March was a surprisingly busy month which involved multiple trips up and down the East Coast Main Line. Early in March I recorded an episode of Watching Brief with Marc (ArchaeoSoup) and with Andy Brockman. The episode was to accompany the article I wrote for the Pipeline - 'Bones of Contention - Beachy Head Woman and the Media' - which explored the online controversy around the origins of the 'Beachy Head Woman' who was at one point believed to have been of Sub-Saharan African, then Cypriot, then finally proven to be of Romano-British origin by new aDNA analysis. The article highlights some of the issues with archaeology and the media especially in the era of clickbait and an age of heritage cuts. The reality is that the case demonstrates some major advances in archaeological science - highlighting the already well understood problems with osteometry as a predictor of heritage, and the advances in aDNA - and a deeply human story of a woman who lived 1800 years ago on the Sussex Downs, was lost in a culture war battle over her origins.
The day after recording this, I was in London, giving a talk at a research lunch held at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art on how the Western Middle Ages shaped Modern Attitudes towards Disability. The talk drew on my thesis, my recently published chapter on Accessibility in Academia, and a paper I have been working on for the last few months about how my analysis using the functional model has revealed a cultural shift which continues to impact the lives of disabled people today. After the session had ended I wandered round to the British Museum and took a few moments to visit a few of my favourite medieval artefacts - the Kells Crozier, the Franks Casket, and the Seax of Beagnoth. Predictably, I left with several more books than I entered with.
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The Seax of Beagnoth - a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon seax found
in the inland estuary of the Thames in 1857.
A prestige weapon, one side of the blade has the only known complete
inscription of the twenty-eight letter Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet, as well as
the name "Beagnoth" in runic letters. |
After spending a few days in Sussex I headed back north. In between working on the revisions of my thesis, and some artwork I had been asked to do for a friend I spent some time in the Yorkshire Museum particularly the Viking North exhibition. I am always amazed the detail work that can be seen in even the simplest of artefacts.
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| Viking era strap ends on display in the Viking North exhibition in the Yorkshire Museum |
My visit to the Museum sparked something else which is that I will soon return to doing Accessibility Reviews of the museums and historical sites I visit. I will be starting this soon - likely beginning with the Yorkshire Museum, York Minster, and the National Railway Museum.
All in all March has been an interesting month for travel, museum trips, and writing!