The Pressure of the Past: Presidential Address.

Abstract

Fifty years ago on 17 February 1934 the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia held its annual business meeting in Norwich. Professor Breuil was elected President for that year, Professor Miles Burkitt as Vice-President and Dr J. G. D. Clark as Honorary Editor. Other elections at that meeting included Mr Stuart Piggott to Council and O. G. S. Crawford to membership of the Society. It had been founded in 1908 when on 17 October a circular had been issued by W. G. Clarke of Norwich and W. D. Dutt of Lowestoft to over 100 interested people inviting them to form an East Anglian Society of Prehistorians. That circular and a selection of replies to it still exist in the records of the Society that have recently been rediscovered. Dr W. A. Sturge of Icklingham Hall agreed to become the first President and, having received 72 favourable replies, an inaugural meeting was held on Monday 26 October 1908 at Norwich.For the better part of three decades the Society maintained an active, if somewhat parochial, role in the development of British Prehistory. Its interests were East Anglian in orientation and with little exception directed to the study of palaeolithic man and the flint implements that might (or might not) be ascribed to human activity.By 1930, however, some members of the Society were contemplating change. As C. S. Phillips (1980, 113) has pointed out, it was the only body in Britain devoted entirely to Prehistoric studies, but whilst its membership had originally been local to East Anglia, by the fourth decade of the century it was expanding outside the region.