My name is Dr Jo Kirton and I am currently the Youth Engagement Manager at the Council for British Archaeology (CBA). This involves encouraging and supporting anyone under the age of 25 to enjoy and participate in archaeology and managing one of the CBA’s flagship outreach projects; the Young Archaeologists’ Club.

In my spare time, I am one of the co-Directors of an archaeological excavation and field school based at Bamburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast, known as the Bamburgh Research Project (BRP). This project has now been running for 20 years, excavating areas of the castle interior, an early medieval cemetery in the dunes, Bamburgh Village and a multi-phase prehistoric wetland out at the Bradford Kaims.

The project has a similar ethos to the CBA – ‘Archaeology for All’ - where we try to provide opportunities for everyone, for free or at cost, through community archaeology projects and our annual field school. The BRP also focuses on supporting student and early career archaeologists, and this was certainly the case for me. The opportunities provided to me through this project have been immense and have shaped my career in so many positive ways.

Working with the BRP

I first visited the BRP as a Durham Archaeology undergrad back in 2005. After a couple of years participating as a student I came back as an Assistant Finds Supervisor, learning the ropes of onsite finds processing and identification, which has been incredibly useful throughout my career to date. I was lucky, as the material culture at Bamburgh spans 2000 years and is extremely rich in variety and material. In the following years, I was the trench supervisor for the excavation of the castle chapel, where we discovered evidence of early medieval masonry (still debating if this is the defensive wall or an earlier chapel!) and hints of Roman structures, our first on site (You can see our excavation report on this here: Exacavations at Bamburgh). I then spent a season supervising the excavation of test pits at the Bradford Kaims. We were lucky enough to land right on top of a Bronze Age burnt mound in our sixth test pit, which sat on a lake side where we would eventually discover preserved prehistoric wooden platforms, paddles and troughs. I then took over the excavation of our primary castle trench in the West Ward, excavating through the 8-11^th century layers, unearthing an industrial metalworking area.

During this time, I continued to excavate elsewhere, primarily in the UK and began a PhD at the University of Chester, exploring the regions early medieval stone sculpture and associate landscapes. I was also lucky enough to work as a visiting lecturer at this time.

In 2014, I was invited to become a Director of the BRP and since then I have largely focused on acquiring and delivering funded projects to move forward our post-ex and publications, and I have been keen to continue to disseminate the work in more public-friendly formats, including our popular and long-running blog.

This year is momentous for the BRP, as we end our main excavation within the castle and begin developing new lines of enquiry. However, due to the current pandemic, all our plans have been put on hold and our field school has been postponed, and likely cancelled for this year. Nevertheless, this has given us the time to take a breather, plan for the future and consider our post-ex objectives (we have A LOT of post-ex). One major element of which will be the publication of the early medieval Bowl Hole cemetery monograph, which Graeme (Young), my co-Director, has been hard at work on, supported by funding from the NHLF as part of the Accessing Aidan project.

So whilst this year has definitely been an odd one and we haven’t achieved all that we had planned it has given us the space to focus on other equally important areas of our research and the methods of dissemination that makes it all worthwhile. Whilst we have been forced to change how and what we work on, I think the project will largely benefit and we will be back with a bang (or at least a few more publications and a new project proposal).

I hope to see you at Bamburgh sometime soon!