University of Kent

Graduate Student, Classical and Archaeological Studies

Research student (PhD)

Thesis Title: Urban Artefact Assemblages in Late Antiquity

About

I gained my BA and MA degrees in archaeology from the University of Kent, and returned to Canterbury to undertake PhD research on urban artefact assemblages as part of the Visualisation of the Late Antique City project. My main research interests are in household archaeology, small finds  and what they can tell us about everyday life in the past, and methodologies for the study of excavated artefacts. I believe that it is important to avoid “temporal insularity” in archaeological research, and consequently I also have interests in a broad range of periods  beyond Late Antiquity, from later prehistory to the middle ages.

My thesis will study the everyday arrangement and use of artefacts within selected urban settings, especially drawing on the rich occupation deposits revealed by Eastern excavations, which have had little synthetic or critical treatment. This will involve reconstruction of theoretical groups of objects for shops, houses and ordinary churches, with attempts to establish the functional connections between objects (their use). This will allow us to ‘furnish’ architectural illustrations and understand behaviour in each setting. The study will consider object groups from published occupation deposits, as well as those in depictions, inventories, and groups hypothesised from functional artefact studies. These sources will be both analysed on their own terms and compared for their value for studying object use in churches, houses and shops. Although the topic seems vast, the sources limit inquiry: for shops, we can so far only reconstruct object groups for restaurants, metal workshops, glassblowers and cloth-dyers.

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