The 2018 Chernihiv expedition
Following on from a successful expedition in 2018, funded by the University's Cascade scheme, PhD student William Pidzamecky is leading a second, and larger, archaeological expedition to a Viking Age site in Ukraine.
The Chernihiv Archaeological Excavation Project is about to go into its second year with an excavation planned at the Viking Age settlement site of Vypovziv, Ukraine between July 9th and 23rd 2019. One of the important tasks of the 2019 season is the search for the tenth-century burial mounds of Vipovzov, which were visually recorded by means of aerial photography by the Luftwaffe in 1941. The members of the Chernihiv Archaeological Excavation Project will be focusing on finishing the previous year’s excavation at the end of which two ovens were uncovered from two separate dwellings. The dig site will also be extended to include these two dwellings. The international team will be using its own western methods not only for reasons of familiarity but also to show the Ukrainian participants this methodology in action.
This year the project includes 15 participants from the United Kingdom and Iceland. Dr Cat Jarman, lead archaeologist at the Viking Great Army excavation at Repton, Derbyshire, will be the head archaeologist and will be providing archaeological guidance. William Pidzamecky, a second year English PhD student within the University of Nottingham’s Centre for the Study of the Viking Age, will be organizing the expedition and will be the liaison between the team from the University of Chernihiv and the International team. Six other participants will be joining the expedition from Nottingham: Jessica Yusek, Lauren O’Brien, Andrew Lamb, Elisabeth Magin, Jessica Treacher, Cassidy Croci, Christopher Mawford, and Claire Poynton-Smith. The Iceland contingent is made up of master’s students in the University of Iceland’s Viking and Medieval Norse Studies programme. They include Dain Swenson, Alex Casteel and Tonicha Upham. Lastly, Dr Tom Horne from the University of Glasgow and Emma Brownlee from Cambridge University will also be joining the expedition.
This year, the expedition is being supported by the Ukrainian World Foundation.
You can follow the dig on Twitter @Chernihiv2018
Posted on Monday 17th June 2019