The Medieval Studies Forum will be hosting their first in-person meeting again in over two years with a full study day devoted to pottery studies, looking at its historical, technical, social and economic aspects.

The speakers are lined up but the details of the programme are still being finalised. so please make a note of the date in your diaries and watch out for further details, which will be made available soon - for now, save the date!

In recent years, the early inscriptions and carved artworks in churches have become the subject of large-scale surveys, not least for the fascinating pictures which are represented - heraldic designs, word puzzles, ships, architectural plans, figural scenes and cartoons, etc - and the insight they shed on the artists themselves. This online study day will look at recent studies of medieval graffiti in both Surrey and Kent, focusing not only on some of the captivating scenes which have been discovered, but the methodologies involved in undertaking such work.

As part of the Sustainable Impact project, the Medieval Studies Forum are organising a study day for Saturday 14 March at Surrey History Centre which will centre around the medieval landscape and some of the less obvious and more specialist forms of research, including the use of primary documentary sources, name studies and non-settlement based landscape archaeology.

The programme for the day will include a number of informative talks:

10:00    Intro

10:10    Dr Mark Forrest, Dorset Record Society 'Using manorial documents for local history research'

The Juniper Hall Field Studies Centre is hosting a land snail identification course. The course is being run by Dr June Chatfield and is open to all ability levels. It is a weekend of searching for land snails on the North Downs and identifying them. This subject is of use to both environmentalists and archaeologists.

Full details are on the attached pdf

Led by Elvin Mullinger (SyAS). The advanced follow-up course will run from 10:00-16:00 and be either Saturday 7 March or Wednesday11 March. The venue is at the Abinger Research Centre (Hackhurst Lane, Abinger Hammer RH5 6SE). 

Led by Carl Raven (Liss Archaeology), this one-day course will take place on Friday 29 March from 10:00-15:00 at the Abinger Research Centre (Hackhurst Lane, Abinger Hammer RH5 6SE). 
This is a detailed overview introductory course on using the free Snuffler geophysics software for processing of both magnetometry and resistivity data, but will also cover theory and methods in undertaking geophysical surveys.

Led by Jane Lewis (Surrey Heritage) and Nowal Shaikhley (SCAU), this one-day course will take place on two separate occasions (Tuesday 5 February and Saturday 16 February) from 10:30-15:30 at the Surrey History Centre (130 Goldsworth Rd, Woking GU21 6ND).  

Led by Jane Lewis (Surrey Heritage) and Nowal Shaikhley (SCAU), this one-day course will take place on two separate occasions (Tuesday 5 February and Saturday 16 February) from 10:30-15:30 at the Surrey History Centre (130 Goldsworth Rd, Woking GU21 6ND).  

Led by Simon Miles, this one-day course will provide an introduction to the uses of GIS and QGIS for archaeological purposes. It is intended for newcomers to the key concepts and capabilities of the programme. Topics covered will include:

What is GIS?
Core principles of GIS
What is QGIS and why use  it?
Setup and install QGIS
Learning the basics of QGIS
(Loading, Styling and Editing data)
Finding Data

Led by Simon Miles, this one-day course will provide a more advanced overview to the uses of QGIS (a free and open source GIS application) for archaeological purposes. It will build upon the previous Introduction to GIS and QGIS workshops, but attending that course is not a prerequisite of attending this one.

Using actual site data, combined with a series of Open-Data sources we will explore how to use QGIS. We will look at pre excavation tasks such as geophysics, field walking and site grids, as well as post excavation find plotting, digitising of trenches and georeferencing.