No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis takes a material culture approach to exploring how the Thames was experienced from 1660 to 1830. It conceives of the river as a material object, constantly shaped by its designers, makers and users. The river was an essential part of the day-to-say lives of Londoners and visitors and framing the river as a kind of object allows an exploration of the material-human interactions on a number of different levels, from transformative changes to the river's geography to more everyday contact at work, leisure and home. The thesis understands the river's changing relationship to key transformations in Britain's long eighteenth century as London became the metropolis of an expanding commercial and territorial empire. The first chapter addresses the redesigning of the river, tracing the building projects imposed by political and mercantile interest groups which transformed riverfront architecture with six new bridges and vast dock complexes and aimed to control how people experienced the river's relationship to the nation and its growing empire. The second chapter uses watermen's court records and criminal trials alongside material remnants of river work to show that watermen asserted an informal control over the river space which was increasingly eroded by the desire to secure imperial trade against theft. Chapter three explores the growing use of the river as leisure space, using diaries to identify quotidian leisure activities on the river. It highlights the increasing commercialisation of riverine leisure as boat trips and guidebooks proliferated. The final chapter uses objects depicting the Thames to show how the river filtered into everyday lives through consumption, often constructing a picturesque view for a polite audience. Like the other material engagements with the river, these objects constructed an experience of the eighteenth-century waterway which glorified commerce and obscured from everyday experience the realities of an imperial river.

No description available.

Late Iron Age and Early Roman Britain has often been homogenised by models that focus on the resistance/assimilation dichotomy during the period of transition. The main objective of this thesis is to examine the rural settlements of this period through the lens of Cultural Theory in order to tease out the more nuanced and diverse human landscape that the material suggests. This approach begins to develop new ways of thinking about the variability observed in rural settlement from the end of the Middle Iron Age (MIA) to the beginning of the 2nd century AD. The selected study area is the Upper and Middle Thames Valley. The thesis uses the grid/group designations of Mary Douglas' Cultural Theory as a tool to produce a more multifaceted picture of the period, exploring the assemblages of these rural settlements to understand the nature of the socio-political structures of the region, beyond the anonymity of tribal affiliation and the faceless economical dichotomy of high and low status. The structure of the thesis is as follows: Chapter 2 summarises the state of play in the study of Late Iron Age and Early Roman Britain within the study area. The strengths and weakness of Cultural Theory, how it has been used in the past, and what role it has played in this research will be introduced in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents the dataset and the patterns observed, as well as why and how the types of artefacts examined are integral to the formation of the worldview of people. Chapter 5 offers interpretation of the data through the lens of the Cultural Theory model whilst Chapters 6, 7, and 8 place six case studies from the Upper and Middle Thames Valley under inspection and show in greater detail the potential of Cultural Theory as a tool for thinking about rural settlement variation. This study re-characterises the rural Upper and Middle Thames Valley as a place where there was a wide variety of worldviews during the period of great cultural and socio-political transition of the centuries straddling the turn of the first millennium. It suggests that the varying success and longevities of these rural settlements may have depended upon the ability of their inhabitants to either change their worldviews or to find similarities in the new organisation of their world.

This thesis deals with the development of farming landscapes in the Thames Valley from the Neolithic to the Roman period (4000 BCE - 410 CE). The focus is on the major domestic animal species, cattle, sheep and pig, and their roles in the agroecosystem, traced using carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios measured in collagen. The large dataset of faunal isotope values from a limited area, obtained from sites with extensive archaeological and environmental information, allowed a thorough characterisation of variability in isotope values, within and between species, sites, archaeological periods, and landscape regions. Isotope ratios in a flock of modern sheep showed less variability than archaeological assemblages. Linear mixed models were used to analyse variation in isotope values in 1490 archaeological samples from 23 sites. The pattern of change over time differed for cattle, sheep and pig, reflecting both wide-scale environmental change and changes in animal management. d13C values of cattle and pigs reflected the loss of primary closed-canopy woodland. Pig management changed from an emphasis on woodland resources to a closer association with settlement and consumption of anthropogenic waste. Herbivore d15N values probably reflect variations in the intensity of pasture use and association with arable farming. Climatic cooling since the post-glacial thermal maximum cannot explain these varied trajectories of change. Variation between sites in faunal isotope values was related to landscape regions. Faunal isotope values at individual sites were useful in site interpretation in the context of other evidence. The trend in pig and cattle δ13C values with time was widely found in the UK, as expected if it represents forest clearance. In the Neolithic, cattle management was similar to the UK at central and eastern European Neolithic sites, but pig management was different. Patterns of faunal isotope values and their changes over time, analysed in the context of archaeological and environmental information, can contribute to the interpretation of sites, and give a unique perspective on changes in farming practice and their effects on the landscape.

Zugl.: Birmingham, Aston Univ., Diss., 2009

This dissertation analyses the visual representations of the Lower Thames in the years between about 1880 and 1901 to understand the ways in which they reconstructed and projected modern life in London in and through visual forms. Focusing on works which were accessible in the broad middle-class sphere through exhibitions and publications, it sets out to show how non-modernist works of art articulated capitalist modernity in powerful terms. In translating a working port into representations such as exhibition pictures and newspaper illustrations, artists exploited the naturalist aesthetic. They highlighted the dirty, modern, chaotic and even dangerous river, while playing with the distance between that depicted working-class site and the middle-class audience of their work. Examining their subject and means of representation, the dissertation shows how the late Victorian representations of the Port of London illuminated the values of technology, labour, capital and the Empire.