Dr Alice Wolff
IASH-HCA Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2025 - July 2026
Alice is an environmental archaeologist and historian interested in all things vegetal. She received her PhD in Medieval Studies from Cornell University in 2025 and her MPhil in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge in 2017. Her PhD dissertation, titled "The Beauty of the Field: Weeds in the Medieval Imagination and Landscape", examined relationships between humans and weeds in Europe from antiquity to the present day. Alice previously held a Junior Fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., USA, and her work can be found in Weed Science, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, and Weed Technology.
Project title: Biodiversity on the Edge of Empire: Agricultural Plant Communities in Medieval Northumbria
Recent biodiversity loss in arable fields is a major issue across Great Britain, but the longer history of biodiversity loss is a neglected topic by historians and biologists alike. This project uses the scientific study of archaeological plant remains to investigate the interconnectedness of premodern climate change, agricultural transformation, and biodiversity loss in northern England and southern Scotland. The medieval period in northern Britain underwent significant agricultural changes as political structures such as the early medieval kingdom of Northumbria and the later medieval kingdoms of Scotland and England developed. This period similarly saw a number of dramatic climate events such as the Late Antique Little Ice Age of the 6th and 7th centuries, the Medieval Climate Anomaly of the 9th to 11th centuries, and the Little Ice Age beginning in the 14th century. The long stretch between the 6th and the 15th centuries therefore provides a clear opportunity to study the relationship between agricultural practices, climate change, and biodiversity in the longue durée. Previous studies of medieval agricultural change have focused on southern Britain. Scotland has a wide range of habitat types with significantly less arable land compared to southern England. This means landscape simplification and agricultural intensification in the past may have had a more immediate impact on plant biodiversity than in the more homogenous landscape of southern England. Similarly, the more marginal environment with less arable land may have made this region's agricultural systems more vulnerable to climate change in the past. This project draws on two archival datasets to investigate this question of biodiversity change in the past: the archaeobotanical remains from completed excavations at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland and Dunbar Castle in East Lothian.