Dr Stuart Brookes

Research summary

Current Research

Travel and communication in Anglo-Saxon England: The subject of travel and communication is central to the study of society in any period, important for matters of commerce, warfare, polity-identity, etc. This 3-year Leverhulme Trust-funded research project will be the first interdisciplinary, national study of the routeway infrastructure of Anglo-Saxon England (ASE), drawing upon historical, archaeological, landscape, linguistic and literary sources.

Research Interests

• Geographical approaches to state formation. Spatial manifestations of culture. Border and frontier formation. Heterarchies and hierarchies. Analysis of territories, especially hundreds, parishes, shires, kingdoms. GIS approaches to modeling communications and settlement patterns.
• The development of towns, particularly ports and strongholds. Plan-form analysis of towns and fortifications. Linking urban development to coastal reconstruction.
• Databasing and quantitative analysis of inter-disciplinary data. I have been compiling large datasets of burial evidence; settlement data; place-names and historical data, and am interested in ways of compiling, interrogating and disseminating large datasets.
• Social organization as interpreted from burial. Chronological and spatial patterns in intra- and inter- cemetery assemblages. Statistical and macro-economical approaches to cemetery data.
• Nails, clench-nails and bolts, and their use in boats, doors, beds, coffins, etc.
• Phenomenological approaches to landscape. How to characterize and document ‘places’. Viewshed and soundshed analysis.
• Archaeology of Kent, London, southern England, Germany, Scandinavia.

Teaching summary

Course Co-ordinator: ARCL0085 London before the Great Fire

Current PhD students:

• Scott Chaussee Social landscape of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Sussex Hana Lewis Pattern and process in Anglo-Saxon rural settlement (principal supervisor Andrew Reynolds)
• Victoria Ziegler Urban occupation identities in Saxon London c.770 - 1020: a new approach to questions of urban development and trans-location in early medieval England (joint principal supervisors Louise Martin & Andrew Reynolds)

Completed PhD students:

• Rosalind Broadley From wics to monasteries and palaces: Early Medieval vessel glass from settlement contexts (principal supervisor Andrew Reynolds)
• Hana Lewis Pattern and process in Anglo-Saxon rural settlement archaeology (principal supervisor Andrew Reynolds)
• Jay Rees Settlement Patterns in Roman Galicia: 27BC – Second Century AD (principal supervisor Andrew Gardner)
• Tom Williams Landscape and warfare in early medieval Britain (principal supervisor Andrew Reynolds)

Education

Birkbeck College

Other Postgraduate qualification (including professional), Postgraduate Certificate | 2003

University College London

Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 2003

University College London

Other higher degree, Master of Arts | 1998

University College London

First Degree, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) | 1996

Publications

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