Berkeley Tales

This volume reports on fifteen years of excavation and landscape research carried out by the University of Bristol at the Berkeley Castle estate in south Gloucestershire. The project set out to reconstruct the history and archaeology of the castle and of the settlement that grew up around it, combining fieldwork with the castle's archive of about 20,000 historical documents. Its central theme is the move from minster to manor to town. The findings shed new light on the early medieval period and on the changes in landscape and society that followed the Norman conquest and the building of a castle on the site of an earlier minster. The excavation project won the 2016 Current Archaeology award for Archaeology Project of the Year.

The project aimed to rewrite the story of how the castle, the town beside it, and the Severn valley landscape overlooking the Welsh border came into being, using both physical remains and archival and geophysical evidence. The book is intended for specialists in the field and for the wider public alike.

The volume opens with an introduction that sets out the scope, aims and objectives of the Berkeley Castle project and reviews how the university's research in the town has been interpreted over time. It then presents the excavation sequence and the analysis of the recovered archaeological material. Contributors cover geophysics and landscape survey, pottery, animal bones and husbandry, the human skeletal remains from Nelme's Paddock, metalworking and early industry, worked stone, small finds and coins. A closing discussion traces the Berkeley Castle landscape over roughly two thousand years, from the Roman period through to the Tudors.

Beyond the castle itself, the book documents methodological advances in archaeological practice, including excavation and geophysical techniques and community and public archaeology. The editors hope it will be significant both for the study of castle landscapes and for archaeological method more broadly.