Lewes Castle

This week’s seminar was a very informative presentation on the shell-keeps of the UK. Robert Higham, an Honorary Fellow of the University of Exeter, led us through the details of what makes a shell-keep and the vast array of keep architecture found in the UK. Prof Higham revisited many of the shell-keeps recorded antiquarians and refined the list to those that met all of the architectural criteria, reducing the historiographical list of roughly 120 down to 20 surviving examples. These shell-keeps appear to be a design that is particular to the UK, with the majority being constructed by the ‘wealthiest of castle owners’. There is no evidence for timber precursor structures and the shell-keep is essentially an Anglo-Norman high status structure.

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Prof. Bayliss (Historic England, University of Stirling) presented an entertaining overview of how the application of Bayesian chronology to archaeological research has the potential to provide specific information and considerably narrow date ranges. She expounded the importance of constraint by using the information already known about a site to provide limits for modelling.

This is because the mathematical model has to incorporate what might seem to be obvious information to us, in order for it to recognise and discount parts of the sample date range that do not fit. For example, putting into the model that a structure’s destruction date must come after it’s start date seems a pointless statement to us, but without this information the model will produce a date range that extends to cover all possibilities.

Bayes’ theorem for Archaeologists

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It was pollen diagrams galore on Friday when paleo-ecologist Professor Henry Hooghiemstra came to talk to us about Anthropogenic Impact on Columbian and Ecuadorian ecosystems. In a fascinating talk Hooghiemstra took us to many ecological zones of Columbia and Ecuador, from the high Andes to the savannah and tracked the human impact on these landscapes.

Deforestation of high altitudes in the Andes (credit: H. Hooghiemstra)

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Last week we had the absolute pleasure of welcoming Taryn Nixon to speak at our departmental seminar. Taryn is the CEO of Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), who operate commercially through development-led archaeology. Her talk concerned some of the major work MOLA have been doing in London, how it links with various research agenda and how it might be similar or different from the roles academics play at universities. Alongside their commitments to developers, Taryn was keen to emphasise the role MOLA play in establishing links with the heritage of a place and the local community.

As part of this she presented “3 Days in the Life” of a particular case study: the Bloomberg Place project in Walbrook, Central London. This site was first excavated in 1954 during the post-war development of London when a Roman temple was discovered: London Mithraeum. This temple was dedicated to a mysterious Roman cult from Persia celebrating Mithras and instantly caught national attention with over 400,000 people lining the streets to visit the excavation. At the time only a single archaeologist worked on site alongside the construction workers.

Temple excavation 1954

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Richard Bradley came to talk to us before Christmas about the use and reuse of stone circles. In a fascinating presentation he took us through many early Bronze age sites, describing their possible original purpose and showing the archaeological evidence for later use and, in some cases, destruction. Right up to Christian times stone circles were being used as a strategic reference back to local and non-Christian traditions. Bradley also showed that in the modern period new stone circles are being built all the time, and thus the cycle continues.

Clava cairn (credit: Visit Scotland).