A life on the tiles: Exploring the work of David Neal as artist and archaeologist

Chris Prewett’s portrait of David Neal at work, holding a large drawing board between hand and hip, forms the frontispiece to David’s autobiography (see ‘Further reading’ below). That figure will be familiar to anyone who has worked on a Romano-British site in the last 60 years or who has watched a Time Team programme in which a mosaic has been discovered. Although these mosaics will have been captured through a full photographic survey, there is something richer and more truthful about David’s paintings, especially in the way they capture the slight irregularities and subtleties of colour that enrich even the simplest of pavements made of grey and white tesserae. In his introdu