The county archaeological team have dealt with a considerable level of planning casework over the last year and were consulted on 1,805 planning applications in 2022/23, including 431 major schemes. We asked for archaeological work in association with 461 of these applications.

SELECTED PROJECTS

Ambrosden Manor, Ambrosden

An archaeological evaluation was carried out by CA on land where the HER recorded the possible location of Ambrosden Manor, which was also recently seen in aerial photographs. The Manor was built after 1673 and was pulled down in 1768. A geophysical survey recorded the remains of the Manor in more detail. Evaluation trenching on the site recorded a layer of demolition material overlying the remains of walls and a possible moat around the outside of the building. The trenching also recorded a possible outbuilding, which was not identified from aerial photography or in the geophysical survey but appeared to be of a similar date to the main building. The pottery recovered from the site was largely consistent with the date of the Manor house.

Symmetry Park, Ardley

CA undertook an archaeological evaluation on the proposed site of the new Symmetry Park development at Junction 10 of the M40. The site was known to have produced a large number of metal-detected finds, including a hoard, and aerial photographs had recorded a potential Roman settlement, banjo enclosure and ring ditch on the site. A geophysical survey confirmed that there was an area of dense, likely Roman, settlement with potential for buildings and agricultural activity on the site, as well as a possible banjo enclosure.

On the southern side of the site a potential sunken-featured building with other remains of Anglo-Saxon settlement were recorded, which is rare in the general area. Trenching over the area of the Roman activity revealed a well-made wall and demolition layers, but the function of this building is not clear. Below the demolition layers, Iron Age features have been recorded which suggests there could be a level of continuity of occupation on the site. Surrounding the potential building, the trenches have revealed dense activity with some very large ditches, the function of which is currently unclear. The trenching also revealed a number of cremations and an inhumation burial.

Berry Hill Road, Adderbury

OA carried out an excavation on Berry Hill Road in Adderbury, following on from an evaluation they carried out earlier in 2022.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a conceptual overview for emergency planners and responders of the different patterns of emergencies, incidents, disasters, and disease outbreaks (EIDD) and the challenges that they pose for mounting a mental health response. Issues covered include anticipating who is affected, where they are located, and how they can be identified and contacted, as well as other implications for public health and clinical services.

The county archaeological team secured funding for two years to recruit a third planning archaeologist and an assistant archaeologist. Victoria Green will act as planning archaeologist mainly dealing with Cherwell, and Robbie Luxford, as assistant archaeologist, is helping the HER Officer as well as providing support for the advisory side of the team. These posts have been funded as part of the Growth Deal in order to ensure that the team has the capacity to cope with the increase in work related to the delivery of a number of strategic infrastructure schemes.

Despite being short staffed, the team continued to deal with a considerable level of planning casework and was consulted on 1,720 planning applications in 2021, including 415 major schemes. We asked for archaeological work to be carried out for 396 of these applications.

SELECTED PROJECTS

Cornwell Farm, Tetsworth

A trenched evaluation was undertaken by AOC Archaeology at Cornwell Farm, Tetsworth in advance of proposals for a solar farm. The evaluation identified the presence of archaeological remains dating to the Iron Age and Romano-British periods, primarily concentrated in Field 2 and representing a continuation of settlement and occupation activity previously recorded on the site by work associated with the Aylesbury to Chalgrove gas pipeline (Site 32, Cornwell Copse). Further investigation is proposed.

Bowling Green Farm Quarry, Faringdon

Phase 6 of the ongoing archaeological mitigation was undertaken on the Chinham Farm Extension at Bowling Green Farm Quarry by TVAS. Archaeological recording revealed a low volume of features, these characterised by a small cluster of eight pits with a small number of outliers. The pit cluster itself contained a dense group and range of finds with two radiocarbon dates confirming that it represents a relatively short-lived use of the site in the eighth to seventh century BC. An especially concentrated deposit of pottery vessels in particular suggests the filling of the pits was as a result of feasting. No associated structural remains were present to indicate permanent settlement and the recorded evidence may indicate that some occasion may have been celebrated as a one-off event.

Crab Hill (Junction Works), Wantage

OA undertook detailed mitigation across the area of a cropmark enclosure identified to extend across the A417 to the east of Crab Hill. The inner circuit of the enclosure ditch was dated to the Bronze Age.

Introduction

Discovery tools and interfaces have emerged through a number of routes over the past 20 years: protocols to search across multiple sources (e.g. Z39.50) have had tools developed around them; library management systems have provided tools to bring to the surface the content they manage; specific library collection indices have been built and had tools developed to provide access to them; and the richness of the web has been surfaced through web search engines. The origins of these discovery tools have frequently informed how they have then evolved and matured, and how they have been adapted to meet changing needs within libraries and beyond. Blacklight is no different: because of its origin as part of a digital humanities project, it has been clear from the start that discovery had to be adaptable if it was to work across multiple types of resource and associated metadata. This starting point has enabled Blacklight to evolve to meet specific needs but always hold at its centre the need to be flexible with regard to what is being accessed and support the discovery needs of end-users.

Blacklight (http://projectblacklight.org) itself is an open source Ruby on Rails engine that provides a discovery interface for an Apache Solr index (Blacklight Project, 2019a). Its flexibility comes from two places:

• Apache Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr/), built on the underlying Apache Lucene search engine, offers a very flexible way of indexing the content to be searched. It is widely used around the world for many search applications. While Blacklight's default Solr configuration settings will often be sufficient, there is real additional value to be gained from exploiting how Solr indexes resources to meet specific needs.

• Blacklight itself can be used to provide discovery across heterogeneous resources. It exploits Solr's capability of being able to index different types of metadata together (acknowledging the need for a mapping between them), and can also display different resources via different templates, allowing for specific views onto resources.

The flexibility is also inherent in the separation of the discovery interface from the underlying data. Blacklight operates by taking a feed from a data source (e.g. a library catalogue) and presenting it in a way that is not constrained by the underlying data structure: the Solr indexing and configuration of views can apply its own structure, so that discovery can focus on user behaviour and needs instead of database tables.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines psychopharmacology as ‘the scientific study of the effect of drugs on the mind and behaviour’ (Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2018). The earliest reference to the term was in 1548 when Reinhard Lorichius published the prayer book Psychopharmakon, hoc est Medicina Animae (Lehmann, 1993; Wolman, 1977). Lorichius coined the term ‘psychopharmakon’ to refer to spiritual medicine that could reduce human suffering. The word psychopharmacology was first used in a scientific paper in 1920 by a pharmacologist working at Johns Hopkins University who wrote a short paper entitled Contributions to psychopharmacology (Macht, 1920).

WHILE MUCH SCHOLARLY ATTENTION has been devoted to John Gower's revisions in Confessio Amantis, most of it has had to do with the political conditions under which he was working. One prominent exception involves his rewriting of what Peter Nicholson has called, “the two most famous lines in the entire poem” – a process that C.S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love characterized as purely aesthetic:

Gower, Lewis goes on to suggest, excelled at what Dryden was to call “the fairy way of writing” (220), and his careful revision of this passage from “The Tale of Rosiphilee” offers one instance of his responding to its appeal.

John Lawlor, in an oddly disputatious piece intended for a volume published in Lewis’ memory, takes issue with this reading. It betrays, he suggests, an overly romanticized view of Gower – Lewis had gone so far as to claim that Gower was “‘romantic’ in the nineteenth-century sense of the word” (220) – because it fails to appreciate that the word faye represents “a possible mode of being.” “The apparatus of past belief,” he writes, in an interesting anticipation of Todorov's distinction between the fantastic and the marvelous, “can become the vehicle of ‘romantic’ treatment only when it is freed from every touch of objective likelihood” (126). In other words, in a world where people might still believe in their existence, fairies could not possibly function as the vehicles of romantic fantasy. I agree with Lawlor's criticism here – though in general it seems to me far more appropriate to the Lewis of the Allegory of Love (written in 1936) than to the one of The Discarded Image (published posthumously thirty years later) – but I suspect that there are even more cogent objections to be raised to Lewis’ argument.

This book's title – Communities, Archives and New Collaborative Practices – raises the question of who or what is collaborating. The reading of the title most immediately available might be that the collaboration is between communities and those that work in archives. Yet we want to focus on another type of collaboration here, one that is equally crucial in developing new collaborative practices for archives. In a recent action research project to develop an Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History, it became clear that in seeking to produce an archive we needed to conceive of collaboration not only in terms of people but also in terms of a collaboration between different political theories. In developing the Inclusive Archive, we recognised that we needed to seek a collaborative relationship between the political ideas derived from public political logics – public service, public sphere, ‘on behalf of the public’ and for posterity – and those that derive from relational and personal-centred politics. While there was constant debate in the team with some of us favouring one set of political logic and some the other, we realised that for an archive to be an archive, and for it to be an inclusive one, we needed to develop an approach to archival practice that held both the public and the relational political traditions in dialogue.