This year the RESCUE AGM took place as part of the 2010 Archaeology Day on ‘The End of Roman Lincolnshire’ hosted by the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology. The event took place on the Riseholme campus of the University of Lincoln, just north of the City.
The day was extremely well attended with barely a spare seat in the large conference hall, and all lectures were well received by an attentive and enthusiastic audience. The event started with an introduction to the society, with emphasis on the close links between the University and the Society, and this was followed by a brief introduction to RESCUE given by our own Mick Jones, City of Lincoln Archaeologist, joint-organiser of the meeting. As well as the range of interesting lectures the meeting was also an opportunity to launch a new Roman Lincolnshire publication which was available at a special price to conference attendees in the lunch break, and which seemed to sell well! Nine lectures were packed into the day; all of about half an hour and these covered a broad range of topics which linked in seamlessly to each other to inform the audience of both rural and urban evidence of life in late Roman Lincolnshire, supported by artefactual and environmental based talks. At the invitation of the Society, RESCUE Council members, Jude Plouviez and Roy Friendship Taylor, widened the scope of the study to the neighbouring areas of Northamptonshire and East Anglia which highlighted both differences and similarities. Indeed one of the strengths of the whole conference was the number of occasions when one speaker was able to compare and identify similarities in patterns of evidence presented by previous speakers, which gave the whole conference a strong sense of cohesion. Whilst the conference started by looking at how people lived in Roman Lincolnshire in the third and fourth centuries it finished with lectures examining the demise of the Roman population in the southern fenland areas and the city of Lincoln, finally concluding with a thought provoking talk offering new ideas as to what occupation is represented in Lincolnshire in the post-Roman period.
It is testament to the organisation of this conference, both in a practical and academic sense, and to the quality of the speakers that almost all attendees were present until the end, without the usual shuffling away before the final lecture that can mark the final hour of a conference. I was certainly captivated throughout! RESCUE is very grateful to Lincolnshire History and Archaeology for allowing us to combine our AGM with their conference, reserving for us some of their heavily oversubscribed places and providing us with such an informative backdrop to our business meeting. It is unfortunate that so few members were able to attend, they missed a great day-out.
We would like to continue to hold our AGM’s in conjunction with other local societies which allows us to integrate more with like-minded people and to offer opportunities to RESCUE members from all over the country to attend lively and interesting conferences as well as holding our own meeting in various places outside London.
Jo Caruth, RESCUE Council