Classics
Staff

Fieldwork is essential to me, as it often allows us to make a leap forward, where the existing evidence has been exhausted and, quite frankly, because there is nothing more exciting. I will never forget how our team uncovered the remains of a timber gate of AD 44 at the Alchester fortress near Oxford and three years later, bit by bit, the fragments of an inscription telling us the life story of the first known inhabitant of the site and the area.

Similarly memorable has been the work of the joint team of the Iranian Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organisation and the University of Edinburgh on the over 190 km-long Gorgan Wall in north-eastern Iran, an awe-inspiring achievement of ancient Persian engineering.

Antiquity

The last paragraph may give the impression that I am just interested in military monuments, but rest assured: I am also passionate about many other topics, such as aspects of religion in the past. My doctorate has focused on coin offerings in springs and the spread of the systematic exploitation of hot spring water (for bathing and medical cures) into Rome’s colder provinces, notably Gaul.

I plan to write a general book on spring veneration in Antiquity. Other fields of interest include the destruction of pagan images in the late Roman Empire and its early medieval successor states – as well as ancient linear barriers across the world.

Archaeology and Ancient History

The most interesting and promising areas of research are, in my view, often the ones at the borderlines between traditional disciplines. I have therefore deliberately avoided specialising in a single geographic area, topic or method, to enable me to employ one discipline’s methods and insights to solving some of another discipline’s questions. I have expressed some of my perhaps unconventional views on this matter in my edited book on ‘Archaeology and Ancient History’.