Herbert E. Roese born in 1935, originally trained as a mechanical engineer. After a two-year foundation course, he studied full-time at the Technical University of Cologne, gaining the degree of Dipl.Ing.. Between 1959 and 1973 he was active as an engineer in Cape Town, Chicago, London and Stuttgart. During this period he persued his interest in archaeology, especially prehistory like a visit to see the cave paintings at Lascaux/France before they were closed to the public. While in Africa, he visited such places as Louis Leakey's palaeolithic site at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, as well as the cave paintings in the Matopas Hills in Zimbabwe. During the years in London he visited many prehistoric sites in Britain and Denmark. By then, the time was ripe for a change and he took up an undergraduate course at the Archaeology Department of the University of Wales Cardiff, finishing with a B.Sc.(Hons) in 1975. Thereafter, he continued as a postgraduate student at UCC researching for his doctoral thesis. In 1979 he gained his Ph.D. in Archaeology on the fieldmonuments of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Wales and wrote a number of papers for archaeological journals. Throughout his career he also had a keen interest in the sculptural arts and crafts of Africa, as well as in the contemporary visual arts in Wales.