If Carlsberg made archaeological jobs ….

Checking to see if there’s a buried prehistoric monument down there.

Dr Jim Leary has recently been awarded a grant from The Leverhulme Trust to fund a project entitled ‘Extending Histories: from Medieval Mottes to Prehistoric Round Mounds’, which will run until the end of 2017. In essence it means that he and a team of researchers from the University or Reading and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre will be investigasting a number of mottes to see if they conceal earlier prehistoric mounds, something that has recently been confirmed at Marlborough.

You’d have thought there are no massive prehistoric monuments left in Britain that aren’t well documented but it seems that may not be true and that a number of them may be hidden in plain sight. Using a variety of techniques including coring “the project seeks to uncover prehistoric mounds that were adapted for medieval defence or have been misidentified as later mottes – a previously unrecognized phenomenon that could re-write our understanding of both the later Neolithic and Norman periods.”

Read more about the Round Mounds Project on its blog here