ALBERT RECKITT ARCHAEOLOGICAL LECTURE

Continuity and Change in a Wessex Landscape 1500BC–AD500

Sir Barry Cunliffe CBE FBA, Professor of European Archaeology, Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University

Thursday 23 October 2008

The completion of a long-term fieldwork and excavation project on the chalk downs of eastern Hampshire in the vicinity of the hillfort of Danebury provides an opportunity to review two thousand years of human activity representing a single cycle of agrarian activity spanning the period from the Middle Bronze Age to the beginning of Saxon settlement. It allows us to ask how significant, if at all, was the interlude of Roman control and to consider questions of land-holding and agrarian improvement (and degradation) in the ‘longue durée’.

Sir Barry Cunliffe was elected a Fellow of the Academy in 1979. He is one of Britain’s most distinguished field archaeologists.  Through Iron Age Communities in Britain and his major excavations at and around the Iron Age hillfort of Danebury, Hampshire, at the coastal settlements of Hengistbury Head and Mount Batten and elsewhere, he has made a massive contribution to our understanding of social and economic change in Britain in the first millennium BC.  His research also covers the first millennium AD,  contributing to our understanding of Roman and medieval Britain through major excavations in Bath, Fishbourne and Porchester Castle.

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