Dr Anwen Cooper

Research Profile

Anwen’s is currently leading the ‘Rewilding’ later prehistory project – a UKRI-funded Future Leader Fellowship based at Oxford Archaeology – in collaboration with the School of Archaeology, Oxford, the University of Exeter, Historic England, the Archaeology Data Service, Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse, and Knepp Castle Estate rewilding pioneers: https://rewilding.oxfordarchaeology.com/

After ten years as a fieldworker from 1996-2006, Anwen’s doctoral research developed a multidisciplinary perspective on research practices in British prehistory over the last 40 years. From 2010 to 2022, Anwen was a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded ‘Island of the dead?’ project (University of Durham), the ERC-funded English Landscape and Identities project (University of Oxford), the AHRC-funded Prehistoric Grave Goods and Boundary Objects projects (Universities of Manchester and Reading), and the Leverhulme-funded Ebb and Flow project (University of Oxford). From 2020, she also worked with colleagues at the Cambridge Archaeological Unit interpreting the fabulous archaeology from the Late Bronze Age pile-dwelling settlement at Must Farm, Cambridgeshire.

In recent publications, Anwen has explored the character of archaeological ‘big data’, matters of time and scale in English landscape archaeology, the subtle powers of understated funerary objects, and the role of rivers in shaping Bronze and Iron Age communities of practice.

Publications
Teaching