On two occasions during the past year our apartments here have been the scene of festive celebrations unusual in our normally unexciting routine, but none the less welcome for that. On 2 May 1974 we were privileged to entertain our Royal Fellow Queen Margrethe of Denmark who graciously agreed to accept an invitation to be formally admitted to her Fellowship in the course of her State Visit to this country. After the admission ceremony, which followed traditional lines in this room, Her Majesty attended a reception in her honour in the Library at which she was able to meet the Officers and their wives, members of Council, and many Fellows and guests, including a number who had been her teachers or contemporaries when she was studying archaeology at Cambridge some years ago. She also showed great interest in some of our treasures, such as the portrait of her ancestor King Christian II of Denmark, and in a special exhibition of material illustrating our Society's links with the Danish pioneers of European archaeology in the heroic age a century and more ago when her country led the world in the systematic study of prehistory and in the protection of ancient monuments. This exhibition, admirably contrived and displayed by our learned Librarian, showed once again what a wealth of material our collections contain on so many aspects of antiquity. The arrival and departure of the Queen were signalled by splendid fanfares from our good friends the Guild of Gentlemen Trumpeters, and we have reason to believe that Her Majesty enjoyed these outbursts of joyful noise, and indeed the whole delightfully informal occasion, every bit as much as we did ourselves.

In the first season of excavation by a British team participating in the UNESCO Save Carthage Project, two sites in the harbour area and one inland were examined. On the site on the island in the circular harbour, the remains probably of the νεώρια described by Appian succeeded earlier Punic occupation periods and were in turn followed by two successive Roman temples and a building, probably a pharos, associated with the second temple. After this, there appears to have been domestic or commercial occupation in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. On the north shore of the circular harbour, remains of the late Roman quayside and associated streets and buildings were found. On the inland site, situated to the south of the Roman street grid, there were the remains of third–fifth-century and fifth–sixth-century buildings fronting a street and backed by a substantial wall identified as the city wall constructed in the reign of Theodosius II.

The Carmarthen brooch, datable not later than c.a.d. 50 and perhaps as early as c. 25, is a direct two-piece successor to the pre-Roman, one-piece, Aylesford type, now known to be considerably later in date than used to be thought. The two-piece construction, which characterizes the entire British trumpet-brooch series, was adopted as a convenience when the bow was given a massive form in order to accommodate Late Celtic decoration in relief, of a western character and antecedents. The central moulding and foot carry petalled ornament of a ‘transitional’ or ‘supporting’ type: this ornament is reminiscent of that sometimes found between the circlet and terminals of early La Tène torcs abroad, but is probably better understood here as the carefully-designed continuation en suite of the open flower or rosette upon the headloop, and thus as half-open flower. Only the Carmarthen brooch retains such a headloop rosette.

The Carmarthen brooch was soon copied in bronze, and on these copies the relief appears in a coarsened and simplified form. The copies are entirely from western findspots. In the southern part of the region in which they occur, the medial petalling is retained (as at Lydney); but in the northern part, additional simplification has led to the suppression of the medial petalling (as at Segontium). Thus the Carmarthen brooch may be seen as the parent of the more fully-developed Rii class of Collingwood's typological sequence, and also of at least one strand in the Ri class, which has been considered up to now as the original form. In the west Midlands, perhaps seizing the opportunity offered by the simplified relief, craftsmen began to apply red enamel to the hollow areas, and to emphasize the central moulding, with its petalling, so that this became the principal plastic ornamental element (as at The Lunt, by a.d. 75). In the north of England, these novel features, enamel and exaggerated moulding, were further developed. The fine northern brooches (Backworth—not enamelled, but engraved—or Risingham) do not have headloop rosettes, and it was in the presence of their exaggerated central mouldings that Collingwood devised his celebrated ‘acanthus’ theory. By the Antonine period, brooches were being produced with polychrome enamel, and with their mouldings confined, very often, to the front of the bow; many of these have been found along the Rhine. Some late derivatives of the Carmarthen type are known from Wroxeter, and form a final group in the Appendix above.

In 1971 the British Museum bought a fourth-century silver spoon with Christian symbols. An undated document acquired with the spoon showed that it was the survivor of a hoard from Biddulph, Staffordshire. In 1973 notes made in January 1886, about the discovery of the spoon, were found in a notebook compiled by A. W. Franks. The newly acquired spoon proves to have been one of a hoard of four spoons found at Whitemore Farm, Biddulph. The find-place of the spoon suggests a possible direct link between Chester and Buxton, while its dating adds to the sparse testimony for late-Roman life in the north-west of the province. The style of the lettering may indicate that the spoon was made in the East Mediterranean, and the Christian symbolism adds to the stock of evidence about the cult in the western Roman Empire.

An important petrographical study of Anglo-Saxon and medieval honestones has been made recently by Mr. S. E. Ellis (British Museum, Natural History), and the object of this paper is to identify the hones of the pagan period mentioned therein, and to provide illustrations of them as well as comments on their archaeological contexts. Most of the stones used as hones were picked up locally, but there is a possibility of the export of Kentish Rag from Kent and greywackés from southern Scotland. Ritual is evident in connection with a few of the hones.

Entries in the London Museum Catalogue indicate that the association of a carinated pedestal based bowl with a pair of applied brooches and a bronze fragment in Mitcham (Surrey) Grave 205 almost certainly represents a valid closed find. The continental antecedents of the complete applied brooch from this grave may be dated to the first quarter of the fifth century. The English brooches with this floriate cross design show an insular development with a restricted distribution in south-east England It is argued that the English examples were manufactured during the first half of the fifth, probably towards the middle of that century. This brings the brooches nearer to the date of the pot, which Dr. Myres argues must have been made in the years of Roman–Anglo-Saxon overlap around A.D. 400.

In 1971 the Winchester Excavations Committee undertook excavations on six sites in the city, a seventh being excavated by the Winchester Schools Archaeological Committee. The final season was also the longest: work began on 29 May and lasted for twenty-two weeks until 1 November. About £25,470 was spent and an average of 200 people took part each working day during the ten weeks of the full season from 21 June to 29 August.