Lecture Program 2019 - 2020

All meetings will be held at Friends Meeting House, Hill Street, Coventry, at 19:30 on the 2nd Tuesday of the month.​ 

​There is a £1 door charge per member (excluding children of family members) to defray room hire fees. Door fee for non members is £3. Non members door fee is refunded if you join CADAS on the evening.

Membership is £15 for individuals; £20 for family. Membership includes a bulletin.
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8th January Title: Recent Excavations near to the Lunt Fort, Baginton.

​Lecturer Nigel Page heritage.warwickshire.gov.uk/archaeology/welcome-to-archaeology-warwickshire/the-team/ 
Nigel is a Project Officer at Archaeology Warwickshire who has worked on a range of sites

CADAS has links going back over decades to the Lunt and Baginton so these excavations which were in preparation for a new Jaguar Landrover site are of special interest especially since they have revealed a range of finds from a Roman cremation cemetery, prehistoric barrow not to mention a Saxon cemetery.
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12th February Title: A14 Huntingdon to Cambridge Improvement works: A brief overview of archaeological discoveries 2016-2018.

Lecturer Simon Markus 
Simon Markus is a project officer for MOLA who has worked on a number of sites including Hayle Harbour in Cornwall as part of its regeneration and Wolston about which he lectured to the Society in 2016.

This site which is being excavated by MOLA Headland Infrastructure and employs approximately 250 archaeologists. It has revealed a cornucopia of finds from some 6000 years of Cambridgeshire’s history from the Neolithic to the Mediaeval periods. 

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12th March Title: Title Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia.

Lecturer Dr John Hunt
Dr Hunt is an honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, a medievalist working primarily on regional history and archaeology. His many publications include a book and articles on Mercia.   www.birmingham.ac.uk/.../history/hunt-john.aspx

For three hundred years Mercia was a great power in Anglo-Saxon England with a capital based at Tamworth. Its most famous king was Offa. Eventually it became part of the Danelaw and ultimately was absorbed in to England but  items such as the Staffordshire Hoard and the Lichfield Angel attest to the kingdom's wealth and culture.
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9th April Title: A unique Iron Age feasting and ritual site: Excavations at Glenfield Park, Leicestershire.

Lecturer John Thomas
John is a Project Officer, University of Leicester Archaeological Services.
www2.le.ac.uk/services/ulas/about/staff-folder

As well as information about the settlement the lecture will cover the discoveries which include a unique collection of Iron Age metal artefacts which sheds new light on rituals in this era 
www2.le.ac.uk/services/ulas/discoveries/projects/

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14th May A.G.M.
Members only.
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                                                                   Margaret Rylatt Memorial Lecture

 10th September Title: Lecturer Mathew Morris, The Archaeology of Oakham Castle.


Mathew Morris is a Project Officer at University of Leicester Archaeological Services and has excavated numerous sites including a massive multi-period urban excavation at Highcross Leicester, the first excavated section of the Lower Icknield Way at Aston Clinton and in 2012, he directed the successful archaeological search for the grave of King Richard III. He is the director of the site at Oakham Castle. Over the past few years he has given a number of excellent lectures to CADAS. www2.le.ac.uk/

Oakham Castle was originally a motte-and- bailey building probably established in 1075. This was replaced about 1180 by Walkelin de Ferrers with a stone edifice. He also built the Great Hall, considered one the finest examples of its kind in England. Now only parts of the Castle remain and in 2012 Time Team opened trenches there. The more recent excavations have shed light on the structure and history of the site. and uncovered buildings previously unknown.

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8th October Title: From Viking Boats to Whitby Jet: new discoveries on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, Western Scotland.


Dr Harris is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester, author of  numerous journal articles and books. In 2016 he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Archaeology, He is co-director of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, a long running research project into changing lifeways on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, western Scotland. and he spends his summers digging there.  www2.le.ac.uk/.

The aim of the project is to understand how human occupation in one specific area changed at key moments such as the start of farming or the arrival of the Vikings and beyond .Through this project Dr Harris has directed excavations of a Neolithic chambered cairn, a Bronze Age kerbed cairn and a Viking boat burial. The project was awarded the Archaeological Training Forum award at the 2014 IfA conference. The lecture will look at the latest finds from this fascinating site.
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November 12th Title: For the times they are a-changin: reconfiguring the Neolithic of central England.


Paul Garwood is Senior Lecturer in Prehistory in the Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology department at the University of Birmingham. His research in to prehistoric social life in particular focuses on the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Britain and north-west Europe. He was Project director of five-year field project exploring the Medway megalithic monuments and is one of the principal investigators contributing to the Stonehenge Hidden Landscapes Project. He has published numerous articles and books and was the editor of The Undiscovered Country: the earlier prehistory of the West Midlands. www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/caha/garwood-paul.aspx

The Neolithic in England was a time of change - the greatest of which was that people ceased to be hunter gatherers and became farmers settled in one place, at least for some years, with profound implications for the future of humanity. Technology advanced, various henge monuments and some barrows were built and the area of the Midlands was a region of cultural differences rather than uniformity.

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                                                                             The Shelton Lecture

10th December Title: Drapers' Hall; an Archaeological Journey.

Lecturer: Paul Thompson is an Assistant Project Director for the Museum of London Archaeology ( MOLA) based at Northampton. He has extensive archaeological knowledge and had lectured to CADAS on many occasions.
www.mola.org.uk

The current Drapers’ Hall in Bayley Lane was built in 1832 and has been dormant since the 1980s.  This building with its lovely interior is now the subject of a £5 million restoration and as part of the project an archaeological  excavation will take place on the land by the Hall . There are hopes the site will yield not only medieval finds but possibly some from even earlier and possibly items linked to the City’s textile trade demonstrating the link to the original Drapers’ Hall.
www.princes-foundation.org/drapers-hall
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                                                             2020
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January 14th Dr Daniel Reynolds At the Crossroads of Empires
Dr Reynolds is Lecturer in Byzantine History at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include the culture of the Byzantine empire and the Byzantine and early Islamic Levant. He has published journal articles and books and is co-director of the project “At the Crossroads of Empires: the Longobard Church of Sant’Ambrogio at Montecorvino Rovella (Salerno)”. www.birmingham.ac.uk/.

Excavations have revealed the remains of the 9th century church of Sant’Ambrogio in Southern Italy which show beautifully preserved wall paintings and other features usually associated more with Byzantine Constantinople and Papal Rome than with the culture of the Lombards in whose territory it stood. The project is conducting a full archaeological and historical analysis of the church with the aim of having it incorporated in the World Heritage List.
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11th February Title: The Archaeology of HS2

Lecturer: Rob Early is Head of Heritage and Archaeology at WSP UK. and has over thirty years archaeological and heritage experience.  Recent work has  included the first large-scale archaeological research project of a German POW camp in France and heritage consultancy for the Daming Palace Heritage Park regeneration project in Xian, China.
His publications range from the prehistoric time period to the Second World War.

The work being done in preparation for HS2 is s the largest archaeology project undertaken in the UK. The northern section alone covers more than fifty miles as it travels in to Birmingham and already many finds have been discovered. The project will uncover.the remains of a medieval manor in Warwickshire, find out more about the Black Death and its impact on medieval villages and compare and contrast the lives of the population in London and Birmingham by studying two Georgian / Victorian burial grounds.
http://www.hs2.org.uk/building-hs2/archaeology


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March 10th Title: Heavy Metal!

Paul Thompson is an assistant project officer with Museum of London Archaeology ( MOLA ) based in Northampton. He has given a variety of entertaining and highly informative lectures to CADAS over the years - frequently in period costume.

The talk will include a large handling collection of original and replica artefacts and include Luga’s guide to everyday living in the middle ~ later Bronze Age in Britain, approximately 3,000 years ago. It will incorporate the latest knowledge that has been learned about this period.
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7th April Title: Band of Brothers at Bullecourt: Operation Nightingale Excavations on a First World War Battlefield

Lecturer: Alex Sotheran is the archaeological Advisor for the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, covering the North of England and Scotland. and has been involved in archaeology for almost twenty years. He has worked on sites in various parts of the world. His work has included First World War archaeology and he has also worked on several television documentary series on First World War sites.

Operation Nightingale is a project intended to help rehabilitate injured soldiers by involving them in archaeological excavations. Teams of wounded service personnel and veterans have worked very successfully on various sites. Some have gone on to become professional archaeologists One such site is Bullecourt in France which was the scene of a major tank battle in 1917 and was the subject of one Digging for Britain programme. various websites.


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                                                                        AGM
10th May
Members only