A multi-disciplinary investigation of medieval settlement and landscape in a carefully selected area of England, building on a succesful pilot project. The existence of both villages and hamlets gives an opportunity to explain the divergence between these settlement forms in an environmental and social context.
Increasingly within archaeology, the Web is used for dissemination of datasets. This contributes to the growing amount of information on the ‘deep web’, which a recent Bright Planet study estimated to be 500 times larger than the ‘surface web’. However Google and other web search engines are ill equipped to retrieve information from the richly structured databases that are key resources for humanities scholars. Important archaeological results and reports are also appearing as grey literature, before or instead of traditional publication.
This project follows on from a previous collaboration which established a methodology for using measurements of the past magnetic field of the Earth for dating archaeological materials in the last 4000 years in the UK. The primary aim of this project is to realise the potential of this research by developing its practical application in UK archaeology. There is increasing interest in using archaeomagnetic dating as part of the suite of chronological tools available to archaeologists. However, it has yet to be adopted routinely.
North Sea Palaeolandscapes is a remarkable project utilizing 3D seismic data to generate models which will be of enormous value to the geological and archaeological community (as well as to the aggregate extraction industry). The University of Birmingham is the lead organisation and other contributing organizations include the University of Southampton, BGS (British Geological Survey), Petroleum Geo-Services, English Heritage, BMAPA (British Marine Aggregate Producers Association), Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund, TNO (Netherlands Institute of Applied Geoscience) and Tigress.