Great North Museum Hancock

Roman Britain in Colour is the title of an intervention in the Hadrian’s Wall Gallery of the Great North Museum: Hancock. This intervention makes use of projection mapping to interpret a series of seven Roman altars; using colour and animation to enhance the visitor experience in the gallery. This paper explores the decision to use projection mapping technology against the background of increased interest and research into the use of pigmentation on Roman sculpture. It outlines some of the benefits of projection mapping for the understanding of archaeological material in museums and discusses some potential drawbacks of the technique as an interpretative tool.

Abstract Jane Ellen Harrison’s early work giving tours and lectures in London’s museums offers an unusual window on visitor experience in the late nineteenth century. This article examines the composition and motivations of her audience, looking at how Harrison’s lectures addressed gendered and class-based anxieties about their access to education and ability to respond appropriately to prestigious objects. Harrison used Greek vases to tell stories from ancient Greek literature. She made the case for the value of Greek vases as a repository of stories that could be understood through comparisons with literature but which also stood as evidence in their own right, hinting at lost stories and the perspectives of ordinary people. Her museum talks demonstrate a belief that Greek vases offered an alternative to Classical literature, one which had been made by ordinary people in the past and could be ‘read’ by ordinary people in the present.

A new agnathan assemblage is described from the Wenlock Series of Tortworth, southern England. It includes Logania cruciformis Gross 1967, L. cuneata (Gross 1947), L. ludlowiensis Gross 1967, L. scotica (Traquair 1898) and Thelodus cf. traquairi Gross 1947. This may be a facies fauna, but it has affinities with Baltic and Siberian assemblages and may suggest a more complex palaeogeography for Europe in mid-Silurian times, differing from those already known from England.

Thomas Sopwith (1803–1879) of Newastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, England, was engineer and mineral surveyor in the coal mines of Newcastle and the lead mines of Alston Moor, County Durham. Self taught in geology and engraving, and with family connections in cabinet making, he designed and had made in the family workshops a series of small wooden models illustrating the simple geological structures which confronted the coal and lead miners underground. The models, and the drawings accompanying them, must be regarded as one of the earliest attempts at explaining simple geological structures in three-dimensions for the mining and civil engineer. As such, they have an important place in the early history of engineering geological mapping.

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SynopsisCladoxylon waltoni sp. nov. is described from stems resembling C. radiatum Unger in the form of stele and absence of secondary xylem, but differing in the mode of emission of clepsydroid leaf-traces. Each leaf-trace originates as a band of xylem connecting two adjacent xylem arms. Dorsiventral axes with an ornate U-shaped bundle and 4-9 radiating arms are also included in the species. These give off alternate clepsydroid traces from two or three adjacent arms in a manner resembling a rachis. One specimen of Hierogramma mysticum Unger is described and three small rachides are interpreted as possible subdivisions of a Hierogramma frond.