Almost 1000 skeletons were recovered, of which 387 were of known name and age. They had been buried from 1729 to 1859. The circumstances made the excavation one of the most important ever undertaken.

The handbook is intended mainly for teachers working with primary or secondary school children, but is also aimed at adults wishing to train themselves to make a positive contribution to non-excavational fieldwork. It therefore describes thoroughly tested techniques for detecting the remains of past human activity in the countryside, and covers all stages from preliminary study and planning, through field collection, to recording and interpretation. Some guidance is also given on finds recognition, further reading, sources of air photographs etc.

Thirty-five years ago this Council produced A Survey and Policy of Field Research in the Archaeology of Great Britain (1948); in less confident but more socially sensitive times we now eschew a survey and baulk at stating policy, cloaking our aspirations in the neutrality of Research Objectives. The purpose, however, remains essentially the same: to inform, to encourage, and to add to the sum of human knowledge. Well over a hundred individuals, collectively contributing through seven committees deployed through the Research Board of the Council, have brought their minds, skills, and experiences to bear in producing these papers. I hope at least a few of those who read this page will then read the whole booklet through to the back cover so that they, like me, will of so much deliberation. be able to experience the cumulative effect. These papers together place their strongest emphasis on research: this booklet is about what we want to know. This may be unfashionable, and indeed largely impractical, in 1983. After a decade, however, of pointless argument about the so-called rescue/research dilemma, of increasingly embittered argument with commercial, trivializing treasure-hunters, and of not always apparently fruitful argument to promote archaeology to its rightful place in the conservation world, to consider research on its own merits is both a relief and a challenge. We consider it here on a thematic rather than a chronological or geographical basis, reflecting the CBA's timely re-organization from period to subject committees in the mid-1970s; yet the considerations tend towards the empirical and intuitive in the well-tried tradition of British scholarship. Fifteen years after Analytical archaeology and all that it symbolizes, its lack of overt influence here, for better or for worse, is worth noting. Surely one hundred and more practising British archaeologists cannot all plead ignorance of 'New Archaeology' as the reason for its absence. The old arrangements for conducting archaeology are changing, however, and this cannot be ignored. Archaeology in universities and archaeological societies in their communities, for example, are under examination; the state, at least in England, is about to discharge its statutory functions, and possibly more, through a new Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission instead of through the Directorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings of the Department of the Environment. The archaeological functions of the Ordnance Survey have recently been transferred to the three Royal Commissions on Ancient/Historical Monuments for England, Scotland, and Wales. Our objectives, defined without reference to such organizational matters, will surely nevertheless be affected by them and we can but humbly draw our deliberations to the attention of those in high places. In that context especially I would stress that this discussion paper is a publication of the Research Board and NOT a policy statement of the Council for British Archaeology.

The object of this booklet is to consider briefly the present state and future direction of British field research in archaeology, for the Prehistoric and Early Historic periods which may conveniently be taken together to form a first Part of such a work. It will be followed in due course by a second Part, which will cover likewise the later Pre-Conquest, Medieval, and Post-Medieval periods. It is hoped that both as a survey and a policy it will form a convenient starting-point and directive for the resumption of field research now that the war is over; and in particular, that it will be found of use for action in the period of national re-planning and reconstruction now beginning, in which many sites and antiquities throughout the country may require investigation, protection, and excavation for the preserving of their value for the public interest. The work was begun at the request of the Research Committee of the Congress of Archaeological Societies, and has been completed, since the termination of the Congress's existence in 1945, under the auspices of the Council for British Archaeology, with the aid of moneys transmitted by the Congress, at its last meeting, to the Council for this purpose.