Jess Hornby
Time-slicing cemeteries: New method for understanding Iron Age identity in Britain before Rome (400 BC–AD 43).
Research interests
Identity studies, Funerary Archaeology, Iron Age Britain, Modern British History, Working Class History, Subcultures and Society, Genealogy.
The research investigates and re-assesses Iron Age burial identities across time and space in East Yorkshire. In Britain, the five centuries-long ‘Later Iron Age’ has resisted segmentation, leaving interpretation to broad-period models, characteristically dominated by ‘high status’ burials. Resultingly, public understandings of society in Iron Age Britain remain reliant on Roman textual sources and the backwards projection of stereotypes by archaeologists of the 19th and 20th century.
To establish a new understanding of identities in Later Iron Age Britain, the project aims to develop a data-driven, contextual methodology - piecing together diverse identities from the data. The method involves applying new object typologies and radiocarbon dating to the Yorkshire cemetery data, to visually map/plot the spatial-temporal development of cemeteries – a method successfully applied in Dutch prehistory and Early Medieval studies. This will identify temporal burial trends, isolating evidence for changing identities, thus refining our understanding of pre-Roman Iron Age society.