Histories of death in prehistoric and Romano-British Wales - people, material culture, beliefs and special places

This PhD research project will take a long view of burial, across the first 40,000 years of human occupation in Wales up to and including the Roman conquest; it will identify spatial patterns in funerary practices and illustrate how these have changed across time. The project will create accurate and precise chronologies for burial and associated material culture practices from across prehistoric Wales, produced using an innovative approach to scientific dating and spatial modelling-techniques, including chronological Bayesian modelling and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) spatial analyses of changes in material culture and site use. As well as identifying chronological patterns in all burial practices, the programme of study will place particular emphasis on documenting two key aspects of funerary evidence that are not always prioritised: Non-monumental burials practices from the upper Palaeolithic, across prehistory, into Romano-British practices. The material culture of death and burial, with biographies of artefacts, and traditions of deposition assemblages, resulting in a more synthetic understanding of funerary and burial rites.