Mapping burials in Northumbria: a chance to input to the project
People and Place is charting the entirety of the burial record for the kingdom of Northumbria at its greatest possible extent. We are two years in to our project and have now reached the final stages of data collection. Our database records all archaeologically attested early medieval burials within the kingdom at its largest extent currently includes approximately 550 sites and +3000 individuals. The sites, individuals, and associated artefacts are all logged within our access database, allowing us to spatially map relationships between these sites and the natural and human altered landscape, within localities and across regions.
Over time many scholars have collated gazetteers and hand lists of late Roman and early medieval funerary evidence for all or parts of the north of England and lowland Scotland (for example Miket 1980; Lucy 1999 and more recently Maldonado 2011). At each juncture, these lists are updated, but over time each is superseded as new finds are made. Part of our project remit is to release our digital dbase online, creating a freely accessibly and up to date list of all known burials and cemetery sites attributed to between AD 300-800 from our study area. We hope to do this in a simple, but user friendly way, facilitating access to accurate basic information to aid current and future research.
This month we are releasing a pilot sample and we’d like your opinion on how accessible this data is, how usable and how we might improve our online delivery. We’ve chosen to offer you our mortuary data from the County of Durham. Below you will find a series of links. There are three tables presented as .pdfs – these list the sites we have collated for the County of Durham, the individual burials from these sites, and the artefacts that were recovered with those burials. Three information sheets are also present to you navigate the lists and use them to identify information about locations, individual graves and artefacts. We have also produced four sample maps: a basic plot of sites, the sites mapped in relation to elevation, to rivers and to Roman roads. You can use these to locate well known cemeteries, and using the unique individual identifiers, work with the tables to then learn how many individuals are known from a site and what kinds of finds were buried with the deceased.
So please ‘dig in’! We are very keen to receive feedback on the usability so we can shape our ultimate release of all data online. We’d like to hear your views before the 1st of December 2017. Please send all your comments to Brian at [email protected].
References:
S. Lucy, 1999. Changing burial rites in Northumbria AD 500-750, in J. Hawkes and S. Mills (eds.), Northumbria’s Golden Age (Stroud), 12-43.
A. D. Maldonado Ramírez, 2011. Christianity and burial in late Iron Age Scotland, AD 400-650 (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow).
R. Miket, 1980. A restatement of evidence from Bernician Anglo-Saxon burials, in P. Rahtz, T. Dickinson and L. Watts (eds.), Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries, 1979. BAR British Series 82 (Oxford), 289-305.
People and Place is charting the entirety of the burial record for the kingdom of Northumbria at its greatest possible extent. We are two years in to our project and have now reached the final stages of data collection. Our database records all archaeologically attested early medieval burials within the kingdom at its largest extent currently includes approximately 550 sites and +3000 individuals. The sites, individuals, and associated artefacts are all logged within our access database, allowing us to spatially map relationships between these sites and the natural and human altered landscape, within localities and across regions.
Over time many scholars have collated gazetteers and hand lists of late Roman and early medieval funerary evidence for all or parts of the north of England and lowland Scotland (for example Miket 1980; Lucy 1999 and more recently Maldonado 2011). At each juncture, these lists are updated, but over time each is superseded as new finds are made. Part of our project remit is to release our digital dbase online, creating a freely accessibly and up to date list of all known burials and cemetery sites attributed to between AD 300-800 from our study area. We hope to do this in a simple, but user friendly way, facilitating access to accurate basic information to aid current and future research.
This month we are releasing a pilot sample and we’d like your opinion on how accessible this data is, how usable and how we might improve our online delivery. We’ve chosen to offer you our mortuary data from the County of Durham. Below you will find a series of links. There are three tables presented as .pdfs – these list the sites we have collated for the County of Durham, the individual burials from these sites, and the artefacts that were recovered with those burials. Three information sheets are also present to you navigate the lists and use them to identify information about locations, individual graves and artefacts. We have also produced four sample maps: a basic plot of sites, the sites mapped in relation to elevation, to rivers and to Roman roads. You can use these to locate well known cemeteries, and using the unique individual identifiers, work with the tables to then learn how many individuals are known from a site and what kinds of finds were buried with the deceased.
So please ‘dig in’! We are very keen to receive feedback on the usability so we can shape our ultimate release of all data online. We’d like to hear your views before the 1st of December 2017. Please send all your comments to Brian at [email protected].
References:
S. Lucy, 1999. Changing burial rites in Northumbria AD 500-750, in J. Hawkes and S. Mills (eds.), Northumbria’s Golden Age (Stroud), 12-43.
A. D. Maldonado Ramírez, 2011. Christianity and burial in late Iron Age Scotland, AD 400-650 (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow).
R. Miket, 1980. A restatement of evidence from Bernician Anglo-Saxon burials, in P. Rahtz, T. Dickinson and L. Watts (eds.), Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries, 1979. BAR British Series 82 (Oxford), 289-305.
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