Gabor Thomas

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+44 (0) 118 378 5449
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Professor
- Research Division Lead
- Archaeology Unit of Assessment Lead for Research Excellence Framework 2021
- Programme Director BA/BSc Archaeology
- Archaeology representative, 糖心探花 Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies (GCMS).
Areas of interest
- Early medieval rural settlements and landscapes
- Early medieval religion and monasticism
- Early medieval objects and identities, with a particular interest in ornamental metalwork and dress accessories
- Cultural interaction in Viking age Britain and Ireland.
Postgraduate supervision
Gabor currently supervises/co-supervises the following research projects:
- Three thousand years of Rubbish in the Thames: the long durée of object deposition from the Bronze Age to the medieval period (Clifford, AHRC SWW DTP studentship).
- Gender and religion in Early Medieval Wales: The Archaeology of religious transformation in Wales c. 400-1200 CE.
Previous student topics have included:
- Changing Social Relations and the Making of an Early Medieval Kingdom: People and Pottery in Anglo-Saxon Kent AD 450-850(Backhouse, AHRC SWW DTP studentship).
- A Zooarchaeological analysis of Anglo-Saxon Lyminge (Knapp).
- Centrality in Early England: the development of central places in early Anglo-Saxon England and their North-West European Parallels AD 499-700 (Austin, AHRC funded).
- The Sacred in the Secular: Investigating Anglo-Saxon Ritual Action and Belief Systems through a Holistic Study of Settlements and Cemeteries in the 7th-9th Centuries AD (Knox, AHRC funded).
- The Ecology of the Anglo-Saxon Conversion: A Multi-Proxy Geoarchaeology of the Anglo-Saxon Monastic Landscape of Lyminge, Kent (Maslin, AHRC funded).
- The Brooch in Context: Costume, Culture and Identity in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Weetch, Project Curator of Early Medieval Collections at the British Museum).
I am happy to discuss proposals for postgraduate research in areas concerned with the material culture, landscape and settlement archaeology of the early medieval period.
For more information, please contact gabor.thomas@reading.ac.uk.
Research projects
My research explores early medieval life through the archaeology of places, as revealed by ambitious field-based projects, and through the social and cultural meanings of objects. I have directed a series of large-scale research excavations exploring early medieval monastic and elite settlements and also have a long-standing interest in understanding how dress and personal adornment mediated cultural interaction between the peoples of Britain and neighbouring regions.
Cookham, Berkshire
I am currently directing research excavations on the site of an early medieval monastery on the Rive