Society of Antiquaries of London

The Society of Antiquaries of London is charged by its Royal Charter of 1751 with “the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries”. It celebrated its Tercentenary in 2007. The Society’s 2,900 Fellows include many distinguished archaeologists and art and architectural historians holding positions of responsibility across the cultural heritage. The Fellowship is international in its reach and its interests are inclusive of all aspects of the material past. As a registered charity, the Society’s principal objectives are to foster public understanding of that heritage, to support research and communicate the results and to engage in the formulation of public policy on the care of our historic environment and cultural property. The Society’s publications – the Antiquaries Journal and Archaeologia – are international journals of record, used by students and scholars everywhere, as are the Society’s Research Reports, Occasional Papers and other publications. Their policy is to publish works of reference that will be in use for decades.

Lordship and Landscape in East Anglia AD400-800

The royal centre at Rendlesham, Suffolk, and its contexts
Format: Hardback
Pages: 535
ISBN: 9780854313075
Pub Date: 31 Oct 2024
Series: Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London
Illustrations: 209
Description:
This is an inter-disciplinary study of pathways to regional rulership and territorial lordship in early post-Roman Britain which takes as its starting point the East Anglian royal centre at Rendlesham and its contexts.This book examines the origins and development of the East Anglian kingdom in the fifth to eighth centuries AD through the lens of the elite settlement complex at Rendlesham, Suffolk using an interdisciplinary approach involving field survey, landscape history, excavation and metal-detecting finds. It also examines the wider regional context and proposes a new narrative of kingdom formation.
Roman Mosaics of Britain Volume V Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 302
ISBN: 9780854313068
Pub Date: 05 May 2024
Series: Roman Mosaics of Britain
Illustrations: 223
Description:
Since the completion of the four volumes of Roman Mosaics of Britain covering all of Britain to 2010, more mosaics have been discovered and research has continued. The present volume brings the catalogue up-to-date to July 2023, while the first part is devoted to various aspects of mosaic, including subject matter, context, design and manufacture. This is a lengthy overview of mosaic research, which could only be discussed on a regional basis in the previous volumes.
The History of King Richard the Third: by Sir George Buc, Master of the Revels Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 512
ISBN: 9780854313044
Pub Date: 15 Feb 2023
Series: Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London
Description:
Sir George Buc (1560-1622), one of the careful antiquarian scholars of the English Renaissance, is famous in literary history as Master of Revels under King James I, a position in which he was responsible for censorship of Shakespeare’s later plays. His own work has never received the attention and assessment it merits. In 1619 Sir George wrote The History of King Richard the Third, a study of Richard’s life and reign and a defence of his historical reputation against the Tudor chroniclers’ slanders.
Landscape and Settlement in the Vale of York Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780854313020
Pub Date: 27 Apr 2020
Series: Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London
Illustrations: 78
Description:
The Vale of York, in North Yorkshire, has been used and shaped by communities since the end of the last Ice Age to the modern day. Its earliest, prehistoric features chart the way in which household groups shifted from mobile to more sedentary forms of occupation over time, culminating in the creation of landscape divisions from the end of the Bronze Age, and then recognisable field systems during the Iron Age. Throughout all periods, a variety of activity types on the landscape has been evident in the landscape, taking significantly different forms in different contexts: water management; the creation of boundaries; agricultural production; structural development, from domestic houses to larger monuments; exchange and consumption; and mortuary practices plus other ritual activity.
Isurium Brigantum Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 208
ISBN: 9780854313013
Pub Date: 13 Apr 2020
Series: Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London
Illustrations: 110
Description:
Modern-day Aldborough, in North Yorkshire, lies on the site of Isurium Brigantum, the former administrative capital of the Brigantes, one of the largest indigenous tribes of Roman Britain. Strategically located on Dere Street, by the second century AD it had become a key Roman town engaged with the supply of the northern frontier, with buildings and mosaics that reveal a thriving economy through to the fourth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the site of Isurium Brigantum was the subject of important antiquarian investigations.
The Staffordshire Hoard Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 640
ISBN: 9781527233508
Pub Date: 01 Nov 2019
Series: Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London
Illustrations: 355
Description:
The Staffordshire Hoard: An Anglo-Saxon Treasure tells the story of the Staffordshire Hoard’s discovery and acquisition, and the six-year research project that pieced its fragments back together, identified its objects and explored their manufacture. Key chapters discuss the decoration and meaning of the Hoard’s intricate ornament, the techniques of Anglo-Saxon craftsmen, the religious and historical background, and hoarding practice in Britain and Europe, to place this most exceptional find in context. Finally, the text explores the impact that the find has had locally, nationally and internationally in the twenty-first century.
RRP: £49.95
Sherborne Old Castle, Dorset Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780854312993
Pub Date: 26 Mar 2015
Description:
Roger, Bishop of Salisbury (1102–39, built Sherborne Old Castle within his episcopal estate at Sherborne, in north-west Dorset, in about 1122–35. The fortified palace was one of several major building projects undertaken by Bishop Roger; among the others were the rebuilding of Old Sarum cathedral and castles at Devizes and Malmesbury. Although Sherborne Old Castle was altered over the next four centuries, most of its original structural elements were retained until the buildings were slighted in 1645.
RRP: £35.00
Roman Mosaics of Britain Volume IV Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 480
ISBN: 9780854312948
Pub Date: 11 Nov 2010
Illustrations: c.500 b/w & col photographs and line drawings
Description:
This volume brings to a triumphant conclusion this monumental project to catalogue, describe and illustrate every Romano-British mosaic. The area covered by the fourth and final volume in the corpus is one of the richest regions of Britain in economic as well as architectural and artistic terms and this is reflected in the quantity and quality of the region's mosaics, which include the largest figured mosaic ever found in Britain - the Woodchester Orpheus pavement - which was perhaps the inspiration for the other famous Orpheus mosaics of the Roman Cotswolds. At the heart of this affluent region is Cirencester, Roman Britain's second largest town, represented here by more than sixty mosaics, the second-century examples being the most exquisite in the country.
RRP: £160.00
Westminster Abbey Chapter House Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 305
ISBN: 9780854312955
Pub Date: 15 Mar 2010
Illustrations: 255 illus (155 in colour)
Description:
This volume tells the complete story of the Westminster Abbey chapter house, which ranks as one of the spectacular achievements of European Gothic art and architecture; and that is precisely what its builder, King Henry III, intended. Begun in the mid-1240s, and completed within a decade, its pre-eminence was recognized in its own day, when the chronicler Matthew Paris described Westminster as having 'a chapter house beyond compare'. Papers by leading scholars in the field of medieval art and architecture reveal the reasons for the construction of the chapter house and trace the possible influences upon the master mason in charge of the project.
RRP: £49.95
Hill Hall Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 544
ISBN: 9780854312917
Pub Date: 16 Jun 2009
Description:
This is the complete history of a building that began as a hunting lodge, late in the eleventh century and that grew to be the principal house of the manor of Theydon Mount in Essex, a small country retreat within easy reach of London. In 1556, the house was acquired by Sir Thomas Smith (1512-77), a man of humble origins but precocious intellect who became Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge at the age of thirty and Chancellor of the University two years later. He then forsook academic for political life, becoming Master of Requests to the Lord Protector Somerset.
RRP: £55.00
Roman Mosaics of Britain Volume III Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 600
ISBN: 9780854312894
Pub Date: 05 Apr 2009
Description:
The third volume in this massive project to create the first complete corpus of the Roman mosaics of Britain covers the areas of Britain that were first to come under Roman control and where some of Britain's most impressive mosaics are to be found - in Colchester, Silchester, London and Verulamium, and in villas and palaces at Brading, Bignor, Fishbourne and Rockbourne. In their introduction to the volume, the authors trace the origins of mosaic-making in Britain, and the development of colour palettes and motifs, from the mainly black-and-white geometric designs of first-century Fishbourne Palace, reflecting contemporary Gaulish fashions, to the more elaborate polychrome designs of the third and fourth centuries, featuring figures from classical mythology, some of which (like Brading's Orpheus taming the animals with his music, or Lullingstone's Bellerophon slaying the Chimera) had been invested with new meaning as symbols of Christianity. They consider too the types of buildings with which mosaics are associated, the functions of mosaic-decorated rooms, the materials from which they are made, the impact of mosaic discoveries on early antiquaries and the pioneering mosaic paintings of artists such as Richard Smirke and Charles Stothard, published in Samuel Lysons' Reliquae Britanniae Romanae (1817).
RRP: £200.00
Visions of Antiquity Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 463
ISBN: 9780854312870
Pub Date: 04 Sep 2007
Series: Archaeologia
Description:
This fascinating portrait of the Society of Antiquaries of London, founded in 1707, assesses the impact that individual Fellows and the Society as a whole have had in influencing the way we visualise and understand the past. There are, for example, essays on the Society's pioneering role in recording monuments and antiquities for posterity, in establishing the scientific and empirical basis of archaeological studies, in replacing Biblically based timeframes with a clearer understanding of deep time measured in millions of years, in drawing up the first legislation protecting ancient monuments, and in funding and publishing the great excavations of the last one hundred years, from Stonehenge, Maiden Castle, Richborough and Sutton Hoo to Aksum (Ethiopia) and Mons Porphyrites (Egypt). All the papers represent fresh and original scholarship and they tell us much about the Society's achievements (and some of the accompanying conflicts between personalities and ideas) over three hundred years.
RRP: £75.00
Excavation of Khok Phanom Di, 7 Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 182
ISBN: 9780854312825
Pub Date: 19 Apr 2005
Series: Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London
Description:
This is the final volume in the series. The volume summarises and synthesises the material from this remarkable site, and considers its place in the wider context of Southeast Asian prehistory.

Excavation of Khok Phanom Di, Vol 3

The Material Culture (part 1)
Format: Hardback
Pages: 283
ISBN: 9780854312627
Pub Date: 01 Dec 1993
Illustrations: 107 figs
Description:
The prehistoric site of Khok Phanom Di in central Thailand, occupied c.2000-1500 BC, was particularly rich in material culture. This volume focuses on the non-ceramic objects, all of which are discussed, catalogued and illustrated.
RRP: £36.00

The Excavation of Khok Phanom Di, Vol. 2

The Biological Report (part 1)
Format: Hardback
Pages: 388
ISBN: 9780854312573
Pub Date: 01 Dec 1991
Illustrations: 77 figs
Description:
Report on the biological remains of the 4000 year-old site, detailing results of analysis on pollen and sediments, ostracoda and foraminifera, microfauna and large mammalian fauna, shellfish and landsnails, stomach contents and coprolites.
RRP: £26.00