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I caught a programme last night on BBC2 on "Our Top Ten Treasures". It's billed on the BBC website as "In an [Meet the] Ancestors special, five experts from the British Museum nominate the ten most extraordinary treasures in their collection. Adam Hart-Davis goes behind the scenes at the British Museum to see the artifacts that have been selected, from the singular beauty of the Ringlemere gold cup, crafted over 3500 years ago, to the Anglo-Saxon brilliance of the Sutton Hoo treasure and the priceless social record of Britain's earliest letters." The British Museum's webpages on the top 10 are at http://www.british-museum.ac.uk/treasure/index.html with a link to the "treasures tour" in the Compass database. In the programme the Vindolanda Tablets [Britain's earliest letters] were agreed to be number 1 - the most extraordinary treasure in the BM collection. These were chosen not for their beauty (other contenders included Sutton Hoo treasure, at no.2, the Hoxne and Snettisham Hoards, the Isle of Lewis chessmen etc) but for the way they brought real, ordinary people to life... Not only are the tablets artefacts/museum objects, however: are they one of Britain's oldest archives? The tablets are impartial, authentic, natural, interrelating and unique records. They were selected for permanent preservation (admittedly through the vagaries of the British weather etc rather than formal appraisal - but what else do we all have in our strongrooms that have been preserved by chance??) The techniques of archaeological excavation mean that there are some clues to their provenance and original order... The Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents offers an online edition of the tablets http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/ and lots of other information about Britain's oldest archive [??!!] Sarah M Sarah Wickham Archivist Royal Northern College of Music 124 Oxford Road Manchester M13 9RD +44(0)161 907 5211 [log in to unmask]