The Department of History at Lancaster, in partnership with the Vindolanda Trust, has won funding for a Collaborative Doctoral Award from the AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, to study religious landscapes on Hadrian’s Wall.

Applications are now open for the doctoral project, entitled ‘Religious Landscapes on Hadrian’s Wall: A Spatial and Diachronic Analysis’. This PhD will bring together large-scale spatial analyses of religious activity on the Wall network as a whole with an in-depth case study of religious and ritual landscapes at the fort/settlement site of Vindolanda to illuminate the role of religion in the construction of community and identity on the Romano-British frontier.

The successful candidate will be supervised by Dr Eleri Cousins and Dr Patricia Murrieta-Flores at Lancaster, and Dr Andrew Birley at Vindolanda. The student will benefit from training in advanced use of GIS and computational archaeology via the University's internationally-recognised Digital Humanities Hub and will take part in the Vindolanda Trust’s ongoing programme of fieldwork for up to three months over the course of the PhD.

In the final year of the project, the student will be encouraged to develop a temporary exhibition stemming from their research for the Vindolanda Museum, and will work with the Trust on incorporating the project’s results into site guide training and site and museum signage at Vindolanda.

The student will thus finish the PhD with a skill set suitable for potential future employment in History, Classics, and Archaeology, as well as the heritage and commercial sectors, in addition to having the opportunity to shape public perceptions of a heritage site that receives over 100,000 visitors per year and whose museum is recognized by the Arts Council as a ‘Designated Collection’ of national and international significance.

Dr Cousins said: ‘Religion played a crucial role in shaping the lives of people on the Romano-British frontier, and this project has the potential to radically change our understanding of the nature of religious landscapes in the Wall region.’

‘Vindolanda has long been a leader in research on Hadrian’s Wall, and we are thrilled to be partnering with them for this Collaborative Doctoral Award. This project also reflects the Lancaster History Department’s long-standing strengths in Digital Humanities and commitment to regional history, as well as our expanding programme of Roman archaeological research.’

Further details about the project scope, funding, and application procedure can be found at http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/hw-religious-landscapes/.