Department research recognised by the Science Museum Group Annual Review

News | Posted on Thursday 2 May 2024

Two groundbreaking projects which involve the Department of Archaeology and the National Railway Museum have been highlighted in the Science Museum Group's annual review.

Navvies posing in front of timbering shoring up the north end of the Gill's Corner railway tunnel (Midland Counties Railway) during its reconstruction in 1892. The photo is from the National Railway Museum collection.
Navvies posing in front of timbering shoring up the north end of the Gill's Corner railway tunnel (Midland Counties Railway) during its reconstruction in 1892. The photo is from the National Railway Museum collection.

First, the Slavery and Steam project headed by Professor Jon Finch in the Department and Dr Oli Betts from the National Railway Museum, funded by the White Rose University Consortium/AHRC includes colleagues from the White Rose universities as well as the NRM, Science and Industry Museum, Manchester, and Leeds Industrial Museums. It is exploring how the histories of enslavement and steam power are intertwined across global networks and how these histories are told in our museums.

Second, is the new Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between the Department and the NRM, supervised by Jon Finch and Oli Betts, for which Peter Randall will explore the history and archaeology of the navvies; the shifting population of workers who built the early railways. Tracing their communities and their depictions in the national press at the time, Peter’s work addresses a surprising scholarly gap in the field.

Read the Science Museum Group annual review