The British Archaeological Association generously awarded me £500 to present my research at the 2025 Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology International Conference (CAA) in Athens, Greece. My research focuses on the landscape contexts of Anglo-Saxon barrows from the sixth and seventh centuries AD. The barrows were built during the rise in Anglo-Saxon kingship and are conspicuous monuments that may be an insistence on status by an emerging social elite. My research has the potential to illustrate how the barrow builders signalled status by placing the barrows in certain landscapes. In my work, I use a GIS-based spatial analysis of 123 barrows across England to analyse whether the barrows were placed near earlier monuments, visibility points, land routes, and sea routes.
The section of my research presented at CAA concerned the relationship of the barrows to earlier visible monuments in the landscape. I proposed a method for modelling LiDAR-derived topographic data that increases the recognition of archaeological features that have been ploughed out over the past two centuries. I found that far more high-status Anglo-Saxon barrows were related to visible earlier monuments than previously thought. The analysis indicates that there was a particular investment in locations that had sightlines to nearby Bronze Age barrows. The Bronze Age barrows were probably perceived in the sixth and seventh centuries as representative of important and mythic ancestors in the place’s past. My research indicates leading families probably sought to use relationships with these mythic ancestors to strengthen claims to social status.
I am very grateful for the academic enrichment that I have received as a result of the generous BAA travel grant. Travelling to Athens for the CAA Conference was a highlight of my DPhil. At my CAA conference session, I received feedback from leading experts in spatial and topographical analysis. I have since used their feedback to strengthen my spatial analysis ahead of my DPhil submission deadline. My experience at the conference will also result in the publication of my LiDAR visualization approach in an upcoming volume, which will allow others to reuse my method for their own work in British Archaeology.