Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

Between 1953, and 1999 when it closed its film department, Arts Council England commissioned or participated in the production of 485 films, which recorded all aspects of - mainly contemporary British - art. The subject matter, length and format of the films are as varied as they are eclectic. Moreover, because of the Council’s liberal attitude to sponsorship, and the creative freedom their commissions offered, they also attracted some of the best film-makers in the UK. Indeed, some of them provide a unique record of a partnership between the Arts Council, artists and film-makers.

Refugees are always in the news. This project inaugurated a new era in migration research by highlighting the achievements of German-speaking refugees who arrived in Britain between 1933 and 1950 and whose papers are located in public and private British collections. The aim is to compile a comprehensive searchable database, which will catalogue collections of papers relating to prominent figures such as Anna Freud or Karl Popper as well as information on less well known family papers and unpublished autobiographical narratives.

The project consists of preliminary geophysical prospection (1999-2001), a programme of limited excavation (30 sq metres), accompanied by faunal, organic, and metallurgical analyses (1999-2008), whose aim is to create a continuous, dated sequence of activities at the late Iron Age river port at Adjiyska Vodenitsa, near Vetren, plausibly identified with ancient Pistiros.

The nature of the processes by which the economic and cultural elements regarded as Neolithic spread from the Near East across Europe continues to be the subject of much debate, despite or perhaps because of the lack of detailed information about what those elements were and how they differed from region to region.