The Queen's Hotel development site in York was in the news early in the year as yet another urban rescue project where a developer's building schedule left very little time for archaeological investigation of, in this case, a palatial Roman building. As always, the question was, where best to dig to learn much and quickly? A guiding answer came from a new application of subsurface radar.

Excavations in the last two decades in York, combined with developments in the techniques of environmental archaeology, have enabled studies to be made of the city's layout, housing provision, food and water supply, effluent disposal and environmental conditions over a span of 2.000 years. Excavation of several thousand burials allows an assessment to be made of these and other environmental effects on longevity, robustness, stature, the incidence of disease, stress and trauma. Relatively good provisions and an evident concern for public health matters in the Roman legionary fortress and nearby colonia do not seem to have resulted in exceptional longevity though general health levels seem to have been fair. Quite different environmental conditions appertained in Anglian York, some better (no rats) and some worse. By the Viking Age conditions in York reached an all‐time low. the city being a largely organic world sited on a heap of rotting organic debris. Conditions, housing, water supply, rubbish and effluent disposal ‐and their implications for the physical state and life expectancy of some 2.000 individuals recently excavated from cemeteries ‐ all improve as the Middle Ages proceed.

The excavator has two advantages over his architect colleague in the study of ancient buildings: he can take his studies back long before the date of the earliest surviving vernacular buildings; and, by beginning his researches at ground level and going down, he can study parts that other researchers cannot reach. This paper, arising out of excavations undertaken in medieval York over the past eight years, seeks to compare what is now known about the underpinnings of York's medieval buildings with the development established, in the main by Denys Spittle's colleagues in the York office of the RCHM, from the above-ground evidence, the surviving buildings. It is offered to Mr Spittle, a scholar whose studies usually stop at ground level, from one whose studies as often as not begin there, on the one hand in recognition of the patient tolerance he has shown of the enthusiasms of the excavator during his incumbancy of the Institute's secretaryship; and on the other in the hopes that future vernacular building studies will increasingly show a marrying of the evidence from excavations with that from the standing buildings.

Michael Hughes: The small towns of Hampshire: the archaeological and historical implications of development. Southampton: Hampshire Archaeological Committee, 1976. 150 pp., 47 maps. £1.50 (including postage) obtainable from the Department of Archaeology The University. Southampton, S09 5NH. - Volume 51 Issue 202

SummaryThe first year's campaign of rescue excavations by York Archaeological Trust is described. A sewer and part of a substantial building, perhaps the baths, were located within the Roman legionary fortress, and the sequence of defensive ditches on the south-west front was examined. Extra-mural settlement near the fortress was also examined in two places. Four small trenches in the heart of Anglo-Scandinavian York revealed 10 m of deposits including a post-Roman sequence giving a stratified series of timber buildings with C14 dates, ceramics, and artefacts. Well-preserved biological materials revealed in detail the palaeoecology of the buildings and immediate area. The development of riverside properties in Skeldergate was investigated: the land between Skeldergate and the Ouse proved to have been a late medieval reclamation. Part of the medieval suburb of Newbiggin was examined outside Monk Bar. The Hospital of St. Mary in the Horsefair was found at Union Terrace, where a twelfth- or early thirteenth-century building was traced through various phases of alteration and addition for use as a Carmelite church, as a hospital, and finally as a school which survived until the seventeenth century.

EXPLORATORY investigations at the Chalton Anglo-Saxon village in 1971 were followed in 1972 by a major excavation, which revealed some 8 per cent of the expected area of the settlement. A number of rectangular timber buildings were found. These, attributable to at least four phases, included small, square or oblong, post-built structures with one doorway; longer, oblong, post-built structures with two doors, set opposite one another in the long sides; a long, post-built building, with the posts set in continuous trenches; two buildings with either buttress- or verandah-posts; and one sunken-floored hut of the two-post Grubenhaus form. Some of the buildings appeared to have been grouped in threes and some were contained within post-built curtilages. In one small area there were a number of shallow pits or working-hollows. The finds, which include grass-tempered and sandy pottery, ironwork and the escutcheon or base print of a 7th-century hanging bowl, corroborate a proposed date for the settlement within the 6th and 7th centuries.

The remains of Hall Place, St. Neots, a late 17th- or early 18th-century house facing Church Street, were encountered during the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon settlement in 1961. Hall place had been built over the site of a large timber-lined cutting, perhaps a fishpond, which had been filled up with domestic rubbish and demolition debris during the course of the 16th century. The fishpond contained a large group of finds including both local and imported pottery, metalwork and leather objects. Pits, wells and other late and post-medieval structures and features were also found in the garden areas behind Hall Place and other Church Street houses.

FIELD-WORK undertaken as part of research into the past use of a typical area of south Hampshire downland has revealed an Anglo-Saxon hill-top village of some 6 hectares (75 acres). In a sample excavation two timber houses set end to end were discovered, with traces of several others and fences associated with them. The two houses, built of posts set in continuous trenches, both superseded buildings of posts set in individual post-holes. The houses each had three entrances, two in the side walls and one in the end wall, and in each the E. end was divided into three small rooms. The overall dimensions of the buildings were 11.40 by 6.30 m. and 11.00 by 6.30 m. (c. 37 by 20 ft. and c. 36 by 20 ft.) respectively. Finds include knives, an arrow-head, bones mainly of sheep and deer, and grass tempered pottery. Surface finds suggest the 6th to the 8th centuries as the date of the settlement, which is presumably the predecessor of three near-by medieval valley villages.

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SUMMARYA dark-age settlement was discovered at Maxey during gravel-quarrying and partly excavated before destruction to reveal at least seven rectangular buildings ranging from 30 ft. to 50 ft. in length and 16 ft. to 20 ft. in width. They were all of post-hole construction but there were instances of post-holes in trenches, post-holes joined by wall-trenches, and, once, a central beam-slot. Near by were smaller ancillary structures including pits surrounded by post-holes, perhaps storage-huts. Open hearths, pits of various types and boundary-ditches were also found. The pottery was of an unusual type, but the small finds suggest that both it and the settlement are of the middle Saxon period.