St Gregory's Minster, Kirkdale, North Yorkshire: Archaeological Investigations and Historical Context

Contents

Summary ;
Preface ;
Chapter 1: The Site of Kirkdale ;

Investigations in and around the Church ;
Chapter 2: The West Exterior ;
Chapter 3: The North Exterior ;
Chapter 4: The South Exterior ;
Chapter 5: The Chancel Exterior ;
Chapter 6: The Church Interior ;

Investigations in the locality ;
Chapter 7: Adjacent Fields ;

Assemblages ;
Chapter 8: Human bones ;
Chapter 9: The Artefacts ;

Synthesis ;
Chapter 10: Overview and Interpretation ;

References

About the Author

Professor Philip Rahtz was founder of the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, where he was primarily interested in equipping students with techniques that would enable them to be able to excavate and produce reports on all periods. ;

Lorna Watts has worked as a freelance archaeologist since the 1970s.

Reviews

'This well-presented and thoughtful report will be of interest from a wide range of perspectives. The excavations show how to use targeted trenches disturbing only a fraction of the available archaeology to unravel the history of a church. The explanations of stratigraphic sequences and logical inferences from the structure of the building show how to go about distinguishing the phases of a building, and are revealing about how rebuilding was undertaken. The expert osteoarchaeological analysis of the bodies, by Lizzie Craig-Atkins, adds a valuable cemetery population to our corpus. The catalogue of individual artefacts encompasses fragments of stone sculpture, fired clay, pottery, glass, melon beads, jet, a copper alloy strap end, and metal-working slags. The final overview and interpretation shows the limits of what our broader historical models and interpretations of the Anglo-Saxon Church can do when they are confronted by the sequence of developments at a single site.'–Thomas Pickles (2021): Northern History, DOI: 10.1080/0078172X.2021.1968175