Festival of Archaeology Talks: Venue 2 – Museum Hall

Festival of Archaeology

Museum Hall Talks and demonstrations information 2024

Saturday 27 July

11.00 – 12.00

Museum Hall

Adrian Green

Transforming the King’s House

Past Forward and the Museum Masterplan

This year’s festival comes just two weeks after the opening of our £5.1m refurbishment.

Salisbury Museum’s Director, Adrian Green,  will be looking back at the journey the museum has been on, looking at the recent changes and briefly looking toward the future.

Saturday 27 July

12.30 – 13.30

Museum Hall

Special Guest announcement: 

Alex Langlands

A Walk through Medieval Old Sarum:

Bringing to life the sights, smells and sounds of the streets, buildings, mills, and churches of this now lost landscape

Saturday 27 July

14.00 – 15.00

Museum Hall

Conserving The King’s House: Salisbury Museum for future generations:

Louise Salman

 

Architect Louise Salman will discuss the challenges, opportunities (and many surprises!) in conserving historic architecture and cultural heritage sites.

Historic buildings are one of the few things we have today that can tell us about the past and how people once lived and worked, they are an integral part of a community’s cultural heritage.  These structures serve as a testament to the history and development of a city and also a ‘sense of place’.

The legacy we leave in these great buildings tell our story to future generations.  In historic building conservation we seek to conserve and celebrate the past, but also strike a balance and look to the future. They are not a memorial to the past, but a living building and therefore they must change and grow, to ensure they remain at the heart of the communities they serve and represent the values we hold.

Giving an insight into the recent works at The King’s House, Louise will explore the approach, materials and traditional techniques required to conserve and adapt The Salisbury Museum for the next generation.

 

Saturday 27 July

15.30 – 16.00

Museum Hall

Paul McCulloch, Regional Manager Pre-Construct Archaeology Ltd

 

Sun Lane, New Alresford, Hampshire: a Bronze Age and Anglo-Saxon funerary landscape in the River Itchen valley

 

At Sun Lane three Bronze Age ring ditches and a Romano-British and large Anglo-Saxon cemetery were investigated ahead of a housing development.  This funerary landscape is not unique in the Itchen valley , which saw successive populations inherit and re-use what they found.  The Anglo-Saxon cemetery appears to date to the 6^th-7^th century, based on objects found with the burials, and provides an opportunity to look at a population at a time of change and which appears to have established many of the long-lived historic settlements in the valley that we can still see today.

 

Sunday 28 July

11.00 – 12.00

Museum Hall

 Emily Ryland-Langley, TWO Bird Experience

‘Raptors- Modern Dinosaurs’. Talk to look at Archaeopteryx- a dinosaur that lived 150 million years ago that is potentially believed to be the link between reptiles and birds. This would build into the origins of avian flight and then into how birds evolve and adapt to fill specific roles.

 

Sunday 28 July

12.30 – 13.30

Museum Hall

Mike Allen, Environmental Archaeologist

 

The Cerne Abbas Giants: when, who, why and how – the results of the new archaeological research

 

Mike Allen Environmental Archaeology has been operating for over 15 years, with Mike, a leading geoarchaeologist and environmental archaeologist with over 35 years of experience, specialising in land snails, soils, sediments, hillwash and co-ordinating palaeo-environmental programmes.

 

Sunday 28 July

14.00 – 15.00

Museum Hall

Matt Leivers, Wessex Archaeology

What Was Stonehenge For?

 

Recent work in the Stonehenge landscape has cast new light on everyone’s favourite archaeological mystery – what was Stonehenge for? This talk will present the results of some of that work, and the new understandings of Britain’s most famous Neolithic site and it’s surroundings it has allowed us to develop.

 

Festival of Archaeology

Ceramics Gallery Talks and demonstrations information 2024

Ceramics Gallery

Julian Richards, archaeologist, writer, presenter and curator will be leading tours of the museum’s magnificent new Ceramics Gallery. Julian curated the gallery to be a trip through ceramic time, starting the gallery with examples from the Stone Age and taking us through the medium’s progression right up to ceramic’s use in the present day. Join Julian for a fascinating insight into how he curated the collection and hear some of the stories of artefacts he discovered along the way.

Saturday 27 July

10.30 start

13.30 start

Sunday 28 July

10.30 start

13.30 start