April ZOOM Meeting
The next meeting of the London Chapter OAS will be online via ZOOM. It will be held on Thursday April 11, 2024, starting at 7:30 PM. The speaker will be:
Dr. Christopher Kerns, TMHC Inc. Consulting, London, Ontario, speaking on:
Buried Underground: The Excavation & Re-examination of Iron Age activity at Read’s Cavern, Southwest England
Abstract
The presenter will discuss the results and conclusions from excavations he conducted at Read’s Cavern during April and May 2010. While the excavation revealed intact Iron Age deposits consistent with those reported by earlier 1920’s excavations, analysis of the material from the 2010 excavation has indicated a significantly more complex set of depositional practices than previously suggested. The cave will be placed in its broader Iron Age context in southwest England, which includes activities in the Mendips and the Somerset levels as well as Britain and Western Europe more broadly. A more detailed understanding of the taphonomic processes raised questions regarding the original conclusions that Read’s Cavern was a site of habitation and domestic activity. The possible uses of the cave have been reconsidered through comparisons to activities taking place at other Iron Age sites around Britain, including other cave sites. The defining aspect of Read’s Cavern as a space is its lack of visibility, as both a feature in the landscape and as a place in which it was difficult to penetrate the darkness. Concepts of contamination and cleanliness may have had an important role in forming the intricately structured deposits within Read’s Cavern. Such an interpretation of the cave may also give insight into how people in the Iron Age viewed and understood the landscape around them. It may even give further insight into cosmological concepts and structures during the Iron Age outside the context of the cavern. The contextual aspects of the site combined with the new archaeological material recovered during the excavation has led to the proposal that the cavern may have been utilized to contain and/or negate profane objects and material within a changing and developing Iron Age cosmology.
London Chapter members will be automatically sent a ZOOM link but anyone else wishing to attend can send an email request to Jim Keron at jrkeron@yahoo.com and he will send a link to the ZOOM meeting session. The ZOOM session normally opens about 7:00 PM.
As a heads up, this is our last speaker before the summer break. Our next meeting will be on Thursday, September 12, 2024. Speaker will be announced when available – see our website for any updates: https://oaslondonchapter.ca/