Wednesday 22nd November 2017, 7.30pm, Abbey Guest House (note change of venue) Members free, Visitors welcome (£3)
Ben Ford on: ‘Westgate Oxford: Initial results from Oxfords largest excavation – a prehistoric floodplain, a medieval Friary, Civil War defences and Victorian terraces’
In 2016 Westgate Oxford won ‘Archaeological Project of the Year’. This richly illustrated talk will bring you up to date with the ongoing work from the largest archaeological endeavour to have been undertake in the City of Oxford. Ben Ford will discuss the changing landscape on the southern edge of the Oxford promontory, where the city meets the Thames Floodplain and how it was used and changed by human and natural action over the last 3000 years. The talk will touch on possible prehistoric and Late-Saxon activity, deal in depth with the extensive structural and artefactual remains of the Greyfriars complex (1244 – 1538), before revealing evidence from the Civil War, and the more recent Victorian terraces of St Ebbes.
Ben Ford – Director of the Westgate Oxford Excavations is a Senior Project Manager at Oxford Archaeology, who, for the last 20 years, has specialised in the excavation of urban environments, a passion that was first ignited whilst scampering around on the Roman bath-house excavations at an early age in his home town of Dorchester in Dorset. Since then Ben, who graduated from Reading University in 1990, has led many of the largest excavations to have taken place in some of Southern England’s most significant towns and cities including Bristol, Reading, Winchester and Oxford, as well as undertaking large scale investigations at Hampton Court Palace, the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, and Montpellier in southern France.
