Join us in the historic Guildhall in York on Saturday, 19th September 2026 for a conference on Heritage Science.

This year’s conference is hosted by the Centre for Medieval Studies and Department of Archaoelogy, at the University of York on Saturday 19 September 2026.

The event will be based in the historic Grade I/II-listed Guildhall in the centre of town- once a centre of civic governance, now newly refurbished as a state-of-the-art events facility on the banks of the River Ouse. We hope that this will provide the perfect context for lively discussion of the ways in which breakthroughs in heritage science have impacted, and stand to impact upon, our understanding of the Middle Ages.

Heritage Science provides a timely focus given the recent creation of RICHeS (the UK’S Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science), with its aim to create a distributed infrastructure of collections and equipment, while we equally wish to highlight the accelerating impact of scientific approaches and data on medieval archaeology in a wider sense.

Over the day, we anticipate that discussion will range widely over subjects including archaeometry and dating, materials science, bioarchaeology, and digital data archiving.

Our keynote speaker, Professor Meggen Gondek (University of Chester) is Head of RICHeS Infrastructure Headquarters. RICHeS is a long term, £80 million commitment from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to support excellence and collaboration within heritage and conservation science. We are delighted to welcome Professor Gondek to provide her own perspective on the future of heritage science in the study of medieval archaeology.

We have an excellent line-up of 10 speakers over the course of the day:

Julian D Richards: Introducing the Heritage Science Data Service

Emma Brownlee: ‘Wiggle-matching’ people: Towards a generational chronology in medieval cemeteries

Aleks McClain and Gerard Barret: Radiocarbon dating lime mortar in medieval English churches

Gareth Perry and Dawn Hadley: New insights into old problems: Archaeometric analysis of Stafford Ware

Yannick Signer: New tools for old pots: Using archaeometric methods to reconstruct and contextualise the development of pottery production in medieval Yorkshire

Kutsi Akcicek: Multi-Technique Dendrochronological and Archaeometallurgical Investigation of Timber and Ironwork at Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire

Samantha Jones, Ewan Campbell and N Holliday: Farmers, monks and raiders: exploring cultural and environmental transitions in the Inner Hebrides during the 1st millennium AD

Sam Leggett: Everything and the Kitchen Sink: High-resolution Scientific Approaches to Early Medieval Populations

Michelle Alexander,Jasmine Lundy, Oliver Craig, Maite Idris García-Collado : New Biomolecular Insights into Foodways in the Medieval Multifaith Societies of Iberia

Lucy Koster: Isotopic insights into childhood in urban Medieval Flanders

Exact timings will be available nearer the time.

Ticket includes lunch and refreshents throughout the day.

Description supplied by the event organiser.