Professor Sarah Semple has been awarded the British Academy’s 2024 Landscape Archaeology Medal for her pioneering research in the field.
Sarah, who works in our Department of Archaeology, is known for her explorations of early medieval interactions with and perceptions of the natural and human altered landscape.
She has led on influential projects and publications, connected to early medieval Britain and the North Sea zone, focused on perceptions of the prehistoric past, landscapes of consensus and governance, elite framing of royal power and the numinous and sacred qualities of landscape for pre-Christian and conversion-period communities.
Sarah is currently completing a Leverhulme-funded project entitled ‘The Making of Northumbria’ which is using bioarchaeological and landscape analyses applied to the early medieval burial record, to explore the health, wealth and wellbeing of communities in the north in 5th-8th centuries, as the large kingdom of Northumbria emerged.
She is also leading a reassessment of the internationally important site of Yeavering in Northumberland, an early medieval palace and place of assembly in the seventh century CE, mentioned by the Venerable Bede in 731 in his ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’.
New field excavation and scientific analyses, including radiocarbon dating, are changing our understanding of this royal site and its hinterland.
Sarah uses archaeological, historical, place-name and environmental data to reconstruct how people lived in and interacted with the landscape around them – how they named it, how they used its resources, how it was exploited to frame popular, religious and elite activities, its role in early medieval beliefs and perceptions and how people moved through and monumentalised their immediate and broader environs.
These discoveries offer a deeper picture of the way past communities engaged with the world around them, and their sense of place and past.
The Landscape Archaeology Medal, awarded annually for distinguished achievements in landscape archaeology, was created by the late Professor John Coles, a Fellow of the Academy since 1978.
I am absolutely delighted. It is an amazing honour, and it is wonderful to be acknowledged in this way. I owe a great deal to my colleagues at Durham University and my research students, and external partners, for stimulating, inspiring and broadening the scope of my research.
Sarah will officially be presented with the medal at the British Academy in London on Friday 11 October.
