AHRC Research Grants Scheme Project PhD studentship
The Gallo-Roman sigillata (samian) industries
Limit of tenure: Fixed term funding, no renewal. Limit of tenure: 3-year PhD studentship running from 1st October 2008 to 30th September 2011
Professor Michael Fulford, Department of Archaeology, School of Human and Environmental Sciences, University of Reading has been successful in obtaining research grant funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which includes provision for a doctoral student based in Reading.
The overall purpose of the grant is to research the sigillata (samian) manufacturing industries of Gaul and Germany which were active between the 1st and the mid-3rd century AD. The distinctive, red glossy tableware was manufactured in large quantities at a number of locations in Britain, Gaul and Germany and distributed across the western and Danubian provinces of the Roman Empire. A major output of the project will be the publication of an index comprising the potters’ die stamps and signatures, representing more than 300,000 records from 5-6,000 potters who worked at the various production centres. Along with the
records of the potters’ stamps, the index contains information on the findspots, the vessel forms, the places of manufacture and the dates of the potters. This will provide the Reading PhD studentship with the means to address questions relating to patterns of consumption and chronology. It will be possible to research in considerable detail on a number of topics, such as the development of samian consumption in Britain, the markets served by contemporary potters working either at the same or geographically separated potteries, and what can be learned of competition between different workshops and manufactories. With a focus on the 2nd/3rd centuries, the Studentship will also be able to explore routes and methods of distribution and social patterns of consumption in areas such as Britain where the record is particularly rich.
Supervision of the PhD will be provided by Professor Fulford and Dr Eckardt. The award supports three years’ full-time work. The successful candidate must meet the AHRC’s academic criteria and residency requirements; it is expected that the successful candidate will hold or be about to receive a master’s degree or its equivalent in a relative subject. Standard (home) tuition fees and maintenance grant of £12,923 will be paid by AHRC. An extensive training programme is provided by the University’s Graduate School in
the Arts and Humanities and further financial help is available through the School to support other research expenses, such as conference attendance.
There is no application form. The letter of application should include a research proposal and specify the reasons and purpose for undertaking this project. It should detail preparation and previous experience which qualifies you to undertake doctoral study. It should be accompanied by a current CV, and two letters of reference. Applications should be sent to:
Professor Michael Fulford, Department of Archaeology, School of Human and Environmental Sciences, The University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 227, Reading, RG6 6AB.
The final offer of a studentship is subject to confirmation by the AHRC. For further information about the project contact Professor Michael Fulford (m.g.fulford@reading.ac.uk)
Closing date: Friday 16th May
Interview date: Thursday 29th May
This came via our National Finds Adviser for Prehistoric and Roman objects, Sally Worrell. Some of you may be interested in the below:
The 4th Joan Pye lecture, ‘Understanding Britain as a Roman Imperial Possession’, will be given by Professor David Mattingly (University of Leicester) on Tuesday 24th June 2008 at 6.00 in the House of Lords.
The lecture is sponsored by the Roman Research Trust (http://rrt.classics.ox.ac.uk/). Admission is free but by ticket only as numbers are limited. For tickets please apply giving your name and contact details (preferably email) to Dr John Pearce, Department of Classics, King’s College London, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, john.pearce@kcl.ac.uk. Tickets will be dispatched in late May with information on the venue and entry procedure for the House of Lords.
Some of our website users make use of the and might have noticed that a proportion of the findspots were inaccurate. We had coins in the sea and outside their specified county. These have now been cleaned up and relocated where needed; therefore making the resource more valid for researchers. I have also added the geographical district when a parish has been given. In due course, we will be uploading the East Leicestershire coin hoard and a couple of others.
To finish this task, you could say wasn’t exactly simple. We had grid references that were given the wrong grid square, reversed easting and northings and also a bug in the lat/long conversion script that I had been running. Using a variety of web mapping tools and the Ordnance Survey’s dataset of parish/district/county the CCI was realigned to what we have shown below in a Google Earth plot. If you have higher level access rights, you can produce these maps direct from any query. If you want to get access, contact me…
If you use our site frequently, you might have noticed that the servers have been less than reliable lately. I’ve been monitoring the logs (httpd, mysqld etc) to try and track the source of the server crashes down; it has been a hard slog as I’ve never done server maintenance regularly before. Several issues have come to light, and I’m not totally sure if the problems have been resolved. I therefore apologise for any further outages we suffer (always seems to be when I am away!) We have the servers monitored via pingdom (thanks to Andrew Larcombe).
Things that came out of the investigation were:
Yahoo’s search spider was hammering our server constantly with a huge amount of activity which seemed to generate a slow query, send mysqld or httpd mad and then crash the server. This has infuriated our staff no end as the site is a live working tool via which they input their data about archaeological objects. I’ve blocked a couple of their spiders (via iptables) which seemed to do the most damage and then added User-agent: slurp Crawl-delay: 120 to the robots file on our server. It only seemed to have this issue with the findsdatabase URL. This month alone, their spider has taken 2.5GB of bandwidth for that site, and generated over 300,000 page requests for just finds.org.uk Is that wrong? I dunno….. 5% of your overall bandwidth in spider traffic?
Although I did find that someone from the Pentagon seems to frequent our findsdatabase rather a lot.
We’re getting probed for XSS vulnerabilities constantly by domains from Latvia and Russia, but their IP addresses seem to be hosted out of Marina del Rey, CA, America! (For example: 2.36.100.101 or 2.45.88.8)They try and see if they can redirect variables on your site by adding their URL to a query string. For example: http://www.iamamoron.com/?ID=http://holegirl.eclub.lv/.images/pictureofme?
Now I’m not really interested in looking at the picture of someone from Latvia, with the domain name of holegirl. Haven’t you got better things to do?
If you look around the web, there’s not much information about the eclub.lv domain hacking attempts; or at least not that I could find that was worthwhile reading.
Their URL just goes to a 404 page with Cyrillic script which contains no malicious scripting that I can determine. However, I think I have sanitised all areas where there might be XSS vulnerabilities. I of course might well be wrong about the above. I guess you can use your .htaccess file to prevent http:// query strings, but I haven’t had time yet to figure this out. If anyone can give me a pointer, would be most grateful!
We’ve also got a problem with a couple of SQL queries that were written by our former suppliers OAD, that constantly run slow. I’ve removed the functions that generate these on the website where ever I can. Hopefully that fixes it.
There’s also been a couple of instances where we had intrusions via the old wordpress systems. These holes were well documented and have been cleared up. If you run wordpress and haven’t updated yet, more fool you. Their founder Matt, writes a good piece about why you need to upgrade over at his blog.
I’m not a server guru, so no doubt I’ve done it wrong.
Update to this: I’m also seeing the following IP address 1.29.72.70, which guess what is from the same USA address, checking the wp-cron.php file anyone know what they’re up to?
The content contained within the Blog's pages do not represent an official position from any of the organisations associated with the Portable Antiquities Scheme. They are solely those of the post's author.
