Welcome to the Urban Archaeology blog. Chiz Harward provides a range of archaeological services including desk-based assessments, evaluations, excavations, watching briefs and post-excavation services, training and development work, and archaeological illustration. This weblog will carry news of projects as and when they happen as well as wider thoughts on archaeological issues, especially recording, stratigraphy and training.



Happy new year

Well 2015 has been a full-on year here at Urban Archaeology. The 100 Minories‬ excavations in the City of London never failed to provide fascinating insights into medieval and post-medieval London: from fabulous oak revetments to 17th and 18th century buildings and drainage systems, as well as some wonderful domestic clearance dumps. All in all a very good year for timber, bricks, ceramics and clay pipes, as well as for digging very deep holes.

There is a lot more to Urban Archaeology than 'just' digging holes though; on the ecclesiastical front the Gloucestershire Cross-slab Survey is now up and running -we're having our first training day in a few days- and work recording the six Romanesque lead fonts from Gloucestershire is almost complete. There have been some wonderful artefacts to illustrate this year and there is plenty more illustration work in the pipeline, which looking outside at the rain can only be a good thing.

On the publication front, 2015 saw the long-awaited publication of two of my MOLA monographs -Upper Walbrook Roman Cemetery, and Post-medieval Spitalfields (with an article in Current Archaeology), and Plantation Place and Medieval Spital can't be far behind. Looking forwards we are working on the publication text for the excavation at Horse and Groom -Iron Age burials and some wonderful medieval farm buildings- and hope to get that into a journal for next year, along with a few short articles.

So thank you to everyone who has followed us over the last year, I hope you have found all the posts interesting, and I'd like to wish you all a peaceful 2016,

Chiz Harward
Urban Archaeology

Current Archaelogy article: Spitalfields Market post-medieval book


This month's Current Archaeology magazine contains an article on the MOLA Spitalfields Market project in London, which I co-wrote with finds specialist Nigel Jeffries (MOLA). The excavations in Spitalfields were one of London's largest ever excavations and were carried out between 1991 and 2007. I was a supervisor on the excavations and and worked on the post-excavation from 1998 to 2008, contributing to the medieval and post-medieval monographs.

Current Archaeology 310 - now on sale!