Reports & Books
Over the years Jon has worked with community groups across Yorkshire to investigate and publish their archaeology. Here you can explore a selection of the resulting reports and books. Many are available to download free as PDFs, while some can also be purchased as printed copies.
Finding Iron Age and Roman Cawood 2019
Margaret Brearley and Jon Kenny
Finding Iron Age and Roman Cawood tells the story of a community archaeology project that set out to investigate remarkable cropmarks on Cawood Common. Fieldwalking, aerial photography and geophysical survey led to a five-trench excavation in 2019, investigating a landscape of enclosures, roundhouses and other features associated with later Iron Age and Romano-British settlement.
But this 229-page report goes much further. Margaret Brearley brought together years of local research to place the excavation within the wider story of Cawood, including earlier Roman discoveries, Cawood Castle and its Garth, Keesbury, the rivers and historic landscape, and the work of the Cawood Castle Garth Group. It is both a detailed archaeological report and a record of what sustained community research can reveal about one Yorkshire landscape.
Keesbury Manor Heritage Project: Evaluation Excavation Report: 2015
Jon Kenny
This report tells the story of the 2015 community excavation at Keesbury, a medieval moated manor on the edge of Cawood. Once held by the de Cawood family, the site provides a fascinating contrast with the nearby residence of the powerful Archbishops of York at Cawood Castle. Seven trenches were opened to investigate the manor platform, moat, possible buildings, drainage and other features across the site.
Although the main medieval house remained elusive, the excavation revealed a surprisingly long sequence of activity, including possible Anglo-Scandinavian occupation, medieval structures and craft working, hearths, a cesspit and later demolition and horticultural use. Together these discoveries begin to show how this small manorial centre developed and changed over many centuries.
Wheldrake's Historic Landscape
Jon Kenny
Wheldrake’s Historic Landscape grew from my curiosity about the village next door to my home — a place where my children went to school and whose fields, lanes and surrounding countryside are part of my everyday landscape. The book follows that landscape from the end of the Ice Age, through the first evidence for prehistoric settlement and the Iron Age and Romano-British farms, to the emergence of the medieval village.
Using archaeological discoveries, historic maps and documentary evidence, it explores how Wheldrake developed: its medieval tofts and crofts, fields and commons, the riverside settlement at Waterhouses, Langwith, the possible castle and manor, and the long influence of Fountains Abbey. It is an attempt to read the history still preserved in a familiar landscape and to understand how the village and the countryside around it became the place we know today.
Comunity Search for a Medieval Manorial House in Osgodby: It's about the journey!
Jon Kenny and Jan Mitchell
This report follows a community archaeology project that set out to find Osgodby’s elusive medieval manorial house. Local people worked through the archaeological process from documentary research and aerial photography to geophysical survey, excavation and test-pitting, investigating the development of the village and the surrounding fields. The search produced evidence ranging from Romano-British pottery to substantial quantities of medieval material, including Northern Gritty Ware and Scarborough Ware.
The missing lordly house — and the hoped-for chapel — remained missing, but the project achieved something arguably more interesting: it helped locate the beginnings of Osgodby and trace the village’s development from its earlier landscape into the modern settlement. It was also very much a community project, surviving the interruption of lockdown and bringing people back together afterwards to investigate their local landscape in the field.
Early Deira: Archaeological Studies of the East Riding in the Fourth to Ninth Centuries AD
Helen Geake and Jonathan Kenny (editors)
Early Deira grew from a conference organised in 1995 by the University of York Archaeology Society, then chaired by Jon Kenny. The strength of the papers and the lively discussion they generated led to the decision to publish them, with Helen Geake and Jon Kenny editing the resulting volume. The book explores the transformation of the East Riding between the end of Roman Britain and the emergence of the early medieval kingdom of Deira.
Its eleven chapters range across burials and settlement, West Heslerton and the Yorkshire Wolds, King Edwin and the development of Deira, metalwork and coinage, Whitby, early medieval sculpture, wetland exploitation and bioarchaeology. Together they explore how archaeology was reshaping our understanding of East Yorkshire between the fourth and ninth centuries.
OUT OF PRINT — occasionally available second-hand
The report from the project led by Archaeology North Duffield during 2017, 2018 & 2019.
Jon speculates about
Cawood Castle
