diverse digressions and rambles on English archaeology, landscape and folk traditions with the occasional scenic diversions
In 1896, a baby was born in Debow, a small village in the south-east of Poland – he was baptised Josef Cłab. He now lies buried in small graveyard just outside the North Yorkshire village of Sutton-on-the-Forest. I don’t know the precise chain of events that brought him to Yorkshire, but we can hazard a …
Continue reading “Some corner of a foreign field That is forever Poland”
Session for TAG 2020 – Leicester – 17th-19th December 2021 Historians and archaeologists have begun increasingly to engage with the notion of a ‘global middle ages’. By reframing current European perspectives on the ‘medieval’ to embrace wider Eurasia and beyond, this move towards a globalising perspective has developed two main approaches. One has emphasised the importance …
Continue reading “CFP: An Archaeology of Global Medieval Life”
This is a kind of companion piece to my last entry – I was going to include a lot of this in my original paper for TAG, but there wasn’t enough time to squeeze this all in. This is a brief contribution to some of the on-going discussions about the depiction of early medieval burial …
Continue reading “We three kings – early medieval burials in popular fiction”
NOTES: This is a paper version of the paper I gave in Session 10: Archaeologia Hookland: the archaeology of a lost County in England held at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference (2019) (#TAG@UCL-IoA. The CFP for the session included the following: “For those intimate with Hookland, we offer the opportunity to explore and celebrate its …
As part of the upcoming Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference (TAG@UCL-IOA) Dr Katy Soar and myself are organising a session The Materiality of Folkore and Traditional Practices Traditional ritual practices, happening outside or beyond more canonical or formal belief systems can take oral and material forms. Indeed, often such practices are characterised by a blending of …
Continue reading “CFP: The Materiality of Folklore and Traditional Practices”
I grew up in a landscape of pillboxes. In Berkshire in the 1970s and 1980s concrete and brick machine gun emplacements and bunkers were part of the scenery; lurking in hedges, standing in the middle of fields, at the edge of canals, they were part of the backdrop of my childhood. Not spectacular, not particularly …
My son is fascinated by animals and wildlife so over recent years we’ve visited a lot of zoos, and this week we visited Chester Zoo for the first time. It was an fascinating experience, Ned finally got to see an Aye-Aye (which has long been one of his favourite animals) and we got our …
Photo of the structure looking north from the south end I’ve spent a lot of time visiting Holy Island – Lindisfarne over recent years, and every time I come I discover something new. Over the weekend I was up leading a conference fieldtrip, and after the tour was over I went down to the little …
Today I stumbled a nice example of the intersection of landscape and archaeology and folk tradition. We visited Nun Monkton, a village a few miles to the north-west of York. It’s a classic medieval village, with the houses arranged around the broad open green, with the church at one end. The green is dominated …
Today we took a visit to the Rollright Stones in Warwickshire. With my archaeology head on I should probably have been more interested in the Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monumentality – or even the adjacent Anglo-Saxon cemetery. However, what caught my eye was the evidence for contemporary votive deposition practices. The use of prehistoric …
Continue reading “Knickers in a rag tree: contemporary votive deposition at a prehistoric monument”
Outlandish Knight 