Session: #678

Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

Large Scale infrastructure projects such as High Speed Rail 2 in the UK, present a significant opportunity to advance our understanding of the past across both significant spatial scales and a significant depth of time. Such projects lend themselves to broad themes of population mobility, adaptation to natural environments, economic and social change, and allow the identification of regional trends through comparative analysis at large scales. Opportunities are, therefore, created for methodological innovation both in the application of scientific techniques, strategies for fieldwork, and for the dynamic revision of our understanding of the past to feed into future work.
HS2 Ltd, through broad and ongoing collaboration, is exploring innovations which have the potential to transform our understanding of past populations and contribute to the development of future methods for both heritage practice, knowledge creation and scientific study.
Themes within the session will include:
• The application of scientific techniques and recording methods for the study of remains over a 1000 year history from medieval and post medieval burial grounds;
• Mechanisms for the ongoing review of the large scale archaeological resource, developing narratives, understanding research context and research objectives;
• Developing specific research objectives for route wide themes; and
• Advancing large scale landscape studies and our understanding of environmental change.

objectives innovation methodologies scale narratives

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Mrs Helen Wass (United Kingdom) ¹

Mr Ronan Swan (Ireland) ²