Central Unit blogs

Kevin Leahy, pictured in action at Kelmarsh, has won a prestigious award at the Festival of Science. Congratulations sir! The section reproduced below comes from the SALON newsletter.

Congratulations are due to our Fellow Dr Kevin Leahy whose presentation on the Cleatham Anglo-Saxon cemetery won top prize for the presentation of heritage research at last week’s Festival of Science hosted by the Conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at the University of East Anglia. Sponsored by the Royal Archaeological Institute, English Heritage, Cadw, Historic Scotland, The Environment and Heritage Service (an agency within DOE (NI)) and the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government (Republic of Ireland), the aim of the presentation awards is to promote the results of research in ways that engage a wider audience.

Cleatham is a very difficult site to present to a lay audience, and Kevin overcame this problem through the use of computer graphics and distribution maps to show how the Cleatham assemblage could be analysed using information on the size and decoration of the urns, the fabrics in which they were made, the associated finds and stratigraphic relationships. The result was the creation of a chronological sequence for more than 1,200 decorated urns of mid-fifth-century to later seventh-century date.

The sequencing was made possible by the large number of urns that were buried in pits dug through earlier urns that must, therefore, be of later date. There were also groups of urns buried together that must have been of the same date. By combining these sequences and relationships it was possible to construct a matrix showing that the decoration on the urns could be divided into five phases. This in turn enabled the grave goods found within the urns to be put in order, providing a key to the early Anglo-Saxon period.

The audience was thus given an insight into archaeological method and an idea of the information that it is possible to extract from an early Anglo-Saxon burial site; the site was dug by volunteers under the direction of Scunthorpe Museum between 1984 and 1989.

The Cleatham cemetery is now fully written up and is to be published by the Council for British Archaeology under the title Interrupting the Pots: the Excavation of the Cleatham Anglo-Saxon Cemetery with a hard copy, printed synopsis of around 86,000 words and a main catalogue that will be published electronically and will be made available online.

‘Having spent many years on this project it is good to see it getting some recognition’, Kevin said after being awarded the £1,500 first prize (there is a second prize of £500 and a prize for young researchers, the under-30 prize of £500).