One of Jonathan’s most publicised projects was In 2008 when human remains were found by workers laying a gas line pipe in Durham City.
Jonathan determined that the site was a former graveyard of a 12th century church which had been demolished to make way for a church near the site. He was able to identify signs of disease in the discovery.
Commenting at the time he said: "There are four rather mashed up skulls and a lot of disarticulated bones. It is a bit of a mess.
"That church dated right back to the 12th century so it is possible the bones date from then.
"We do know they predate the present church."
The remains were also examined for age and gender.
In 2010 important Anglo Saxon pottery, buildings and artefacts were discovered during archaeological investigation work at the open cast Shotton Mine in Northumberland.
The settlement comprised at least six rectangular, post-built halls – each thought to house a family unit – two buildings with sunken floors and a system of enclosures, fences and trackways.
Anglo Saxon pottery, loom weights and metal working residues have all been recovered from the site, which has also yielded several Iron Age roundhouses, ditches and pit alignments, which were used as land divisions.
The work provided a rare opportunity to excavate a medieval industrial area, including pottery kilns, at the eastern end of the shrunken medieval settlement, which lies beneath Shotton North and South Farms.
Northumberland was at the heart of the early medieval Kingdom of Bernicia, but archaeologists had so far only discovered a very small number of settlement sites, all previously in the north of the county. The surface mine at Shotton gave the first direct evidence of Anglo Saxon settlement in this part of the county, and has confirmed its potential for making important archaeological discoveries.
Jonathan said: “The site is not only a significant archaeological find for the county, but an important comparative site for other Anglo Saxon sites elsewhere in the country.
“It provides, for the first time, direct evidence for the rural based agricultural economy that lay behind the cultural and intellectual flowering of this period in Northumbria.”
Jonathan has worked in commercial archaeology for over fifteen years, returning to the North-East ten years ago after working in the Cotswolds and Birmingham. He has particular expertise in the management of major archaeological fieldwork projects, particularly of the Roman period and has been deeply involved with most of Tyne and Wear Museums Archaeology’s largest project over the past ten years.
His qualifications include : BA (hons) Theology and History (Sunderland Polytechnic); P.Dip Archaeology (Birmingham University).
TWM Archaeology manages one of the largest archaeological field teams in the region, working not only at its own sites but also commercially on excavations throughout the region.
It is committed to delivering high-quality field work, research and reports, but also to the dissemination of the work and its results to the widest possible audience. TWM Archaeology operates with a core staff of 20 full-time professional archaeologists.
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