Newsletter
9 Newsletter
9 We last produced a Newsletter to accompany our mailings over 3 years ago, so this sheet might come as something of a surprise to relatively new members of the Group. Our aim is to bring you up to date with developments, thank all those who have organised our recent meetings, and draw attention to the meetings now set for 1996.
The autumn meetings in London have regularly attracted 50 to 100 members. Recent themes have included Neolithic Houses, Women and Children in the Neolithic, Neolithic landscapes, and, most recently, the use of Caves, shafts and mines. An extra meeting on Grooved Ware was held in February 1994. Some are to be published - see below. Thanks to the British Museum, and especially to Gill Varndell and Ian Longworth, for hosting all these meetings, and to all the programme organisers, and many others too for organising the programmes.
The Spring meetings have also maintained a steady and loyal following, with recent visits to the Channel Islands, North Wales, and, most recently, Grampian. Thanks to Mark Patton and Kerri Brown, Frances Lynch, and Alan Saville and Ian Shepherd for all their efforts in making these meetings successful and enjoyable. A day visit to Salisbury Plain in May 1994, kindly organised and led by Dave Field, provided a rare chance to see a selection of very well-preserved long barrows on a day when there was no live-firing going on. Incidentally, it was also the day of the annual Neolithic Marathon between Avebury and Stonehenge and many of the runner must have wondered what on earth these people in Land-Rovers were doing zooming about all other the downs stopping only to admire some strange "humps and bumps".
Well nearly! We have prepared some pages containing information about the Group, details of forthcoming meetings, publications, and the text of this Newsletter which will be mounted on the Bournemouth University School of Conservation Sciences site in the very near future. The address will be: http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/acad-depts/cs/cshome.htm so do visit. We will be updating the pages with the latest information about forthcoming meetings as often as time permits. We are thinking about providing a forum for interim reports etc - anyone interested? (See NSG Home Page for first examples)
Most of the recent London meetings are being taken forward to publication by their organisers; we included a flier in the last mailing for the book based on the Women and Children in the Neolithic meeting (Leicester University Press, this summer). The first to hit the shelves will be Neolithic houses in Northwest Europe and beyond, edited by Tim Darvill and Julian Thomas, due for publication by Oxbow Books in March 1996. There is a leaflet enclosed with this mailing so you can order one now! Following on there will be a volume on Grooved Ware and one on Neolithic Settlements and Landscapes. More on these in due course.
The current membership list stands at 201. We have recently carried out our periodic purge of those who have not been to any meetings recently and have not contacted us to ensure they stay on the list. If you think you are in danger of deletion then come to one of the 1996 meetings or drop us a line confirming you address.
The group remains comfortably solvent, with roughly comparable levels of annual income and expenditure. In recent years we have had to raise the "meeting fee" to £2.00 in order to cover hikes in postage and printing costs, and it may be necessary to raise them a little further before long as paper prices and postage increase again. Our aim, however, is to avoid introducing a subscription of any sort.
One way in which we might cut the cost of mailings (and reduce the slaughter of trees for photocopying) would be to use e-mail to alert those members who would like to be contacted in this way. Could members who would like to be e-mailed please send a message to Gordon at his home e-mail address gjbarclay@ednet.co.uk.
The Autumn Meeting will be held on Monday 11th November in the Basement Lecture Theatre at the British Museum. The subject is: "The Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in Britain" and the organisers are Martin Evison (Sheffield University. email: M.P.Evison@sheffield.ac.uk and Martin Richards (Oxford University, Institute of Molecular Medecine). They are currently arranging the programme so if you would like to contribute a paper please get in touch with one of them direct. It is hoped that the programme will include contributions dealing with population dynamics, DNA studies, language and ideology.
Additionally in October a:
Joint Meeting of the PCRG and Lithics Studies Society
hosted by the Alexander Keiller Museum, Avebury to look at ceramics and lithics from the Avebury area.
Saturday 5th October 1996
Further Details available from the
Secretary of P.C.R.G., Lorraine Mepham
c/o Wessex Archaeology,
Portway House, Old Sarum Park,
Salisbury, SP4 6EB
As always, we are open to suggestions for future meetings, either field-based or for the lecture theatre in London (or elsewhere?).
We look forward to seeing you at one of the 1996 meetings.
Tim Darvill, School of Conservation Sciences,
Bournemouth University,Poole, Dorset. BH12 5BB.
Telephone (01202) 595536. Fax (01202) 595478.
e-mail tdarvill@bournemouth.ac.uk
Gordon Barclay, Historic Scotland,
Longmore House, Salisbury Place,Edinburgh. EH6 4SQ.
Telephone 0131 668 8758. Fax 0131 668 8765.
e-mail gjbarclay@ednet.co.uk