Society for Medieval Archaeology Annual General Meeting

Posted On: December 1st, 2022

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Society for Medieval Archaeology Annual General Meeting

 

All members of the society are welcome to attend the Annual General Meeting on Monday, December 5, 2022, from 12:00-12:30. The meeting will be immediately followed by the Winter Symposium, where three talks will be given about recent research in medieval archaeology.

Online link: https://tinyurl.com/wbbfnehz.  Passcode: 572837

 

Agenda

1. Minutes of last Annual General Meeting
2. Elections of Officers and Council

The following nominations have been received for election:

Honorary President: Professor Oliver Creighton (Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter)

Vice President: Dr Helen Fenwick (Department of History, University of Hull)

Treasurer:  Professor Duncan Sayer (University of Central Lancashire), for re-election for a further one-year term

Ordinary member: Dr Toby Martin (University of Oxford Department for Continuing Education)

Ordinary member: Dr Ben Jervis (Department of Archaeology and Conservation, Cardiff University)

Ordinary member: Dr Katie Hemer (Institute of Archaeology, University College London)

3. Election of auditors

Bronsens, 267 Banbury Road, Oxford

4. President’s Report
5. Treasurer’s report
6. Editor’s report
7. Secretary’s report
8. Prizes and Awards
9. Any other business
10. Date of next meeting

 

 

 

 

Winter Symposium

12:30 Professor Oliver Creighton (Professor of Archaeology, Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter)

 Warhorse: Archaeology of a Medieval Revolution?

This talk introduces the current AHRC-funded research project Warhorse: The Archaeology of a Medieval Revolution? (https://medievalwarhorse.exeter.ac.uk/), which is based at the Universities of Exeter and East Anglia and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This interdisciplinary project is engaging with material evidence for warhorses (and horses more generally) in medieval England at a wide variety of scales — from zooarchaeological samples for genetic and isotopic analysis and individual equestrian artefacts through to excavated assemblages and landscape-wide datasets — dating between the late Saxon and Tudor period (c. AD 800–1600), all contextualised by new historical research. This paper stresses how these different lines of evidence, from cutting-edge archaeological science through to re-analysis of primary documentary sources, interact with and complement one another to create the potential to create new understandings about the medieval horse and its social context.

 

13:00 Dr Karen Dempsey (Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology, School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University)

 ‘Green’ Heritage: plants and people at medieval castles

We know that present day landscapes hold evidence of past societies. Can living plants tell us anything further? Combining botanical surveys and castles studies with understanding of medieval health, this talk explores what relict plants reveal to us of the ‘green’ lives of medieval people and their castles.

 

13:30 Helen Gittos (Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History, Faculty of History, University of Oxford)

The Cerne Giant in its Early Medieval Context

The recent dating of the Cerne Abbas giant came as a surprise. This huge, naked figure was cut into a Dorset hillside not, as many have supposed, in prehistory, nor in the early modern period, but in the early middle ages. This means that for the first time it is possible to place the Cerne Giant within a cultural context. Here I will talk about recent work on the giant that seeks to understand his place within the local landscape of Cerne.