Jacqueline Veninger
College: College of Humanities
Discipline: Archaeology
Department: Archaeology
My career as an archaeologist, academically and professionally, has been diverse. I received my BA in archaeology from Boston University in 2005 where I concentrated on patterns of kinship and kingship in the Bronze Age Aegean. For my MA I attended Durham University where I pursued my interest in the archaeology of medieval Britain. There I focused on the thematic concepts of landscape, gender and status – applied to burial and commemoration rituals, and the evolution of the Church in early medieval England. Upon completion of my Masters I worked for a year as a field tech. in commercial archaeology units in the eastern U.S. where I excavated various sites ranging from Palaeolithic ‘camp-sites’ to 19th century farmsteads. I then gained employment as an archaeological researcher at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center, a Smithsonian affiliated Native American anthropological institution based in south-eastern Connecticut. In my five years at the Pequot Museum I worked on a variety of projects, most notably ‘The Battlefields of the Pequot War.’ My intimate involvement in this project fostered an interest in battlefield and conflict archaeology which has led me to my current PhD research. My doctoral research considers the Welsh resistance to the pre-Edwardian Anglo-Norman Conquest of Wales, focusing on Gwynedd in particular from 1066-1277. Specifically, this conflict landscape survey considers the mid-12th century campaigns of Owain Gwynedd and Henry II. The goal of this research is to reconstruct these unique landscapes of conflict (using the landscape survey methodology inherent to battlefield archaeology) to generate a comprehensive cultural and societal native Welsh context that has been absent from our understanding of the Anglo-Norman incursion in Wales.
