Some corner of a foreign field That is forever Poland

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 …

CFP: An Archaeology of Global Medieval Life

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 …

We three kings – early medieval burials in popular fiction

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 …

Towards a psychogeography of Danebury

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 …

CFP: The Materiality of Folklore and Traditional Practices

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 …

Maypoles and "Burying Peter"

  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 …

Knickers in a rag tree: contemporary votive deposition at a prehistoric monument

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 …