Programme 2024/2025: Key events
Prehistory Research Section events:
2024
December
Saturday 7th December.
Christmas in-person meeting - 2 talks and Christmas tea.
Swarthmore Education Centre, 2-7 Woodhouse Square, Leeds LS3 1AD.
Dr Seren Griffiths, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Forged in Conflict: Francis Buckley, the First World War, and British Prehistory
Francis Buckley was extraordinary; an officer responsible for arming grenades, excavating trenches, surveying, sketch-mapping, and military intelligence, his actions were a roll-call of the First World War’s bloodiest battles. The psychological toll was significant. War remade the man and created the archaeologist. Under fire, Buckley recorded prehistoric lithics on the Somme, a rich archaeological landscape, and a deadly battlefield. After the war, “tramping” the Yorkshire moors, Buckley applied military skills to excavate and record a key, but still understudied lithic collection. This paper explores Francis Buckley’s war, its implications for the history of archaeological thought, and reasserts his under-acknowledged legacy.
Professor Tom Moore, Department of Archaeology, Durham University.
Lines in the landscape: Scot’s Dike and the role of monumental earthworks in Britain
Monumental linear earthworks are found across Britain and Ireland, defining communities, channelling movement and inscribing the landscape. Our understanding of the roles of these features remains dominated by interpretive frameworks grounded in antiquarian traditions. Despite their prevalence, apart from notable exceptions such as Offa’s dyke, recent discussions have been relatively quiet on their significance for understanding social and landscape organisation. Our recent Leverhulme funded Monumentality and Landscape (MAL) project (with Prof. Andrew Reynolds at UCL) has sought to redress this by reassessing these monuments. It records over 700 such earthworks across Britain and while dating of most remains poor, the evidence points to peaks of construction in the first millennium BC and mid-first millennium AD with potential differences in their form and roles. Using evidence from the MAL project and focusing on the preliminary results of investigations at Scot’s Dike in North Yorkshire, this paper will explore the important role of monumental linears in defining territories and shaping movement through landscapes. It will be argued that these monuments represent the display of changing forms of power, from the Late Bronze Age to early medieval period.
See flyer here.
Also Prehistoric Yorkshire 62 printed copy available for members to collect.
2025
March
Saturday 22nd March. Talk from Clive Waddington 'How Britain became an island: the Storegga Slide tsunami and Mesolithic catastrophe'.
Possible Archaeological Events for Your Diary:
Guest Lectures (open to all)
Bradford University: School Archaeological and Forensic Science guest lectures series.
Lectures start at 5.30pm in Richmond Building (room E59) and as a webinar.
Please note - Your E-Mail Address:
The majority of members now receive their notices and newsflashes electronically. If your contact details have changed, please let me know, so that our address list remains up-to-date. If you wish to change the way you receive your section information, please drop me a line - either by email, or by post : John Cruse, 3 Ellicott Court, Park Road, Menston, LS29 6PA
Above programme updated 12th October 2024