Our Research Seminars

To date, eight seminars have been presented. The first focused on Windy Harbour, near Blackpool in Lancashire, exploring the transition from hunter gathering to farming from the Mesolithic to the Bronze Age. The second meeting examined a key period of settlement pattern change across southern Britain during the middle Bronze Age. The third seminar dealt with perceptions of Iron Age farmsteads in East Anglia, Essex and the Upper Thames Valley, while the fourth compared rural settlement in northern and southern Roman Britain. The fifth seminar focused on early medieval cemeteries in south-eastern and north-western England, and the sixth looked at the provisioning of medieval towns across England. The seventh explored the archaeological and osteological findings from two major early modern burial grounds in Oxford and Hull. The most recent seminar (see below) looked at historic factories and other industrial buildings.

Seminars 1 to 8 are available on Oxford Archaeology's YouTube page at the following link

The most recent seminar (Seminar VIII) explored some of the historic factories and other industrial buildings that OA has recorded from its Lancaster and Oxford offices. The seminar looked at three types of structure: Lancashire cotton mills from the early industrial period; a late 19th-century power station in Oxford; and an example of a particular type of early 20th-century structure called the daylight factory. 

Papers discussed the different sites in terms of their architecture, history, structural form and evolution while also assessing what we have learned from them about wider society in these periods. They considered how industrial architecture has evolved in response to a post-industrial society and unprecedented population growth.

The seminar was held online in November 2024, but a recording of the seminar is available to view on YouTube (click on the link below).