Lindisfarne Landscapes: Geoarchaeological Approaches to Human-Environment Relations

Project Overview
This project will use an interdisciplinary suite of geoarchaeological methods to investigate the landscape evolution of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and to reconstruct the environment and land-use during the Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods, when the island was home to one of the most important monastic sites in Europe.
Holy Island of Lindisfarne is a small tidal island on the Northumberland coast, in northeast England. It is best known as the site of an important Anglo-Saxon monastery founded in AD 635 by King Oswald of Northumbria and St Aidan, a monk from Iona, and as the focus for the cult of St Cuthbert until his relics were moved to the mainland in the late ninth century in the wake of Viking attacks on the monastery. The archaeology of the island also includes prehistoric features from the Mesolithic onwards, a pond (The Lough), a ninth- to tenth-century settlement in the north part of the island known as Green Shiel, an medieval priory and village, a post-medieval castle and military fort, early modern limestone quarries, kilns and waggonways, and a fishing harbour (Walsh 1993; Walsh et al. 1995; Northumberland County Council and English Heritage 2009; Petts 2015).
Since 2016, geophysical and archaeological excavations on the island by Durham University and DigVentures have focussed primarily on the presumed location of the Anglo-Saxon monastery to the southeast of the medieval priory church that remains visible today, and open fields west of the village. These have revealed an early medieval cemetery and industrial activity areas, field systems, and medieval occupation from the 13th century onwards (Petts 2017; Wilkins et al. 2017; Casswell 2018). The wider landscape beyond the Anglo-Saxon monastery and the medieval priory and village remain poorly understood, although it is clear that today's landscape is substantially different from that of the early-medieval period due to late-medieval sand dune encroachment, the enclosure of fields and blocking of a lagoon near the priory from the 1790s, and the expansion of the village in and since the eighteenth century (Walsh et al. 1995; Wilson et al. 2001; Petts 2017). However, a recent geoarchaeological assessment funded by the Medieval Settlement Research Group, Durham University and DigVentures, has shown that there is excellent potential to reconstruct the early medieval landscape and land-use of Holy Island due to the burial of soils and wetlands by windblown sand.
This PhD project forms an essential new component of the ongoing archaeological and environmental research at Lindisfarne. Using an interdisciplinary suite of geoarchaeological methods, the PhD student will survey, sample, and analyse the soil and sediment archive on Holy Island in order to model how the landscape has evolved over time, and how it has been impacted by human settlement and land-use, and by medieval and post-medieval sand drift. This project represents a unique opportunity to contribute to the understanding of how a monastic community and its tenants experience and interacted with the environment.