The Story of Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria
On this day in 1076 AD, Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria, was beheaded at St Giles’ Hill near Winchester. Executed for treason, he was the only English aristocrat executed during the reign of William the Conqueror. Waltheof was the great-grandson of Uhtred of Bamburgh, of The Last Kingdom fame. After the death of his father and […]
Spotlight: Harness Pendant
Welcome to our newest spotlight! I recently had the pleasure of working with this wonderful little harness pendant in our collections, and it led me down a rabbithole of research. This example (2025.0022 in our collections) dates from the late 14th century, so around 1350-1400 AD. It is in a quatrefoil shape – this comes from the Latin ‘quattor’, meaning ‘four’ and ‘folium’ meaning ‘leaf’. You might see this shape a lot in churches as […]
Volunteer Research: Keys
We want to highlight some fantastic research by one of our volunteers, Kieran. Kieran has been volunteering with us for over a year now in collections. Kieran does a lot of behind the scenes work helping us to document all of our objects – but recently, he asked to do some research for us. Of […]
Recognise These Objects? We Need You!
As those of you following our JAM excavations might know, we found lots of very interesting objects during the dig in Drewett’s Park last summer. They told us a lot about Jarrow’s social history and industrial heritage. Because we would like to try to understand more about our artefacts, we are reaching out to you! […]
Spotlight: JAM
Hello and welcome back to our spotlight series, picking up with our second spotlight of the year. This time we are highlighting our incredible JAM project and learning more about what archaeology is really like. So what is JAM? JAM stands for Jarrow Archaeological Mission. This project, made possible by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, is helping us […]
Women’s History: Women in Heritage
International Women’s Day might be over, but March is still Women’s History Month. So we decided to keep the ball rolling and talk about some important women in archaeology and heritage. These are just a few – there are so many more we could name. Women have contributed in so many ways to preserving our […]