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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.

York Archaeological Trust completed its first decade of rescue archaeology in York with the most spectacular find made in the city for a century or more. On 12 M a y 1982, a bulldozer driver working on a development scheme just outside the Trust's long-running Coppergate excavations iit the heart of the Anglo-Scandinavian and medieval city, unearthed an Anglo-Saxon helmet, only the third, after the Sutton Hoo and Benty Grange examples, to have been found. The Coppergate helmet was in a superb state of preservation. Peter Addyman, Director of the Trust, has provided us with a first account, prepared by members of the Trust's stafl, giving details of the discovery, a description of the helmet itself, and a note on preliminary investigations carried out upon it. MY Addyman begins:

The past two decades have witnessed an almost complete revision of ideas about the character of Anglo-Saxon settlements. The advances have come in the main from a series of archaeological excavations in which techniques commonly used in prehistoric archaeology have been applied to sites of the period in the light of results from contemporary settlements on the continent. The excavations have in effect produced entire new categories of evidence about the domestic accommodation, service buildings and general planning of settlements of all levels of Anglo-Saxon society, in most of England and in all parts of the Anglo-Saxon period. In 1950 almost no domestic buildings were known other than the sunken huts found first by Leeds at Sutton Courtenay and subsequently by others in various parts of the country. Leeds‘s conclusions, accepted albeit with reluctance by scholars, were that ‘the bulk of the people, we can now be assured, were content with something that hardly deserves a better title than hovel, only varying in its greater or lesser simplicity’. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Radford, moreover, in a seminal paper in the first volume ofMedieval Archaeologydemonstrated that they stood in some considerable contrast to the settlements and to the standards of domestic accommodation enjoyed by the ancestors and contemporaries of the Anglo-Saxons on the continent.

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