Doctor Sarah Semple
Nationality: United Kingdom
Year: 2004
Subject Area: Arts and Humanities
The award of a Wingate Scholarship in 2004 provided financial support to initiate a four-year field project entitled ‘Assembly Places in Early Medieval England: Archaeological Perspectives’. Moot-sites or meeting-places are recorded in the documentary sources of the late Saxon period and attested in the place-name record too. This project sought to establish, for the first time, an archaeological profile for a small selection of these places including Scutchmer Knob, Berkshire and Thingwall, Wirral. Excavations over the last three years have shown that these sites make use of ancient prehistoric and Roman remains and that these places are enhanced too by the re-modelling of monuments and the addition of new structures to the site such as enclosure ditches and timber buildings.
The project has developed into a collaborative venture with Dr. Alex Sanmark, UCL and has been extended to involve field exploration of several well-known assembly sites in Sweden with the intention of using collaborative fieldwork in Sweden and England to offer new insights. Two publications are in press in edited volumes.