 I should say that those excavations 100 years ago I didn't do those. I may have been in archaeology for 20-odd years or more, but I don't go back that far. Thank you all for fighting your way through the rain today. I certainly had to, so I do appreciate you being here. The project that I want to talk to you about tonight, I've actually been involved with, for about 10 years since the trustees of Guston Boriaby first came to me with a problem of a fix. of a huge archive of unpublished excavations and it was a project which alarmed me to begin with and then gradually seduced me as Glastonbury does with everyone who gets involved at the site it becomes a bit of a lifelong passion and there's no sign of me relinquishing my links with Glastonbury anytime soon. So what I want to talk to you about this afternoon is really the project that I've been involved in what it tells us about Glastonbury Abbey and the way in which it challenges some of our previous assumptions about the site it's a site which requires quite a lot of introduction in terms of the history and the legend I'm going to try and explain this quite quickly to give those of you who may not be as familiar with the site an idea of why Glastonbury is so famous many of you may know all of the the history and legend of Glastonbury others will have heard of it but not quite sure what its significance is. So Glastonbury Abbey really holds a unique place in the history of medieval monasticism for a variety of reasons it's reputedly the earliest monastic foundation in Britain I'll come back to that it's that's one of its legends. We know that it's the the only Anglo-Saxon monastery to have remained in religious use through the Viking raids that's partly its its location in Somerset. It's well known because of its association with Saint Dunstan who was abbot first of Glastonbury and eventually became Archbishop of Canterbury and he was the one of the figures very closely associated with the reform of English monasticism in the 10th century and really re-establishing monastic life in England. It has associations with the West Saxon royal house with barrels of a number of kings and it was an extremely wealthy Anglo-Saxon and later medieval monastery it was the wealthiest Anglo-Saxon monastery at Doomsday book in 1086 and at the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 it was second only to Westminster Abbey. So it's a site of of considerable importance but the thing the really gripping thing about Glastonbury Abbey and what draws people in is really its origins story and the way in which the medieval monks became involved in cultivating their own origin story and these stories the narratives around Glastonbury continue to influence our interest in Glastonbury today. So it's well known that the monks deliberately cultivated this this origin story in order to claim Glastonbury as the earliest and the most important monastery not just in England but actually in Western Europe and the first stories go back to the life of St Dunstan dated to the 10th century in which they claimed that they had this ancient church a church that was so ancient that they didn't think it was built by the hand of man they thought it was built by divine agency. Then in 1130 William of Malmsbury a well-known historian of his time describes the church at Glastonbury which he said is the oldest of all those that I know of in England in it are preserved the bodily remains of many saints and he describes this in some detail he's an eyewitness and this is a reconstruction fanciful reconstruction from from the 17th century but we know that in the early 12th century there was a church an old church for Tuest Ecclesia which they believed to be extremely ancient that church was destroyed by fire in 1184 and that's a really important part of the Glastonbury story. In terms of the historical evidence for the origins of Glastonbury there's been recent reassessment of the archive of Anglo-Saxon charters by Susan Kelly published a few years ago and she has shown that the historical origins of the abbey probably go back to about the 670s up to around 700 AD so we now know that there's no historical evidence surviving from an ancient foundation at Glastonbury before the late 7th century but the medieval monks believed that their church and their monastic foundation were much earlier and they also believed that they had descended from an early Celtic foundation with strong Irish connections they thought that Saint Patrick and Saint Bridget had visited Glastonbury in the 5th century and they claimed to have relics associated with them but the story gets ever more fantastic so that by the mid 14th century they claimed that this old church the St. Timber Church at Glastonbury was founded by Joseph of Arimathea and that's why many of you will have heard of Glastonbury. According to the Gospels Joseph was the man who donated his own tomb for the body of Christ following the crucifixion and then there's an apocryphal link that Joseph may have been the great uncle of Christ and the Glastonbury legend claimed that Joseph had been sent to Britain by Christ's disciple Saint Philip together with 12 of his followers and they believed that Joseph founded the church at Glastonbury in AD 63 so the monks spun this story they developed it over a series of generations there are a broad range of issues that come into this like French romance literature and the legend of the holy grail there's all sorts of things that I could talk to you about for hours but don't worry I won't but the point is that the monks of Glastonbury Abbey managed to establish a direct connection between their abbey and the life of Christ so this story of Joseph of Arimathea bringing in a biblical character meant that they had the sort of premier abbey in western Europe as if that wasn't enough they also had the association with King Arthur which is the other reason why you will have heard of Glastonbury Abbey the monks achieved international notoriety by claiming to have found the graves the joint grave of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere in 1191 and this was described in detail by a contemporary observer Geraldus Cymbrensus Gerald of Wales now the body of King Arthur was found in our own days at Glastonbury deep down on the earth and in coffin in a hollow oak between two stone pyramids in the grave was a cross of lead placed under a stone and so it goes on this date is quite significant you might remember that the old church the very important old church was destroyed in 1184 they also had lost their patron King Henry II and they needed funds in order to rebuild and modern historians have argued that the story that built up around the discovery of the grave of Arthur and Guinevere was all part of an attempt to build up a secular cult at Glastonbury which would draw in pilgrims bring in funds and allow them to rebuild so this origin story the dual myths of King Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea are what made Glastonbury internationally renowned in the Middle Ages and they continue to be important in Glastonbury's allure today excavations during the 20th century sought evidence for Arthur Arimathea and a Celtic island of saints associated with Patrick and Bridget but the true archaeological story of Glastonbury Abbey has remained largely untold it's not quite as glamorous as the King Arthur stories of course but what I got interested in was the fact that this huge archive of excavations had taken place had been built up in the 20th century there were 36 seasons of excavations between 1904 and 1979 funded by the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Somerset Archaeology and Natural History Society and there were eight different field directors including some really big names in the history of medieval archaeology um but the really shocking thing was that these excavations were never published and these were not minor excavations if I show you all phases of excavation here the little narrow blue trenches were from the 1950s and 60s when a well-known archaeologist Rolly Radford excavated there the big open areas in green are actually the earlier excavations the early 20th century ones um so this lack of analysis of the excavated material the lack of publication has been a major stumbling block both to scholarly assessment of the significance of the excavations but also for interpreting the site to the public and I don't know how many of you have visited Glastonbury Abbey but even if you know a lot about monastic sites it's a really challenging site to understand so for a site of such major historical and legendary significance the lack of archaeological understanding has been a glaring omission and the lack of publication also confronted the trustees of the abbey with with an ethical issue because they'd undertaken 36 seasons of excavations and destroyed the archaeology but not actually published the results and arguably the Society of Antiquaries was implicated in that as well having having funded the excavations so that's where I came in innocently one day answering the phone and being asked to take on the Glastonbury Abbey Archaeological Archive project this is a joint venture between the trustees of Glastonbury Abbey and the University of Reading it's funded funded principally by the Arts and Humanities Research Council but we've also had funding from the British Academy and a number of smaller bodies as well as individuals who actually excavated at the site in the 1950s and 60s who've made contributions and the project has yielded a wealth of detail and new evidence that's been published in the monograph but I would also add that the the full archive not just the slimmed down published version there the full archive is freely available on this website here an archive with the Archaeology Data Service and I think all you need to do is google Glastonbury Abbey Excavations Archaeology Data Service and it'll take you there so these two products outcomes of the project are available now and we're actually in the next phase of work because as I said my association with Glastonbury has continued and what we're doing now with additional funding from the AHRC is we're taking the results of the academic analysis and we're trying to make sense of those to improve the presentation of the site to the public for the 100 000 people who visit the site every year and I'm going to show you some digital reconstructions this afternoon some of which have never been seen before by the public anyway to show you what we've been doing so the next phase of work is making this work relevant to the local community to the visitors to schools who visit Glastonbury Abbey and what I'd like to do in the rest of the lecture is to go through some of the key questions that we asked of the archive and show you some of the major findings this is very much a superficial skating over the surface because this is quite a large scale survey so here are some of the key questions is there evidence for occupation predating the Anglo-Saxon monastery now that's the really exciting one because we know that the historical evidence says 670 onwards whereas we have all this legendary material telling us that there are earlier things happening at Glastonbury the second one is about the scale of the Saxon monastery and craft working centre then there's the question of whether the emphasis placed on myth and cults created a distinctive layout in the medieval church and cloister and then there's the archaeological evidence for the construction form and development of the medieval abbey buildings I'm only going to be able to touch on that and the the material culture and what it reveals about monastic lifestyle I'd like to show you one or two slides of the portable material culture to show you the quality of objects coming out from Glastonbury so the project began with documents like this this is the the the higher quality end of the of the archive from the 1950s and 60s and although there were eight excavation directors it was really the work of Rolly Radford in the 50s and 60s that formed the major part of our work and the the project really began when when Radford died as a very elderly man I think he was 99 and his personal archive finally became available the archive was predominantly complete but it had never been pulled together the materials had never been mapped or in any way and the first thing that we had to do was scan and transcribe and try and make sense of this by using an integrated archaeological database and it's that record that is available on the archaeology data service site and we also had to re-examine the material culture the actual objects that have been excavated those that have been kept anyway and we had 31 different archaeologists working on this project some of them were statistical specialists some of them were pottery specialists a huge huge range of people so the the work that I'm talking about today represents this this huge collaborative project we also had to undertake geophysical survey and partly that's very helpful for knowing what may survive what hasn't been excavated yet for deposit mapping but there was a really essential aspect to this work at Glastonbury and that's that we needed the geophysical survey in order to locate the excavation trenches because the quality of the excavations varied so much and actually over the course of the 20th century the various archaeologists were keying their surveying into different things that have moved and so we had to start again with locating some of the archaeological trenches and I think that may be one of the reasons why Rolly Radford was never actually able to publish this material that before the age before the digital age of archaeology really I think it would have been very difficult for anyone to pull all of this material together so our aim was to to set aside previous assumptions based on the historical and legendary traditions and to provide a rigorous reassessment of this archive of antiquarian excavations so I'm going to go through the key findings according to those questions that I set out the first one being about evidence for occupation predating the Anglo-Saxon monastery but I think this is one of the most exciting aspects previously we haven't known of any early occupation on this site we've actually got a considerable amount of evidence for prehistoric and Roman occupation but the most exciting stuff are those fragments of pottery there now archaeologists always say this but these particular bits of pottery are really important they are called Late Roman Amphora and they you can see what they looked like in their original as a as a complete vessel from the British Museum the reason these are so important is that they were imported from the eastern Mediterranean carrying oil and wine and they date to about 500 AD now there are two things that are important there the first thing is that this is a really high status trade importing oil and wine the second is that previously our archaeological evidence around Glastonbury doesn't take us any earlier than around 700 to 750 so finding this on site something dated around 500 is very important it's even more exciting when I tell you that these these were associated with a trodden floor and the material appears to have been in situ rather than residual material that's just been churned up and moving around the site and the floor is associated with a series of large post pits which are these things here I'm not going to sort of draw a series of buildings there but I'm pretty certain that we have a large timber hall one or more large timber halls with this very high status early pottery now this is quite important because it challenges the existing models about Glastonbury the existing model is that Glastonbury Abbey was a secondary location to Glastonbury Tor and Becary where there were early Christian hermitage sites it now seems that it's at least contemporaneous with those and that we have a whole network of early Christian hermitages in the the marshes around Glastonbury in the fifth or the sixth century so that really it gives us a lot to think about in terms of of the legendary tradition of Glastonbury and it supplements the detailed historical work that's been done on the charters the other question about the early period of course is Arthur's grave because Rolly Radford claimed in 1962 that he had found Arthur's grave at Glastonbury not a glare over the skeleton in it but the pit or the grave from which the monks had exhumed Arthur and Guinevere in 1191 and he used historical sources in order to try and orientate himself and find the approximate area in the monk cemetery in front of the the lady chapel there and he started digging and it took him a couple of seasons before he found something that he thought was convincing his Arthur's grave and he announced this to the press and so on and he was very confident about his dating because he had in in in his pit there he had chippings of Dalting Stone which he believed was used for the first time after the fire and the rebuilding of the old church so he thought that gave him a date of about 1190 and then he had these early burials here or these burials which he believed were Celtic or British burials of the fifth or sixth century but when we went back to Radford's own notes it was clear that there were some there was some circular reasoning going on and the this green stuff that you can see here this is a a dumped clay deposit associated with the period of St Dunstan in the 10th century and the kissed graves that he thought were late are actually cut into this material so they're later than the 10th century and their closest parallels are 11th century graves at Winchester and Wells we also know that the Dalting Stone that he used as part of his dating argument appears in in all periods of the site's history including the Anglo-Saxon sculpture so his dating evidence was was problematic and there's no evidence that this was a grave it seems to just be a a pit with some residual pottery in it so that's quite disappointing those of you who wanted to hear that we'd found the grave of Arthur um but there was quite a lot of press coverage around this when I said that the evidence wasn't very good for Arthur's grave at Glastonbury um and the way the press interpreted it they thought that I was saying definitively Arthur was never buried at Glastonbury and of course we can't say that as archaeologists because all we can say is that that pit that Radford found is certainly not the grave of Arthur and his desire to find Arthur was rather stronger than his archaeological evidence um but I think it's very unlikely that archaeology can prove or disprove those those legendary associations and it's not the sort of thing that archaeologists set out to do these days in the 1950s and 60s they were really keen on finding archaeological evidence for Arthur um we're more interested these days in intangible cultural evidence intangible heritage and what Arthur may have meant to medieval people and to people today so um the second question was about the scale of the Anglo-Saxon monastery and the combined evidence of the excavations and the geophysical survey gives us quite a good indication of that and particularly this long feature here which is um the the boundary uh the valum ditch the boundary of the Anglo-Saxon monastery is basically they defined or enclosed monasteries in order to distinguish between the sacred space inside the monastic enclosure and the secular space outside of it and even in the Anglo-Saxon period this seems to have been a a really important means of defining um sacred space so um Radford excavated this massive um ditch here it's really quite a a significant feature and this seems to um be the the potential monastic valum we've also been able to chart other excavated ditches some of them um before Radford and some of them much more recently in the 1970s 80s 90s some of these more recent ones outside the boundary of the Anglo-Saxon monastery um have had radiocarbon dates which is encouraging um and they give us um dates from the 7th to the 10th century and with if we assume that these are are linked of course we don't know that we need to do more excavation or coring to to determine that it gives us the boundary of the Anglo-Saxon monastery as opposed to the much larger site of of the medieval one it's also important because it's showing us that Glastonbury as an Anglo-Saxon monastery was consistent with the southern English tradition of a square enclosure as opposed to the Irish tradition where there was a round valum around the monastery so this is um quite important um the next thing in terms of the Anglo-Saxon monastery is the the series of Saxon churches and this is really important evidence and quite substantial evidence excavated in the 1920s and the whole area of the the nave of the later medieval church was excavated and a series of three churches were found um not well photographed so I'm I'm afraid I'm going to have to talk you through this the important thing is they found something here called an opus signinum floor this is reused Roman pottery and tile and things um reset to create a Roman floor it's it's something that's used extensively in Kentish churches it seems to have been a church of two or three chambers here and remember at this time there would have been also the old church the timber one that would have been there so you have that old church this Saxon one and then a freestanding structure which is a subterranean there were stairs down into it um and in its eastern wall there was this slab that was drawn which seems to have had an aperture for viewing relics so this is basically a mawsoleum where the early saints and founders and things remains were were stored much more exciting is when you use when you put all that evidence together and this is what you can come up with um so the ground plan is showing us this for the first phase of the church this sort of evidence we've had to extrapolate from other sites but we have tried as as um as much as possible to give you an accurate idea of what the scale and appearance of the first phase church would have been the second phase they actually extended the eastern wall of the church and they took in that freestanding crypt there um and they also extended east and west and they seem to have built an atrium an open space at the west which would have joined it with the old church this church built by divine agency and this is what we've come up with in terms of of the reconstruction and the reconstruction this is an archaeological reconstruction so it's all based on the the measured plan which is a much more time consuming thing to do but at Glastonbury was was quite important I think and then finally the third phase of the church um they've extended the the church eastward again constructed a large tower over the former crypt um exhumed all the remains and left them in a large stone coffin there um and again built some additional chambers onto the north and the south and the final reconstruction shows you the scale of the Anglo-Saxon church this was really quite a substantial structure this so by the time we're at this stage this is contemporaneous with st Dunstan and the reform of of English monasticism in the in the 10th century and Glastonbury the the the churches at Glastonbury the way I've just outlined the way they developed that's very um uh it's very much a common pattern for English monasteries to begin with a series of separate churches on the same axis and for them to be joined up and built around over time so this this sort of um sequence that I've outlined um holds good for a great many um Anglo-Saxon monasteries also of this early phase associated with the Anglo-Saxon churches we've got this really important find of um Saxon craft working glass working uh five glass furnaces were excavated in 1955 to 1957 in the area of the later medieval cloister garth but close to these Anglo-Saxon churches uh this is really important because these are the only Anglo-Saxon furnaces to have been excavated in England we have glass from many sites um but this is unique in that the um the floors of the furnaces were intact um along with around 300 associated finds and you can see a reconstruction based on the archaeological evidence and also some experimental archaeology done by um glass specialists when these were first excavated Rolly Radford suggested a date of the ninth or the 10th century um those dates have since been challenged on a variety of uh factors the first is that the glass itself seems to be earlier more and more excavations were carried out at places like Southampton where they found seventh century glass and it was very similar to the glass from Glastonbury so the dating didn't seem to be right but one of the exciting things when we went back to the material remains in the museum at Glastonbury Abbey is that we found soil samples and charcoal remains from these furnaces and it's remarkable that they kept those in the 1950s it wasn't standard practice at that time and we've been able to get radiocarbon dates from them and people were skeptical not all of it was still viable but we were able to get five good radiocarbon dates um and we've done some statistical analysis on them as well um and this is basically showing that it's likely that the glass making was a short-lived single event likely to date to the late seventh or the early eighth century and the furnaces would have provided window glass for the first stone church as a Glastonbury as well as glasses glass vessels beakers and so on used by the monastic community we've also done chemical analysis of the glass and that confirms that the glass that they were making at Glastonbury was recycled from Roman materials so they weren't making it from raw material they were importing glass cullet taken from Roman sites and they were probably also importing specialist craftsmen from France along with the glass cullet because this was not a tradition until the sort of major founding of the monasteries in England so the dating evidence from the glass furnaces the radiocarbon dates can also be used to help us with dating the construction of the first stone church at Glastonbury to roughly around 700 AD that works in terms of the plan form the presence of the opus signinum flooring and it also corresponds with the charter evidence very closely particularly with the reign of King Inner of Wessex who's credited with having a major role in founding or refounding the monastery so it's one of those rare moments when all of the sources seem to work together so I'd like to say a little bit about the the later medieval monastery this is um I've focused on the earlier monastery today the anglo-saxon monastery because I think that's what people are interested in um but the later medieval monastery is completely unknown and the publication is the first to to really show even the basic plan of Glastonbury Abbey and I'll just draw your attention to a couple of what I find quite interesting things to do with the abbey that really relate to the legends and the traditions of the old church etc so this is how the the actual layout of the abbey was determined or shaped by some of the legendary tradition so I think the most distinctive thing at Glastonbury is that the lady chapel here is at the western end of the church those of you who know your cathedrals like Elie and places like that the lady chapel is normally at the eastern end of the church sometimes to the to the northeast of the church and the monk cemetery was also to the west here whereas normally the monk cemetery is around the the eastern end and this area would have been used for less sacred burials members of families lay patrons of a monastery and the reason why we have this focus of sacred space around the western end of the monastery is because of the old church that church that was described by William of Momsbury that burnt down in 1184 which they believed was founded by Joseph of Aramathias an extremely sacred part of the site the most sacred part of the site is here the lady chapel was reconstructed over the old church so this is what they were focusing on now this this meant that they decided to have the monk cemetery at the western end rather than east as far as we can see which is unique and also very unusually they never completed a west range to the monastic cloister now occasionally at sites of much lower status like monastic ranges and some lower status sites you don't have a full cloister and you might be missing the western range but at a major benedict in monastery of this status this is extremely surprising and I think it's because of the sacred nature of this site and it's impinging on the cemetery there that they didn't want to have the west range because the west range was traditionally the range that was used for the abbots lodging and it would provide accommodation for high ranking guests who would come and stay with the abbot so instead of building it there the abbots of Glastonbury built what seems to have been a sort of self-contained palace really they had they were very aspirational the abbots of Glastonbury Abbey and so they had more or less a second cloister down here which I'll show you in a moment and by keeping the west range well by not building the west range they were able to have exclusive views of the Lady Chapel and across the the the monk cemetery so I think it's also to do with the abbots controlling this area but this is I think to me one of the most interesting things about the the analysis is that we've been able to identify aspects in which the planning and development of the monastic buildings took account of the legends and the history and particularly the stories around the origins of Glastonbury Abbey so the archive has also allowed us to do a bit of work in in reconstructing the later medieval plan you'll see it starting in the late 11th century we have really only very minimal evidence here and Radford did try and reconstruct a fairly complex eastern arm I'm I'm relatively relatively comfortable with what he's done there but I wouldn't particularly want to go further than that the interesting thing in this early phase of Norman work is that we don't seem to have a cloister in monastic buildings they appear to have used the late Saxon monastic buildings and they didn't build a new cloister until round about 1150 that's not unique it is known at a few other sites but it's somewhat surprising and it may be to do with the specific circumstances at Glastonbury Abbey the transition from Anglo-Saxon to Norman Abbey was was quite uncomfortable the first so the last Anglo-Saxon abbot was taken hostage by King William in 1067 and he put in place Terston the first Norman abbot and the monks and the abbots were were unable to get along and in fact it culminated in a bloody battle in in the church and a number of monks were actually killed so it wasn't the slight disagreement about when you had dinner it this this was kind of you know passionate conflict going on and that certainly delayed the development of the monastic buildings in contrast the 12th century building campaign was quite spectacular again we have relatively limited evidence around the eastern end of the church but we do start to get quite firm evidence for the monastic cloister and buildings and this ambitious programme of work can be attributed to the abbey's fourth abbot Henry of Bloir who was grandson of William I nephew of Henry I and brother of King Stephen and John of Glastonbury the abbey's first chronicler states that Henry raised from their foundations the bell tower chapter house cloister lavatorium refectory dormitory the infirmary with its chapel a beautiful and spacious palace I think that's the abbot's palace an attractive gate of dress stone a great brewery and stables for many horses so this was a massive building programme in the mid 12th century and the best evidence that we have for that are the the architectural fragments from the cloister these are a fantastic group of around 40 capitals and other fragments in the local blue liest limestone and of course they would have been fabulously painted in in the 12th century so we don't get a sense of that but I think you can see how richly carved they are they certainly classes amongst the best romanesque sculpture in england we've also been able to reconstruct those on the basis of the surviving capitals again this is an archaeological analysis so we've spent quite a lot of time looking at the diameter of the shafts etc and challenged previous assumptions about what these may have looked like and this is the new work that's been going on in in the last few months and was not part of of that monograph we also have contemporaneous with Henry of Bloir's work a fabulous 12th century stained glass which is known as durable blue it's a particular composition which is known at York Winchester shart and sander knee the it shows the importance of Glastonbury the fact that it was operating in this sort of very high status courtly milieu but the really interesting thing is that this glass was still in place at the dissolution despite the fact that the church was destroyed by fire etc in 1184 so they're they think this is important enough that they're actually collecting it and reusing it and that's a real pattern at Glastonbury it was so interested in promoting its own history that it continued to use and reuse early materials we've also been doing reconstruction of the lady chapel which is the part of the building that the part of the abbey that survives most intact showing what it it would have looked like with its very rich polychromy that's based on archaeological analysis we've been able to show the sequence of the rebuilding of the church this is work by Jerry Sampson based on architectural fragments and standing evidence rather than the excavated material so he's been doing this work to complement the work that we've done on the antiquarian excavations I won't go into that in any detail and then finally we've been able to reconstruct the full later medieval plan in in all its glory for the first time so you can see the chapter house here and the former dormitory the refectory the rherodol for the trein block here the monk's kitchen and this massive complex here associated with the abbots which I'll just yes go on to so the abbots hall complex we have the fabulous surviving kitchen of course to show you where you are but we also have a massive hall that is certainly rebuilt in the 14th century I think there is one before that though in the abbots kitchen we've recently found deposits dating to around 1250 the building itself dates to around the 1330s so we know these later buildings are replacing an earlier abbots complex and then we also have evidence for a large courtyard garden and a second hall here which was built in the 15th century and we've been able to do quite a lot of work in terms of reconstructing that partly through using the geophysics evidence in order to supplement excavations that were done there in the 1970s we've also got illustrations by William Stucley who visited the site in the 18th century and shows quite clearly that second hall and its relationship to the to the kitchen there so as part of the work that we've been doing we've been able to reconstruct the sort of scale and mass of the abbots complex this is so hot off the presses that I really just copied that from an email yesterday so this is very much work in progress but it gives you an idea of how we will be able to transform the understanding of visitors to the site they'll have a much better understanding of what they're looking at um finally I wanted to show you some of the monastic material culture what the portable material culture tells us of the site and because this these excavations were carried out in the 20th century they were selective about what they kept so in contrast with a modern excavation where you'd be doing lots of environmental sampling and you'd keep all your animal bones and fish bones and things like that they were very selective they didn't even keep all the pottery and things but they did keep anything that they thought was religious high status or early okay but um I think we are missing quite a lot of the everyday materials which earlier excavators didn't think were important so having kind of explained that background the pattern of the assemblage of material culture at Glastonbury is very much biased towards the religious and the high status it is of course a monastery so you would expect that um but we have a very large number of objects associated with monastic literacy and music things like writing tools book mounts and clasps a book binding tool um here um as well as things like um oyster shells containing pigments that would have been used as pallets for um while you were illuminating manuscripts um so this is consistent with what we would expect as a monastery um but of course Glastonbury had a famous scriptorium and that is reflected in some of the material culture we also have quite a a lot associated with religious devotion this isn't always the case with monasteries you don't always find things like relics and portable objects um but we have found um a number of things associated particularly with veneration of the passion of christ and with the virgin Mary and I this is a particularly delightful plaque which has a rose on it the symbol of the virgin and it has passages from the song of song so it's in particular veneration of the virgin here we have a terracotta round or with the um this sort of wind of the passion um representing christ there um and also things like an ampule holding holy water uh a tiny reliquary with ihs meaning christ on it so um a range of um portable material culture reflecting the religious aspects of the site and then huge quantities of pottery reflecting more um the economic connections of the community so of the pottery assemblage that they kept remember they threw quite a lot away there are 8 000 fragments and it includes glazed tablewares imported from northern france and locally made products particularly from bristol it was quite surprising actually as a monastery of this status that there are very few imported materials it wasn't right until the end of the middle ages that you start getting things like these um Italian um myolicas and so on most of the connections are showing um local connections particularly with bristol and the abbey did itself own many properties at bristol and these trading connections are reflected in the assemblage we also have 7 000 ceramic tiles representing a wide range of motifs including some unique ones possibly representing some of the abbots abbot beer here representing grains of of wheat for for making beer um but the um chemical analysis of the um ceramic tiles again showed that they were very much made locally even just within the glastonbury area so the abbey was clearly underpinning local economy very much contained within its region not so much acting as an international player based on the material culture that we have so just to draw this together um i hope that's given you a sense of the um the range of things that we've looked at in the project but but hopefully also outlined some of the new evidence for the scale and the significance of both the anglo saxon monastery and the later medieval abbey the distinctive elements of planning have become apparent that were collected with the abbey's legends and also the status of its abbots and the project is also revealed that some of the best known archaeological facts about glastonbury such as Arthur's grave are themselves mis perpetuated by the abbey's excavators so the archaeological myths combined with the historical myths have been a big aspect of the project we've also identified a number of new questions for future research we have questions remaining about the later medieval plan for example i didn't mention the infirmary complex there are still questions about where that may be so there are still lots of questions to ask about glastonbury and a striking feature of the finds assemblage is that we're really lacking any early material associated with the saxon monastery we have very few finds dating before 1000 ad and i think it's likely that we have not yet located the core of the anglo saxon monastery i showed you the churches but we know very little of the domestic buildings and i think it's possible that they're located to the north of the medieval church in an area that hasn't been excavated one of the most exciting things i suppose is the question about the origins of glastonbury abbey and what was at the site in the fifth or sixth century this is the the evidence of that late roman amphora pottery associated with the timber whore this reopens the question of whether there was an early religious settlement based at glastonbury before the foundation of the saxon monastery in the late seventh century we don't know whether that occupation was religious or secular in character or both but certainly evidence for post roman settlements at glastonbury will no doubt fuel speculation on glastonbury's atherian connections so publication of the archive uh both the monograph and the and the digital version has brought this material to uh to the public domain for the first time it represents the culmination of work by the project team but also a series of archaeological generations stretching through the 20th century and and and hopefully acquits the ethical obligations of the society of antiquaries and the trustees but it also throws up a huge number of new questions um new challenges that will um hopefully encourage stimulate new archaeological research and possibly even excavations in the future as this works sparks new questions debates and interpretations thank you