Staff Profile:Professor Grenville Astill

Responsibilities:

Programme Director MA Archaeology of Medieval Europe

Areas of Interest:

Archaeology of Medieval Britain and Europe, with particular interests in:

• Medieval urbanisation
• The medieval countryside and landscape archaeology
• Monasticism
• Technology and industry

Postgraduate Supervision

My students have researched aspects of rural, monastic, buildings and industrial archaeology as well as material culture topics such as metalwork and decorated floor tiles. They have gone on to become university teachers and hold other posts in tertiary education and in major heritage organizations (English Heritage, Cadw, National Trust).

I continue to welcome the opportunity to work with PhD students in the above areas as well as landscape archaeology.

Research groups / Centres:

Social Archaeology Research Group

Key Facts:

I teach the archaeology of medieval Britain and Europe at all undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including a special option which reconsiders the archaeological status of the twelfth century.

I am involved in two long-term research projects:

• The Bordesley Abbey Project, one of the longest running research programmes on a European medieval monastery, based on a Cistercian foundation in Worcestershire. I have just completed for publication the report of an excavation in the area of the south cloister which provides important information for the later industrial reuse of Bordesley’s south range. The major effort is now devoted to an extensive archaeological and documentary survey of Bordesley's twenty granges which is one of the first attempts to use the material evidence in order to understand the character and dynamic of a monastic economy. A review of the grange work is in press.

• The East Brittany Survey, designed to investigate the development of the landsape of an extensive area over the last two thousand years. The published results represent over twenty years of archaeological, architectural and documentary research. The later medieval material has further potential to form the basis of a reconsideration of the state of the fourteenth to sixteenth century countryside in Britain and Northern France

Over the last five years I have become increasingly interested in the social aspects of urbanisation and have also sought to integrate the documentary, archaeological and numismatic evidence for the eighth to twelfth centuries, as reflected in the following publications:

Community, Identity and the Later Anglo-Saxon Town', in W. Davies, G. Halsall and A. Reynolds (eds), People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300-1300, Turnhout, 2006, 233-54.

Medieval Towns and Urbanization', in R. Gilchrist and A. Reynolds (eds), 1957-2007. SMA Anniversary Monograph, Leeds, 2009, 255-70

Exchange, coinage and the economy of early medieval England. In J. Escalona (ed), Scale and Scale Change in Western Europe in the First Millennium. Brepols.

Overview: Trade, Exchange and Urbanisation. In S. Crawford, H. Hamerow and D. Hinton (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology. OUP.

 

Publications:

Y

Jump to: 2017 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2007

Number of items: 8.

2017

• Thomas, G., Pluskowski, A., Gilchrist, R., Ruiz, G. G.-C., Andrén, A., Augenti, A., Astill, G., Staecker, J. and Valk, H. (2017) Religious transformations in the Middle Ages: towards a new archaeological agenda. Medieval Archaeology, 61 (2). ISSN 0076-6097 doi: 10.1080/00766097.2017.1374764 (In Press)

2011

• Astill, G. (2011) Overview: trade, exchange and urbanization. In: Hamerow, H., Hinton, D. A. and Crawford, S. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Archaeology. Oxford Handbooks in Archaeology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 503-514. ISBN 9780199212149
• Astill, G. (2011) Exchange, coinage and the economy of Early Medieval England. In: Escalona, J. and Reynolds, A. (eds.) Scale and Scale Change in the Early Middle Ages: Exploring landscape, local society and the world beyond. The Medieval Countryside (6). Brepols, Turnhout, pp. 253-272. ISBN 9782503532394
• Astill, G. (2011) The changing monastic cloister: excavations in the south range of Bordesley Abbey. Archaeological Journal, 168. pp. 285-404.

2010

• Astill, G. G. (2010) The long and the short: rural settlement in medieval England. In: Goddard, R., Langdon, J. and Müller, M. (eds.) Survival and Discord in Medieval Society. Essays in honour of Christopher Dyer. Brepols, Turnhout, pp. 11-28. ISBN 9782503528151

2009

• Astill, G. G. (2009) Anglo-Saxon attitudes: how should post-AD 700 burials be interpreted? In: Sayer, D. and Williams, H. (eds.) Mortuary Practices and Social Identities in the Middle Ages. University of Exeter Press, Exeter, pp. 222-235. ISBN 9780859898317
• Astill, G. G. (2009) Medieval towns and urbanization. In: Gilchrist, R. and Reynolds, A. (eds.) Reflections: 50 years of medieval archaeology, 1957-2007. Society for Medieval Archaeology Monographs (30). Maney Publishing, Leeds, pp. 255-270. ISBN 9781906540715

2007

• Astill, G. (2007) Community identity and the later Anglo-Saxon town: the case of southern England. In: Davies, W., Halsall, G. and Reynolds, A. (eds.) People and Space in the Middle Ages, 300-1300. Brepols, Turnhout, pp. 233-254. ISBN 9782503515267

This list was generated on Fri Oct 20 01:41:31 2017 BST.

Qualifications:

BA PhD (Birmingham), FSA