A few of our long standing members of staff are leaving us. We’d like to thank them for their dedication over the years and invite you to remember some of their achievements and career highlights with us.
Anne-Marie Oattes
Following a varied career, and volunteering with George Smith on excavations on Penmaenmawr uplands, Anne-Marie Oattes invested her lifelong interest in history and joined Gwynedd Archaeologocal Trust in 2007 at the Neolithic Settlement in Parc Cybi. It was on this site she came across her greatest find to date of a large, decorated pottery fragment, several pottery sherds and flint tools within an intercutting pit.
Alongside her passion for excavation and encountering interesting archaeology, one of the most enjoyable aspects of her long career in the field is meeting a variety of different people on site. This includes other archaeologists, working alongside construction workers, interacting with the public and having interesting conversations with volunteers on community projects.
Anne-Marie will soon be taking a well-deserved rest from the field before embarking on to something new. With her long career inspired by other female archaeologists such as Frances Lynch and Jane Kenney.
Jane Kenney
Jane Kenney developed a fascination for fieldwork during her first excavation on Hadrian’s Wall near Sycamore Gap in 1984. After obtaining a PhD and working the Circuit for several years on various sites throughout Britain (and Switzerland) – she first joined Gwynedd Archaeological Trust working at the Ty Mawr site in 1999.
Digging has been Jane’s primary enjoyment during her long-standing career. Recently she has had great pleasure excavating at Penrhyn Quarry and Llanfairfechan Axe Project; with driving various 4×4 vehicles on precarious terrains along the North Welsh uplands being a big highlight! Jane considers her biggest achievement during her career with GAT/Heneb was running the Parc Cybi excavation. This also included some of her best discoveries which have all been published in her book “A Welsh Landscape Through Time”.
“It’s the process of picking a site apart and understanding what happened that I find most exciting. The most satisfying thing in archaeology is when the really complicated Harris Matrix that you’ve been working on for days comes together and makes sense, suddenly you understand the whole site.” Jane Kenney
Like Anne-Marie, Jane’s considers Frances Lynch as a huge inspiration, and hopes, following her early retirement from Heneb, she can keep going as long as Frances. She aims to write a new version of “Prehistoric Anglesey” updated with all the excavations since Lynch’s last edition of 1991, alongside other publications and intends to continue spending time on her main passion… digging!
Richard Hankinson
Richard’s first experience of archaeology was as a teenager at Newtown High School in the mid 1970s, helping on a dig at Forden Gaer Roman fort. After studying Physics at university, he came back to archaeology in 1987, through the Manpower Services Commission employment scheme, on a 12 month appointment with Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust. Long story short, he’s been with us ever since! His early years with CPAT saw Richard working on major excavations of some truly iconic sites – Pennant Melangell Church, Flint Castle, Sarn-y-bryn-caled prehistoric complex, Caersws Roman fort and vicus, Pen-y-fan Bronze Age burial cairn; he even went back to Forden Gaer.
By the late 1990s, Richard had established himself as a core member of the Field Services team. His stock-in-trade became upland survey, systematically tramping heath, moor and bog to record archaeology in often very challenging conditions. Richard’s background in maths and physics proved useful when geophysical survey became more widely used in archaeology. For many years he was CPAT’s go-to geophysicist, notably surveying Strata Marcella Abbey near Welshpool, and the Roman civilian settlement surrounding the fort at Pen-y-gaer near Brecon with impressive results.
For many years, Richard worked on a series of Cadw-funded pan-Wales projects, studying round huts, prehistoric funerary and ritual monuments, deserted rural settlements, early medieval cemeteries, early monastic sites, caves, WWII air crash sites and others. Some of Richard’s most important contributions were in the study and survey of Early Medieval short dykes, which helped produce some of the first radiocarbon dates for this enigmatic group of monuments. He has just submitted an article on this subject to the Offa’s Dyke Journal, so watch this space!
In more recent years, Richard has worked increasingly on commercially-funded contract work, often finding himself back in the uplands assessing proposed windfarm sites, but also assessing 19th century metal mine remediation projects, road schemes and housing developments throughout the Clwyd-Powys region and beyond. Richard will be deeply missed by the Clwyd-Powys team. After almost 38 years he is a key part of our history and truly embodies the definition of stalwart – loyal, reliable and hard-working. We wish him well in his next steps.
