P&P had a substantial representation at this year’s conference, held in the beautiful Aula Magna auditorium of Stockholm University. Our four posters, and those of Durham colleagues Celia Orsini and Sian Mui, garnered many interested comments and expectations for the outcomes of the project. The field trip to Runsa hilltop settlement, Gamla Uppsala with its monumental burial mounds – a visit enlivened by lunch from a Mexican snack wagon (well done to the organising committee for dreaming up that one!) – and Valsgärde with its collection of cremations, chamber graves and boat burials, together with a stone ship setting, made for an extraordinary day, ending in a welcome drinks reception at Uppsala Castle. Key themes from the conference presentations that struck us as particularly relevant to the project were European-wide incidences and analyses of disease, such as plague and the evidence for climate change. We all came away using the handy acronym LALIA – the Late Antiquity Little Ice Age of the sixth century AD. My highlights? The virtual reality app recreating the great hall building at Gamla Uppsala and a first ever sighting of a white-tailed eagle, floating timelessly above the fjord.

​This year’s Society for Medieval Archaeology annual conference took place at Durham University across the 13th to 15th of July, 2018. The conference, a collaboration between the Society and a Leverhulme-funded project hosted at Durham called People and Place: Creating the Kingdom of Northumbria, addressed the topic of death and burial in early to late medieval Britain and Europe.
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Since 1990 a series of major conferences and publications have investigated aspects of death and burial in medieval societies in Europe and beyond. Some have delivered state-of-the-art research on early medieval and medieval funerary rites; others have profiled new advances in scientific research. The proceedings of the last SMA conference that dealt with burial were of course published in 2002 in the Society monograph series by Sam Lucy and Andrew Reynolds in the seminal volume Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, which captured some of the major changes in thinking at the time on identity, community and belief. Since then spatial consideration has developed as a significant research strand in medieval archaeology, relevant to understanding settlement patterns, land use and travel and the experiential nature of monuments, places and landscapes. From exploring the distribution patterns of grave types and the use of antecedent landscape features for burial and charting the rise of commemorative markers in stone, to identifying patterns of diseases and health in medieval populations and their mobility; the location of the grave has become a rich stepping off point, stimulating and facilitating new research directions.

With this in mind, the 2018 conference brought together established and early career researchers working on aspects of death, landscape and locality from AD 300-1500 in Britain and Europe. A key concern of the event was to promote new dialogues bridging early medieval, medieval and late medieval funerary archaeology and to initiate a broader transnational and comparative debate on methods, theories and approaches relevant to mortuary archaeology in the Middle Ages. The content delivered by our 21 speakers did not disappoint and it was particularly pleasing to listen to wide-ranging sessions that juxtaposed perspectives from Dalmatia and Pictland, or the Low Countries and Ireland, mixed scientific and social approaches and dissolved chronological divisions.  

We were fortunate in having three exceptional and thought-provoking keynote papers. We started with a review of the treatment and exploration of Merovingian mortuary archaeology in past and present from Bonnie Effros on Friday evening in Durham Cathedral. Despite the imposing venue of the Cathedral Chapter House, our speaker kept the audience fully engaged in a critical reflection on the relevance of considering mortuary archaeology in context and a reception followed in the late evening light in the medieval cloister. On Saturday evening the audience heard an inspiring exploration of experiential and individual approaches to understanding human interactions with death in the medieval era from Roberta Gilchrist followed by another sunshine-filled reception at the poster evening in the Calman Centre with views over the historic Durham peninsular. Finally we closed on Sunday with a rich exploration of the architecture and grammar of mortuary archaeology in early Anglo-Saxon England from Duncan Sayer, leaving the audience with considerable food for thought on their journey home. In between our speakers provided new insights into cremation in Britain and the near Continent; explored the rich evidence for monument reuse in Scotland, Dalmatia and Francia; and charted the experiential nature of sculpture, burial and travel as elements of Norse tradition and in the context of Irish and western Christianity. Papers highlighted some recent seminal cemetery excavations such as Vicq in France and Lakenheath in Suffolk, while other speakers drew on the material evidence of the grave contents to explore aspects of ritual practice such as the use of gold coins, or the bioarchaeological contribution of skeletal assemblages. Important themes to emerge included the intersection of domestic and funerary spheres, the idea of resilient traditions during times of change, the importance of experiential approaches to graves, cemeteries and funerary landscapes and the need to individualise and anthropologise death and understand medieval experience. 

​We were also fortunate in receiving a broad range of poster presentations. Some 20 posters were covered research topics including funerary practice in Normandy, the fifth-century Thames Valley, bioarchaeological perspectives on Anglo-Saxon bed burials, life and death in Ipswich, and micromorphological exploration of the Pictish grave fills at Rhynie, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The Society awarded prizes to two researchers for their posters on Riia M. Chmielowski for Viking-Age steatite: do household objects reveal real differences in status? And Celia Orsini for Monument reuse: localised identity, regional diversity and a poster by Elizabeth O’Brien and her team on the Mapping Death project in Ireland: People, Boundaries and Territories in Ireland, 1st to the 8th centuries AD was highly commended by the judges.

Thus in a friendly setting, the conference delivered state-of-the-art research and outlined new agendas in the field of medieval funerary rites. It also gave a voice to a range of new early career researchers alongside more established academics, providing attendees with a privileged insight into the up-and-coming new work that will no doubt change how we think about and use burial and cemetery evidence in medieval research in the decade to come.
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Sarah Semple, Celia Orsini and Kate Mees, Durham University, UK

​Since 1990, a series of major conferences and publications have investigated aspects of death and burial in medieval societies in Europe and beyond. Some have delivered state-of-the-art research on early medieval and medieval funerary rites; others have profiled new advances in scientific research. Throughout all, spatial consideration has emerged as a connecting research strand.

From understanding the distribution patterns of grave types and the use of antecedent landscape features for burial, to charting the rise of commemorative markers in stone, and the arrival of monastic and churchyard burial traditions; from exploring political signalling and polity formation through burial display, to identifying patterns of diseases and health in medieval populations and their mobility, the location of the grave has become a rich stepping off point, stimulating and facilitating new research directions.

This conference, sponsored by the Society for Medieval Archaeology and the Leverhulme-funded Durham Project People and Place: Creating the Kingdom of Northumbria, brings together established and early career researchers working on aspects of death, dying and burial from AD 300-1500 in Britain, Ireland and further afield.

The conference will take place at Durham University and opens on the evening of Friday the 13th of July at Durham Cathedral, with a keynote lecture by Professor Bonnie Effros (University of Liverpool). A free private view of the new Open Treasure exhibition at the Cathedral will be available to full ticket attendees and a drinks reception will follow the evening lecture. On the 14th and 15th of July, speakers from Britain and Europe will present new work and findings on death and burial in medieval society at the Calman Centre on the Science Site at Durham University, and a second keynote will be given on Saturday evening by Professor Roberta Gilchrist (University of Reading), followed by an evening reception and poster exhibition. The conference will close on Sunday the 15th of July with a final keynote by Dr Duncan Sayer (University of Central Lancashire).

Speakers include: Mary Lewis (University of Reading), John Hines (Cardiff University), Jean Soulat (LandArc Laboratory and CNRS Research Unit UMR 6273 from CRAHAM), Adrian Maldonado (University of Glasgow), Ann Sølvia Jacobsen (Durham University), James Graham Campbell (UCL), Dries Tys (Free University of Brussels), Jure Šućur (University of Zadar), Anouk Busset (University of Glasgow) and Catriona McKenzie (University of Exeter). See the full provisional programme here
 
Registration and Fees
To register for the conference please complete the registration form available here (as a word document and editable .pdf) and email it to [email protected].
 
Payment can be made by cheque to ‘Durham University’ and the cheque should be sent to Prof Sarah Semple, Department of Archaeology, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE.
 
We can also take online payments and payments by international bank transfer, please indicate when registering if you need to pay by either of these methods and we will provide you with the account details by email. For all queries please contact us at [email protected] (phone on 0191 334 1115).
 
Conference Fees
 
Full attendance:                     £95
This includes access to the full programme and all keynote lectures, a free private view of Open Treasure, attendance at both evening receptions, lunch on the Saturday and all refreshments at the conference on Saturday and Sunday.
 
Basic attendance:                  £80
This includes access to the full programme and all keynote lectures. The following are NOT included: private view of Open Treasure, the evening receptions, lunch on Saturday and refreshments at the conference on Saturday and Sunday.
  
Society for Medieval Archaeology Members’ Rate:            £30
We are delighted to offer full attendance at the entire conference to all members of the Society for Medieval Archaeology for a special rate of £30. This includes access to the full programme and all keynote lectures, a free private view of Open Treasure, attendance at both evening receptions, lunch on the Saturday and all refreshments at the conference on Saturday and Sunday.
 
The Society aims to offer as many free events to members as possible, in light of the opportunities for members to access a private view of Durham Cathedral’s new exhibition, attend two evening receptions and a poster exhibition, there is a basic charge which contributes to the running and staffing costs associated with these events. Attendance of the main programme, the keynote lectures, the refreshments and lunch on Saturday are all included in this basic price for members.
 
TO JOIN THE SOCIETY PLEASE VISIT THE FOLLOWING PAGE: http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ymed
A full or family membership is £35, membership for retirees is £28 and student membership is £20. 

Aerial photograph of excavations of Binchester cemtery. 2017, ​ © David Petts

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By Brian Buchanan and Sue Harrington

One of the key aspects of our project is investigating regional differences in the burial evidence from AD c. 300-800 by comparing sites and monuments data recorded at Historic Environment Record (HER) offices and through investigating published and unpublished site reports. We have spent most of our time up to this point building our database of sites; with Sue focusing on a bespoke Access database detailing every individual grave in Northumbria based on archival research while Brian has built the GIS geodatabase of funerary sites and their spatial locations. As we are building distinct databases that will later be merged for analysis, we have encountered different problems with the types of data we are gathering and thought it would make an interesting post to look at some of the challenges we are encountering.
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HER Data
Thus far we have obtained sites and monuments data from almost all of the English HERs in our study region, and are actively acquiring the remaining English data now (Figure 1). The next step in data collection is contacting the Scottish HERs over the next few months in order to build up our GIS database of sites. Many thanks are necessary to these HERs for their assistance in not only supplying the data, but also in informing us of potential issues with their individual datasets, how we can solve these problems, and for pointing us to other data sources we had not previously considered. The HERs are invaluable resources for understanding not only where sites and monuments are located, but where archaeological research has been conducted so that we can better understand the patterns in data we are beginning to see.

The People and Place team recently undertook an initial scoping trip to assess the known locations of late Roman to early medieval burial and settlement sites in Northumberland. The purpose was to examine the location of each site in relation to the local environment and explore relationships with topography, water courses and sources and transportation routes. We were also checking locations to ensure we have precision data on cemetery locations. Several trends emerged on Day 1 which will of course see further analysis. For example, many of the sites we visited in northern Northumberland were located very close to water sources – notably either the coast or fairly prominent inland navigable rivers. The importance of water for transportation and as a natural resource is well recognised. The distribution of early medieval burial sites in relation to major inland water courses is a recognised feature of many areas of southern and eastern Britain.

Bowl Hole Cemetery, Bamburgh, view to the east, with the North Sea beyond the dunes in background of image © Brian Buchanan.

The Bowl Hole cemetery at Bamburgh, excavated by the Bamburgh Research Project team from 1998-2007 (https://bamburghresearchproject.wordpress.com), is located to the east of a small ridge within a bowl-shaped depression among extensive sand dunes on the North Sea coast. Much of the sand dune inundation is late in date. Never-the-less, we can assume that the cemetery flanking the early medieval elite complex, lay within close distance to the wild North Sea shoreline.  In the Till valley or Milfield basin, river proximity is significant. Yeavering, excavated by Brian Hope-Taylor in the 1950s-60s, is situated on a gravel terrace adjacent to the River Glen. The settlement most likely dates to the 6th and 7th centuries AD. It was a villa regia, a royal centre containing large timber halls and two distinct burial areas. Other early medieval settlements in the Milfield Basin are located on similar gravel terraces overlooking the River Till and/or its tributaries. There appears to be a regional pattern of occupation and land use in the basin on gravel terraces immediately adjacent to rivers and river confluences and flood plains in the 6th-8th centuries AD. This pattern may also be related to archaeological visibility of early medieval cropmarks on these landforms but this does provide areas for future research. In contrast to the Milfield Basin where most of the known early medieval sites are located on the valley floors (albeit on elevated gravel terraces) the sites we visited in Coquetdale were along the valley’s edge on the top of the rolling hills leading down to the River Coquet basin. The situation of known Anglo-Saxon burial sites along the escarpment edge overlooking major river valleys offers evidence of apparently markedly different choices and motivations, much more familiar along the river valleys of Sussex and the eastern coast and East Yorkshire. . The sites we visited are largely findspots, although some have seen excavation, but casual discard or loss and other depositional processes need to be born in mind alongside settlements or cemeteries.

Welcome to the People and Place: The Making of the Kingdom of Northumbria 300-800 CE project blog. We will be using this space to update you on our project news and progress and upcoming publications. Our team of six researchers over the next three years will together undertake a major in-depth exploration of the full suite of burial evidence for the entire of the kingdom of Northumbria. Our project starts in AD 300, allowing us to capture information on burial rites and traditions in the century before the collapse of Roman military authority. We will chart and interrogate all burial evidence from this point to c AD 800, allowing investigation of the changing rites and traditions in their landscape context across a period of political, social and religious change. A major facet of the project is the integration of scientific applications – osteological and palaeopathological assessment of a large sample of skeletal remains, isotopic analyses and the applications of high resolution AMS dating.

Today the blog is all about my work on the project. As a landscape archaeologist and GIS specialist, one of my primary tasks is the mapping of all known burials within the extent of the kingdom of Northumbria. One of the first steps has therefore been to define the spatial boundaries for the project. Northumbria’s boundaries were fluid, expanding or contracting according to conquests and losses. David Rollason notes the approximate boundaries of Northumbria at their greatest extent stretched from the North to Irish Sea and from the Cheshire and the Humber in the south to the Galloway and the Firth of Forth in the north (Rollason 2007, 2-7). Bede described in Historia Eccesiastica Gentis Anglorum in AD 731, that during King Edwin’s reign '[…] if a woman with a newborn child wanted to walk throughout the island from sea to sea she would meet no harm (HE II, 16, 191)', implying that Northumbrian royal control extended from the North to Irish Seas. While the coastlines offer a robust boundary for our study area to the east and the west, defining a cut off for the edges of the kingdom at its greatest extent to north and south is more difficult. At the outset therefore, the project is taking in data for England and Scotland from the following counties outlined below, purposely drawing in data from the broadest possible extent to reflect the fluid nature of the limits of this kingdom over time. Northumbria is noted for an imbalance in focus with much more research conducted on the eastern heartlands of the kingdom rather than the west (Clark 2011, 113). We hope to remedy this although a paucity of funerary data and issues of survival are well recognised challenges for the north west of England and the Scottish Borders. Our current working geographic extent can be seen here, boundaries are predicated on the pre-1974 boundaries for England and Scotland. Our scope allows us to include some assessment of the Peak District burials and bring in important burial data sets from the western Scottish borders. 

Building on past gazatteers and databases, such as those constructed by Sam Lucy (1998; 1999) and Helen Geake (1997), data is being drawn from regional research agendas, published handlists and catalogues and HeR and grey literature.  The latter will require careful handling and detailed ‘cleaning’ to ensure we get the most productive and usable data sets possible for the initial GIS assessment. The project will include reassessment of graves and cemeteries in terms of form and location, the cataloguing of each individual burial facilitating a ‘census’ for the kingdom over time, re-visitation of all artefactual assemblages in terms of object type and date as well as scientific analyses of the remains of over 200 individuals.

East Yorkshire will be used as a pilot study to test the database currently under construction by Dr Sue Harrington. This integrated relational database assigns unique values to individual burials along with information related to the depositional patterns, morphological characteristics and artefactual evidence of each grave. This is integrated into the GIS database I am designing in order to query spatial aspects of the data.

Clark, F 2011 'Thinking about Western Northumbria', in D Petts and S Turner (eds), Early Medieval Northumbria: Kingdoms and Communities, AD 450-1100. Brepols.
Lucy, S 1999 'Changing burial rites in Northumbria AD 500–750', in J Hawkes and S Mills (eds), Northumbria's Golden Age. Sutton Publishing.
Rollason, D 2007 'Northumbria: A failed European kingdom', in R Colls (ed), Northumbria: History and Identity, 547-2000. Phillamore Publishing.