A Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage graduate, Annabelle Hamilton-Bing spent a summer working for Professor Mark Gardiner on his research into the medieval history of Lincolnshire, with financial support from the School. This research has resulted in a peer-reviewed academic publication by Mark and Annabelle in the internationally recognised interdisciplinary journal Medieval Settlement Research.
Annabelle worked for Mark over the summer of 2023, the year she graduated. She took her undergraduate degree in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, and this work allowed her to develop and broaden her range of skills for employment. She worked part-time for Mark for eight weeks and was taught how to take digital data from lidar survey and to manipulate it in a GIS program to produce images of areas of countryside in southern Lincolnshire (Kesteven).
Annabelle experimented with the most effective means of displaying the images. She then had to interpret the earthworks displayed in the images to understand the landscape history and the significance of the earthworks in terms of the late medieval history of the region. Finally, she had to write up the results to provide an account of what she had found.
This area had not been thoroughly studied for its earthworks and Mark and Annabelle experimented in using various types of data. They wanted to work out how the earthworks could be best displayed and interpreted. They also went out and looked at some of the sites in the field to ‘ground truth’ their findings.
Annabelle learnt how to understand the field archaeology and the factors which had led to the survival of earthworks – sometimes under woodland, but more commonly in pasture fields. She acquired experience in both digital skills and academic research. Mark took her through the process of preparing a paper for publication, including dealing with the referees’ comments and checking proofs, so and she was involved in the process from beginning to the end, with the impressive result of a peer-reviewed publication in a prestigious scholarly journal.