Professor Helena Hamerow

Professor of Early Medieval Archaeology

+44 (0)1865 278245

helena.hamerow@arch.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests

The archaeology of northwest Europe from AD 400-1000; Early medieval rural settlements and economy; The archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England; Links between England and mainland Europe c 400-700.

Research Profile

Research activities

My research focuses on the archaeology of rural communities in early medieval NW Europe. I am especially interested in the impact of lordship, monasteries and towns on rural producers and the countryside. I am also interested in the well-furnished female burials of the seventh century in England and Frankia and what these reveal about the position of women in the Conversion period.

I am currently PI of an ERC-funded project, ‘Feeding Anglo-Saxon England. The Bioarchaeology of an Agricultural Revolution’ (‘FeedSax’; http://feedsax.arch.ox.ac.uk). Using preserved cereal grains, faunal remains, pollen and other data, FeedSax is tracing the emergence and spread of three innovations that enabled medieval farmers dramatically to increase cereal yields and feed growing populations: systematic crop rotation, widespread adoption of the mouldboard plough, and low-input, extensive, cultivation.

I am also interested in the earliest stages of the formation of the kingdom of Wessex, whose origins lie in the Upper Thames Valley and have been involved in a range of fieldwork in this region (www.arch.ox.ac.uk/wessex).

I am a co-Director of excavations, now completed, at the Roman small town of Dorchester-on-Thames (www.arch.ox.ac.uk/DOT1) and PI of the AHRC-funded Novum Inventorium Sepulchrale, an on-line database of Anglo-Saxon graves and grave-goods from Kent (www.arch.ox.ac.uk/NIS1).