Community Geophysics: Reflections on the first decade

The Term II thematic seminar series will be concerned with UK Archaeology in 2023. These will be hybrid events, with in-person attendance in Room 612 of the UCL Institute of Archaeology as well as a livestream (and recording) via MSTeams.

Abstract

In 2013 the AHRC funded a project entitled Sensing the Iron Age and Roman Past: Geophysics and the Landscape of Hertfordshire.  One aim of this project was to train and support a team of volunteer geophysicists from local archaeological societies to undertake magnetometry survey, and thus the Community Archaeology Geophysics Group was born.  In the subsequent ten years the group have surveyed over 40 sites, both within and outside the county, and of a much wider range of periods than the original project.  The range of techniques employed has also expanded to include Ground Penetrating Radar, Earth Resistance and magnetic susceptibility surveys.  The first part of this lecture will review the development of the project and its achievements, strengths and weaknesses.  The second part will showcase some of the surveys we have undertaken.

UCL Institute of Archaeology & Archaeology South-East Research Seminars Programme | Term II, 2022-23

Mondays, 5pm 

• 9 January: Andy Margetts - Medieval Pastoralism: Lessons for our Landscape
• 16 January: Teresa Viera and Jim Stevenson - Drawn swords and the walking dead: the last Iron Age warriors of Britain?
• 23 January: Simon Stevens - The Stiances archaeological project: working with children, animals and the National Archive
• 30 January: Gabriel Moshenska - The Legend of Ea-Nasir: how a Babylonian businessman became an internet meme
• 6 February: Alice Duleba-Dowsett - 13,000 years of natural and human induced landscape change in the Wantsum Valley, Kent

[13 February: UCL Reading Week - no seminar]

• 20 February: Kris Lockyear - Community Geophysics: reflections on the first decade
• 27 February: Kayt Hawkins - A bottle for baby: some aspects of infant care in Roman Britain
• 6 March: Hayley Nicholls - A new lowland hillfort. Presenting the Late Bronze Age enclosed site at Madgwick Lane, Chichester 
• 13 March: Stuart Brookes - Peasant perceptions of landscape: Ewelme hundred, South Oxfordshire, 500–1650 
• 20 March: Anna Doherty - Saltworking at Pococks Field, Eastbourne (title tbc)

Series organisers: Andrew Gardner (andrew.gardner@ucl.ac.uk) and Louise Rayner (louise.rayner@ucl.ac.uk).

Non UCL-IoA/ASE participants should contact Jo Dullaghan (j.dullaghan@ucl.ac.uk) to be added to our events list to receive the MSTeams links.