Craig Cessford
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 209575 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Craig Cessford |
| PRENOMES | Craig |
| SOBRENOME | Cessford |
| ASSINATURA | CESSFORD C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7291-7828 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 275 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1994 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Clare Hall, Cambridge
Archaeological investigations at Clare College, Cambridge, between 2014 and 2021 allow a much greater understanding of the fourteenth to seventeenth-century college than has previously been possible. The extent and layout of the later Medieval quadrangle can be reconstructed with some accuracy. The western range was probably not constructed until the mid-fifteenth century and was c. 9.7 m wide (8.5 m internally). The ground floor was c. 0.4 m low…
Clearing out at Clare College, Cambridge, England
An assemblage deposited at Clare College, Cambridge, England, in 1879–1885 represents the largest archaeologically recovered assemblage from a nineteenth-century Cambridge college. It contains a wide range of material deriving from the corporate collegiate household, including ceramics, glassware, clay tobacco pipes and other materials. This material comprises a mixture of corporate and individual material, which can be interpreted in light of th…
Detecting social differences in diet in medieval towns
The analysis of stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in bone collagen can reveal aspects of diet and how this may change between periods and places. Here, the authors apply a ‘whole-town’ approach to isotopic analysis, to characterise and explore variation in diet within medieval Cambridge and its hinterland. By adopting this approach, and a robust isotopic baseline, the authors argue that the number of confounding variables that typically plague …
Investigating the association between intestinal parasite infection and cribra orbitalia in the medieval population of Cambridge, UK
OBJECTIVE: Cribra orbitalia is believed to be a skeletal indicator of chronic anaemia, scurvy, rickets or related metabolic diseases. It has been suggested that it may be used as a proxy indicator for intestinal parasite infection, as parasites often cause anaemia today. Our aim is to investigate this association in the medieval population of Cambridge, UK. MATERIALS: Individuals excavated from the cemeteries of the Augustinian friary and All Sai…
Caring for the injured
OBJECTIVE: To combine paleopathological and biomechanical analysis to reconstruct the impact that a severe skeletal injury had on an individual's ability to function and participate in medieval society. MATERIALS: Three medieval individuals from Cambridge, England with ante-mortem fractures to the lower limb were analyzed. METHODS: Plain X-rays were used to determine the degree of malunion, rotation and overlap of each fracture. Cortical bone arc…
The Architecture of the Augustinian Friary, Cambridge
The Augustinian friary in Cambridge, England, was founded in the 1280s and dissolved in 1538. Investigations in 1908–9 and 2016–19 have revealed much of the friary cloister, with evidence for an initial late thirteenth–mid-fourteenth-century phase, a major phase of construction in the mid–late fourteenth century and some fifteenth-century construction. This paper will primarily consider what can be reconstructed of the claustral buildings, comple…
Pathways to the medieval hospital
Medieval hospitals were founded to provide charity, but poverty and infirmity were broad and socially determined categories and little is known about the residents of these institutions and the pathways that led them there. Combining skeletal, isotopic and genetic data, the authors weave a collective biography of individuals buried at the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge. By starting with the physical remains, rather than historical …
Assessing the relative benefits of imaging with plain radiographs and microCT scanning to diagnose cancer in past populations
Intestinal parasite infection in the Augustinian friars and general population of medieval Cambridge, UK
OBJECTIVE: To investigate how lifestyle may have impacted the risk of contracting intestinal parasites in medieval England . Regular clergy (such as those living in monasteries) and the lay population form interesting groups for comparison as diet and lifestyle varied significantly. Monasteries were built with latrine blocks and hand washing facilities, unlike houses of the poor. MATERIALS: Sediment samples from the pelvis, along with control sam…
The people of the Cambridge Austin friars
The Austin friars in Cambridge was an important religious institution between the late thirteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Excavations have revealed well-dated and contextualised burials associated with the friary, as well as a range of material culture. The burials have been subject to a wide range of analyses including osteology, palaeopathology, stable isotopes, ancient DNA and geometric morphometrics. Significantly the distinction between…
Buried with their Buckles On
GIRDLE BUCKLES ASSOCIATED with several groups of burials at the later-medieval Augustinian friary in Cambridge indicate that clothed burial was common, with a much higher prevalence than usual for the period. The clothed burial was highly regularised, in terms of both the garments worn and the types of buckles used, and apparently limited to members of the Augustinian Order. The buckles were primarily supplied by the friary, rather than represent…
Fancy shoes and painful feet
OBJECTIVE: Hallux valgus, the lateral deviation of the great toe, can result in poor balance, impaired mobility and is an independent risk factor for falls. This research aims to compare the prevalence of hallux valgus in subpopulations of medieval Cambridge, England, and to examine the relationship between hallux valgus and fractures to examine the impact of impaired mobility and poor balance caused by this condition. MATERIALS: 177 adult indivi…
The greatest health problem of the Middle Ages? Estimating the burden of disease in medieval England
Gout and ‘Podagra’ in medieval Cambridge, England
OBJECTIVE: To estimate the prevalence rate of gout and to explore the social factors that contributed to its development in the various sub-populations in medieval Cambridge. MATERIALS: 177 adult individuals from four medieval cemeteries located in and around Cambridge, UK. METHODS: Lesions were assessed macroscopically and radiographically. Elements with lytic lesions were described and imaged using micro-computed tomography (μCT) to determine t…
Medieval injuries
OBJECTIVE: To explore how medieval living conditions, occupation, and an individual's role within society impacted their risk of skeletal trauma. MATERIALS: The skeletal remains of 314 individuals from medieval Cambridge that were buried in the parish cemetery of All Saints by the Castle (n = 84), the Augustinian friary (n = 75), and the cemetery of the Hospital of St John the Evangelist (n = 155) were analyzed. METHODS: Macroscopic examination a…
Beyond Plague Pits
Ancient DNA from Yersinia pestis has been identified in skeletons at four urban burial grounds in Cambridge, England, and at a nearby rural cemetery. Dating to between ad 1349 and 1561, these represent individuals who died of plague during the second pandemic. Most come from normative individual burials, rather than mass graves. This pattern represents a major advance in archaeological knowledge, shifting focus away from a few exceptional discove…
Intrapopulation variation in lower limb trabecular architecture
OBJECTIVES: Trabecular structure is frequently used to differentiate between highly divergent mechanical environments. Less is known regarding the response of the structural properties to more subtle behavioral differences, as the range of intrapopulation variation in trabecular architecture is rarely studied. Examining the extent to which lower limb trabecular architecture varies when inferred mobility levels and environment are consistent betwe…
Osteobiography
What is osteobiography good for? The last generation of archaeologists fought to overcome the traditional assumption that archaeology is merely ancillary to history, a substitute to be used when written sources are defective; it is now widely acknowledged that material histories and textual histories tell equally valid and complementary stories about the past. Yet the traditional assumption hangs on implicitly in biography: osteobiography is used…
East Anglian early Neolithic monument burial linked to contemporary Megaliths
In the fourth millennium BCE a cultural phenomenon of monumental burial structures spread along the Atlantic façade. Megalithic burials have been targeted for aDNA analyses, but a gap remains in East Anglia, where Neolithic structures were generally earthen or timber. An early Neolithic (3762-3648 cal. BCE) burial monument at the site of Trumpington Meadows, Cambridgeshire, UK, contained the partially articulated remains of at least three individ…
Middle Anglo-Saxon Downham Road, Ely
The large Middle Anglo-Saxon site at West Fen Road, Ely, represents one of the most extensively investigated English archaeological sites of the long eighth century. Recent investigations have significantly expanded its known extent, providing important insights into the origins, development and the nature of the site and modifying previous interpretations. The evidence demonstrates the existence of three separate extensive areas of ditched enclo…
A Tale of Two Sibleys’
Pottery production at Ely, Cambridgeshire, began in the 11th–12th centuries and continued until around 1864, but the 18th–19th century industry has largely been ignored. By considering the later stages of the industry, the issue of why the Ely pottery industry ended when it did will be considered at scales from the intimate and personal to broader ceramic globalization. This also demonstrates why British archaeologists need to pay more attention …
Educating Victorian Children
This chapter presents a case study of the archaeology of a mid-nineteenth century school in Cambridge (England), placing the features associated with the school and the material associated with them in the wider context of children’s material culture, education, and the rapidly changing nature of nineteenth century childhood, considering the material culture that children interacted with in its totality, not just child-specific forms. This allows…
Moving in mysterious ways
Artefact biographies are a valuable means of conceptualising the relationships between people, places and objects in the past. It is rare, however, that the detailed contextual information required by such approaches can be extracted from the archaeological assemblages typically found in the often dense and confusing palimpsests of complex urban sites. Eighteenth- to twentieth-century ceramic wares associated with Oxbridge colleges provide one wa…
Corporate Branding and Collegiate Coats of Arms as Logos
To Clapham’s I go’
The recovery of a large closely dated assemblage that can be unambiguously associated with a mid to late 18th-century Cambridge coffeehouse provides the first opportunity for a detailed consideration of material associated with these significant institutions. A cellar located off All Saints’ Passage in Cambridge, England, backfilled c. 1775–80, produced a substantial assemblage of over 500 objects; principally ceramics, but also including vessel …
Daily Practice and Social Memory at Çatalhöyük
This article is concerned with the social processes involved in the formation of large agglomerated villages in the Neolithic of the Near East and Anatolia, with particular reference to Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The article aims to show that practice theories (dealing with how social rules are learned in daily practice within the house) can be used to interpret the patterning of recurrent construction and use activities within domestic space …
A new dating sequence for Çatalhöyük
A recent series of accelerator mass spectrometry dates from the earliest excavated deposits at Çatalhöyük has allowed the origins of the site to be more precisely dated. These dates also provide a reliable basis for the construction of an overall intra-site chronological sequence
The St. John’s Hospital Cemetery and Environs, Cambridge
The excavation of four hundred complete and partial in situ burials from the Hospital of St. John the Evangelist, Cambridge, represented one of the largest medieval hospital osteoarchaeological assemblages from the British Isles. The significance of the group is enhanced by the detailed investigation of a carefully maintained network of pathways associated with the cemetery, the archaeological sequence that pre- and post-dated its use and a numbe…
Assemblage Biography and the Life Course
Beyond Plague Pits
Ancient DNA from Yersinia pestis has been identified in skeletons at four urban burial grounds in Cambridge, England, and at a nearby rural cemetery. Dating to between ad 1349 and 1561, these represent individuals who died of plague during the second pandemic. Most come from normative individual burials, rather than mass graves. This pattern represents a major advance in archaeological knowledge, shifting focus away from a few exceptional discove…
An Assemblage of Collegiate Ceramics
A large assemblage of ceramics related to dining at Trinity Hall, in which many of the vessels were marked with the name and/or the crest of the college, was recovered during recent excavations undertaken at Newmarket Road, Cambridge. The material, which was produced c. 1845–77 and deposited c. 1877–80, indicates that three distinct dining services were employed by Trinity Hall at this time. In addition to shedding considerable light into dining …
Throwing away everything but the kitchen sink? Large assemblages, depositional practice and post-medieval households in Cambridge
Developer-funded archaeologists investigating post-1750 sites in Britain frequently recover large assemblages of material, which appear to have been rapidly deposited in features by particular households or other groups. Such assemblages possess considerable interpretive potential, but this is yet to be fully exploited. This paper proposes a nuanced approach to the analysis of such assemblages, one that is critically aware of stratigraphic sequen…
Quantifying the Consumption of Obsidian at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey
Archaeological studies of consumption are hampered by the lack of quantified data. New data from the Neolithic site of Catalhiiyiik in Turkey allows the annual consumption of obsidian at the site to be calculated as a minimum of between 116 to 318 kg. The method employed is simple and can be employed at other sites provided appropriate sampling, topographic survey, and dating strategies are implemented
Intrapopulation variation in lower limb trabecular architecture
OBJECTIVES: Trabecular structure is frequently used to differentiate between highly divergent mechanical environments. Less is known regarding the response of the structural properties to more subtle behavioral differences, as the range of intrapopulation variation in trabecular architecture is rarely studied. Examining the extent to which lower limb trabecular architecture varies when inferred mobility levels and environment are consistent betwe…
Pathways to the medieval hospital
Medieval hospitals were founded to provide charity, but poverty and infirmity were broad and socially determined categories and little is known about the residents of these institutions and the pathways that led them there. Combining skeletal, isotopic and genetic data, the authors weave a collective biography of individuals buried at the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge. By starting with the physical remains, rather than historical …
The people of the Cambridge Austin friars
The Austin friars in Cambridge was an important religious institution between the late thirteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Excavations have revealed well-dated and contextualised burials associated with the friary, as well as a range of material culture. The burials have been subject to a wide range of analyses including osteology, palaeopathology, stable isotopes, ancient DNA and geometric morphometrics. Significantly the distinction between…
Buried with their Buckles On
GIRDLE BUCKLES ASSOCIATED with several groups of burials at the later-medieval Augustinian friary in Cambridge indicate that clothed burial was common, with a much higher prevalence than usual for the period. The clothed burial was highly regularised, in terms of both the garments worn and the types of buckles used, and apparently limited to members of the Augustinian Order. The buckles were primarily supplied by the friary, rather than represent…
Medieval injuries
OBJECTIVE: To explore how medieval living conditions, occupation, and an individual's role within society impacted their risk of skeletal trauma. MATERIALS: The skeletal remains of 314 individuals from medieval Cambridge that were buried in the parish cemetery of All Saints by the Castle (n = 84), the Augustinian friary (n = 75), and the cemetery of the Hospital of St John the Evangelist (n = 155) were analyzed. METHODS: Macroscopic examination a…
Middle Anglo-Saxon Justice
A Middle Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Chesterton Lane Corner, Cambridge, has been radiocarbon dated to the seventh to ninth centuries with its floruit in the eighth century and evidence that many of the individuals buried there were executed. Intriguingly, there is also a Late Roman decapitation burial at the site. The evidence for Middle Anglo-Saxon Cambridge is reviewed and the relationship between justice and central places is considered
Life in a “Cathedral of Consumption’
Corporate Branding and Collegiate Coats of Arms as Logos
To Clapham’s I go’
The recovery of a large closely dated assemblage that can be unambiguously associated with a mid to late 18th-century Cambridge coffeehouse provides the first opportunity for a detailed consideration of material associated with these significant institutions. A cellar located off All Saints’ Passage in Cambridge, England, backfilled c. 1775–80, produced a substantial assemblage of over 500 objects; principally ceramics, but also including vessel …
John Webb Cluff
The Dolphin Inn Hoard
This paper discusses the evidence relating to a mid-thirteenth-century hoard of coins and jewellery discovered beneath a cellar in Cambridge in 1817. Five gold rings with gemstone settings survive from this group and are now in the possession of Trinity College library; these rings are examined, and their date and significance explored. The history of the material—from its initial discovery up until the mid-nineteenth century when the rings were …
Gardens of the 'Gododdin
Torcs in Early Historic Scotland
Torcs are a prominent element in the Gododdin poem from Early Historic Scotland. This is intriguing as the archaeological evidence for torcs is much earlier. Examination of references to torcs in the poem shows that they were important status symbols worn by the entire war band. Archaeological evidence shows that gold torcs were worn in this area during the Iron Age, and in the early Roman period torcs occur on both native and Roman military site…
The Pictish Mirror Symbol and archaeological evidence for mirrors in Scotland
The archaeological evidence for mirrors in Iron Age, Roman and Early Historic Scotland is examined and compared with the depiction of Mirror Symbols on Pictish sculpture. Bar‐, shaped‐ and triangular‐handled mirrors which occur in the archaeological record are all represented on Pictish sculpture, and other types of mirror unknown archaeologically from Scotland also occur on Pictish sculpture. The Pictish Mirror symbol, either alone or in conjunc…
Pine Marten and Other Animal Species in the Poem Dinogad's Smock
Pine Marten and Other Animal Species in the Poem Dinogad's Smock ." Environmental Archaeology, 2(1), pp. 71–72
A new dating sequence for Çatalhöyük
A recent series of accelerator mass spectrometry dates from the earliest excavated deposits at Çatalhöyük has allowed the origins of the site to be more precisely dated. These dates also provide a reliable basis for the construction of an overall intra-site chronological sequence
Daily Practice and Social Memory at Çatalhöyük
This article is concerned with the social processes involved in the formation of large agglomerated villages in the Neolithic of the Near East and Anatolia, with particular reference to Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The article aims to show that practice theories (dealing with how social rules are learned in daily practice within the house) can be used to interpret the patterning of recurrent construction and use activities within domestic space …
Quantifying the Consumption of Obsidian at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey
Archaeological studies of consumption are hampered by the lack of quantified data. New data from the Neolithic site of Catalhiiyiik in Turkey allows the annual consumption of obsidian at the site to be calculated as a minimum of between 116 to 318 kg. The method employed is simple and can be employed at other sites provided appropriate sampling, topographic survey, and dating strategies are implemented
Middle Anglo-Saxon Justice
A Middle Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Chesterton Lane Corner, Cambridge, has been radiocarbon dated to the seventh to ninth centuries with its floruit in the eighth century and evidence that many of the individuals buried there were executed. Intriguingly, there is also a Late Roman decapitation burial at the site. The evidence for Middle Anglo-Saxon Cambridge is reviewed and the relationship between justice and central places is considered
Post-1550 Urban Archaeology in a Developer-Funded Context
The amount of post-1550 developer-funded urban archaeology has expanded exponentially in recent years. Based upon the author's recent experience of directing excavations at the Grand Arcade site, Cambridge, some of the implications of this expansion are explored, withparticular reference to how such material should be published. Existing models of publication are problematic, but the potential exists for developer-funded urban archaeology to make…
Post-1550 Urban Archaeology in a Developer-funded Context
Crossing Paths or Sharing Tracks?
Brings together over thirty of the leading scholars in Post Medieval archaeology and examines how this relatively new discipline has developed and where it is going. The impetus for this volume lies in the expansion of interest in Post Medieval archaeology in university, commercial, and voluntary sectors. The study of Post Medieval archaeology is a relatively new discipline but, within archaeology as a whole, it represents one of the fastest grow…
The Dolphin Inn Hoard
This paper discusses the evidence relating to a mid-thirteenth-century hoard of coins and jewellery discovered beneath a cellar in Cambridge in 1817. Five gold rings with gemstone settings survive from this group and are now in the possession of Trinity College library; these rings are examined, and their date and significance explored. The history of the material—from its initial discovery up until the mid-nineteenth century when the rings were …
Life in a “Cathedral of Consumption’
An Assemblage of Collegiate Ceramics
A large assemblage of ceramics related to dining at Trinity Hall, in which many of the vessels were marked with the name and/or the crest of the college, was recovered during recent excavations undertaken at Newmarket Road, Cambridge. The material, which was produced c. 1845–77 and deposited c. 1877–80, indicates that three distinct dining services were employed by Trinity Hall at this time. In addition to shedding considerable light into dining …
Assemblage Biography and the Life Course
The St. John’s Hospital Cemetery and Environs, Cambridge
The excavation of four hundred complete and partial in situ burials from the Hospital of St. John the Evangelist, Cambridge, represented one of the largest medieval hospital osteoarchaeological assemblages from the British Isles. The significance of the group is enhanced by the detailed investigation of a carefully maintained network of pathways associated with the cemetery, the archaeological sequence that pre- and post-dated its use and a numbe…
John Webb Cluff
Corporate Branding and Collegiate Coats of Arms as Logos
To Clapham’s I go’
The recovery of a large closely dated assemblage that can be unambiguously associated with a mid to late 18th-century Cambridge coffeehouse provides the first opportunity for a detailed consideration of material associated with these significant institutions. A cellar located off All Saints’ Passage in Cambridge, England, backfilled c. 1775–80, produced a substantial assemblage of over 500 objects; principally ceramics, but also including vessel …
Throwing away everything but the kitchen sink? Large assemblages, depositional practice and post-medieval households in Cambridge
Developer-funded archaeologists investigating post-1750 sites in Britain frequently recover large assemblages of material, which appear to have been rapidly deposited in features by particular households or other groups. Such assemblages possess considerable interpretive potential, but this is yet to be fully exploited. This paper proposes a nuanced approach to the analysis of such assemblages, one that is critically aware of stratigraphic sequen…
Educating Victorian Children
This chapter presents a case study of the archaeology of a mid-nineteenth century school in Cambridge (England), placing the features associated with the school and the material associated with them in the wider context of children’s material culture, education, and the rapidly changing nature of nineteenth century childhood, considering the material culture that children interacted with in its totality, not just child-specific forms. This allows…
Moving in mysterious ways
Artefact biographies are a valuable means of conceptualising the relationships between people, places and objects in the past. It is rare, however, that the detailed contextual information required by such approaches can be extracted from the archaeological assemblages typically found in the often dense and confusing palimpsests of complex urban sites. Eighteenth- to twentieth-century ceramic wares associated with Oxbridge colleges provide one wa…
Osteobiography
What is osteobiography good for? The last generation of archaeologists fought to overcome the traditional assumption that archaeology is merely ancillary to history, a substitute to be used when written sources are defective; it is now widely acknowledged that material histories and textual histories tell equally valid and complementary stories about the past. Yet the traditional assumption hangs on implicitly in biography: osteobiography is used…
East Anglian early Neolithic monument burial linked to contemporary Megaliths
In the fourth millennium BCE a cultural phenomenon of monumental burial structures spread along the Atlantic façade. Megalithic burials have been targeted for aDNA analyses, but a gap remains in East Anglia, where Neolithic structures were generally earthen or timber. An early Neolithic (3762-3648 cal. BCE) burial monument at the site of Trumpington Meadows, Cambridgeshire, UK, contained the partially articulated remains of at least three individ…
Middle Anglo-Saxon Downham Road, Ely
The large Middle Anglo-Saxon site at West Fen Road, Ely, represents one of the most extensively investigated English archaeological sites of the long eighth century. Recent investigations have significantly expanded its known extent, providing important insights into the origins, development and the nature of the site and modifying previous interpretations. The evidence demonstrates the existence of three separate extensive areas of ditched enclo…
History (27 obras) · Archaeology (25 obras) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (17 obras) · History (17 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (14 obras) · Art (14 obras) · Geography (14 obras) · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies (13 obras) · Sociology (10 obras) · Medicine (9 obras)