Professor Michael Aston is best known as the leading archaeologist on the popular Channel 4 television series Time Team. He is an Emeritus Professor at Bristol University, and Honorary Visiting Professor at Durham and Exeter Universities.
News
The creation of a new
Museum of Somerset will go ahead.
Mick Aston supported the appeal for a lottery grant, which was
successful, and launched a public fundraising campaign to raise
£250,000 towards the project.
Time Team
Series 15 will be shown from on Sundays on Channel 4, starting 6 January 2008 with Codnor Castle, Derbyshire. Mick participated in 8 of the 13 programmes, including Portskewett, Gwent, Binchester, County Durham, and Dungannon in Northern Ireland.Some series of Time Team have been showing for a while in Australia, garnering new fans there. Mick has been running into some of these fans in the most unlikely places. He met one recently in the Somerset Record Office, researching her family tree, and another three while exploring the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland in October.
Filming starts in March on Series 16.
Lectures
In addition to academic teaching at Exeter, Bristol and Worcester Universities, Mick Aston used the fallow winter months as usual to lecture in various places, mainly on Time Team :
- The Bromsgrove Advertiser reported on the success of Mick's talk at the Avoncroft Museum of Buildings on 31 January.
- In February Mick gave a talk on Time Team at St Mary's Church in Long Sutton, Lincolnshire which raised more than £1,200 for the church's South Aisle Roof appeal, of which he is a patron. He was joined by fellow patrons Professor Francis Prior and Dr Masie Taylor.
- In March Mick lectured on Shapwick to the Huddersfield and District Archaeological Society and visited archaeological sites that the society is working on.
Publications
The final scholarly report on Mick's ten-year, multi-disciplinary landscape investigation of a parish in Somerset has now been published: The Shapwick Project, Somerset: A Rural Landscape Explored edited by Chris Gerrard and Mick Aston. Click on the link for more details from the publisher.
Mick has contributed a scholarly article on Muchelney Abbey to Somerset Archaeology and Natural History volume 150 (2007). This follows his interesting popular piece on the topic in British Archaeology September 2006 (see below under Mick's Travels). Mick argues that the abbey originated in a group of hermitages on islands in the marsh.
On 15 June 2007 Mick was presented with the published version of the conference organised in December 2004 to celebrate his career, to mark his retirement from Bristol University. People and Places: Essays in honour of Mick Aston edited by Michael Costen was published by Oxbow Books. This volume contains contributions from his colleagues and former students, inspired by his enthusiasm for landscape and monastic archaeology, and ranging from prehistory to the 19th century.
Two papers by Mick are now available online in pdf format. Somerset Archaeology: Papers to Mark 150 Years of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, edited by C. J. Webster, was published in 2000, but is now out of print. It is a pleasure therefore to see it made available online. Mick contributed Medieval rural settlement and Monasteries in Somerset.
Mick's Travels
British Archaeology has been carrying a regular contribution from Mick, called Mick's Travels.
The May/June issue is now out, in which Mick delves into origins of the many places in Cornwall named after local saints.The March/April issue has Mick wandering in Anglo-Saxon North Mercia, looking at early monastery and minster sites, including the famed Saxon churches at Repton, Derbyshire, and Breedon on the Hill, Leicestershire.
In the January/February 2008 issue Mick searches for traces of the Angles in Suffolk. He returns to West Stow, which he first visited nearly 30 years ago, takes a look at the new National Trust visitor centre at Sutton Hoo and tramps around other sites looking for early monasteries and the like.
The November/December 2007 issue had Mick explaining how he combined a Time Team shoot in Barra with a trip of his own, working up the islands of the Outer Hebrides in his camper van.
The September/October issue featured a piece by Mick on the association of Roman forts in County Durham with early churches. He was struck by the link while filming two episodes of Time Team in the area.
The July/August issue came complete with Mick's shortest travel yet. He turns his landscape archaeologist's eye on his oddly-shaped home parish of Winscombe in Somerset.
In the May/June issue he returned to his home territory of the Black Country, visiting Halesowen in the West Midlands (formerly in Worcestershire).
The March/April issue had Mick writing on his visit last year to the Isle of Man.
The January/February 2007 issue featured Mick exploring the border between Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, and discovering the county of Wincombshire, lost as a result of boundary changes in the Middle Ages. His starting point is a visit he made to the Worcestershire Young Archaeologists' Club.
The November/December issue had a contribution from Mick on Anglesey. Time Team's dig there earlier this year brought back memories; Mick first visited the island in his teens. He reflects on its spectacular array of monuments from prehistoric tombs to medieval churches. The piece has a mass of illustrations, including the impressive aerial shots for which Mick is noted.
September/October 2006 issue had the first of his columns. Given his fascination with early monasteries, it will be no surprise that his first field report was on the estate of Muchelney Abbey in Somerset. Mick delves into the very beginnings of the abbey and the Saxon royal estate that preceded it.
