transferred to the three Royal Commissions and it was amalgamated with the records gathered during the course of their own work over the previous half-century. The Commissions were explicitly empowered to continue this established architectural work. In Wales Peter Smith was assigned as the emergency recorder with special responsibility for domestic architecture. By this stage the Commission had also amassed a considerable archive of measured drawings, surveys and photographs through its own inventory programme. These records documented archaeological sites and buildings of all periods, and the amalgamation created a substantial national archive which was renamed the National Monuments Record of Wales to reflect its unique scope and importance. Its primary functions were "to provide an index of all monuments, so that inquirers can be directed at once to the best information concerning any structure; and to fill the gaps in that information". These ambitious and important aims resulted in a classified card index, innovatory in its day, for every known site and structure in Wales. Managed by C. H. Houlder, it laid the foundation of the Commission's structured archive, database and enquiry service as they are today. Monuments in the National Monuments Record of Wales are assigned a National Primary Record Number or NPRN. When the Commission came to survey the county of Glamorgan, it faced a much larger and more complex body of architecture than that in previous inventories. A greater proportion of investigators' time was needed for architectural survey than for traditional earthwork archaeology, and it was realised that it would be possible to progress the work more efficiently if the system of recording by parishes were abandoned in favour of recording by a combination of period and monument type. Volume I, published in 1976, therefore focussed exclusively on prehistoric and early medieval Glamorgan and represented a major departure. This and the plans for further thematic volumes in the Glamorgan inventory were essentially the work of A. H. A. Hogg and his team. Although Hogg himself had retired as secretary in 1973, he continued to lend his services to the Commission until his late seventies. In the meantime several other important developments had broadened the Royal Commission's responsibilities. In 1969 it took the initiative to list information for local authorities. Commissioners were sensitive to the inevitably slow progress of the authoritative, detailed inventory programme, and it seemed helpful to complement it with a rapid survey of those monuments