Malcolm Lyne – författare

The appearance and revival of handmade grog-tempered ware producing pottery industries during the late 3rd and 4th centuries using technology more appropriate to the Late Iron Age in the south and south-east of Britain is something of an enigma. This revival in the popularity of such primitive pottery took place on the Isle of Wight and in the Hampshire Basin, East Sussex and Kent at a time when the production of Romanised wheel-turned grey and fine colour-coated wares was still on a large scale in the south of Britain and elsewhere in the British provinces. This publication is the result of 25 years research into these grog-tempered wares: it presents corpora of forms associated with the various industries and discusses the distributions of their products at different periods. It also discusses the possible reasons for the revival of such wares, increasing popularity during the 4th century and disappearance during the 5th century AD.

James Douglas (1753-1819) was a polymath, well ahead of his time in both the fields of archaeology and earth-sciences. His examinations of fossils from the London Clay and other geological formations caused him to conclude that the Earth was much older than the 4004 BC allotted to it by his contemporaries. He had come to this conclusion by 1785 and published these findings in that year, long before other researchers in the same field. His Nenia Britannica, published in 1793, reveals a remarkably accurate grasp of the dating of Anglo- Saxon burials; further illuminated by the contents of his common-place book for 1814-16, discovered by the author in a second-hand bookshop. This common-place book, correspondence with his contemporaries and other sources resulted in the present publication recounting his archaeological and other activities in Sussex during the first two decades of the 19th century.