Book your tickets at here!
Conference Programme:
Location: Leeds City Museum
Date: Saturday 27th June 2026
Morning Session
- 10:00 – 10:25 am | Coffee & Registration
- 10:30 – 10:35 am | Alice Lyons: Conference welcome
- 10:40 – 10:55 am | Yvonne Boutwood: Kay – friend and mentor – her legacy lives on
- 11:00 – 11:30 am | Enikö Hudák: Networks of exchange and exploitation: the Distribution of Mancetter-Hartshill mortaria in Roman Britain
- 11:35 – 11:50 am | Naomi Payne: Tracing Motifs Across Media – samian ware and the Coins of Carausius
Short question/discussion section if time allows
- 12:00 – 12:40 pm | AGM
- 12:45 – 1:30 pm | Lunch (Sandwiches provided)
Afternoon Session
- 1:35 – 1:45 pm | Scott Martin: Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble
- 1:40 – 2:00 pm | Edward Biddulph and Katie Brady: What were tankards used for?
- 2:05 – 2:20 pm | Charlotte Burn: Let’s make this official
Short question/discussion section if time allows
- 2:30 – 2:55 pm | Coffee Break
- 3:00 – 3:20 pm | Fiona Seeley: A testimony and a tutorial: reading Kay Hartley’s report on the Bloomberg mortarium stamps
- 3:25 – 3:50 pm | Steven Moorehouse: Identifying Roman landscapes from medieval documents, historic maps and name evidence
- 3:55 – 4:15 pm | Colin Wallace: Kay Hartley in Scotland – early days and a lasting legacy
Final question/discussion section if time allows
- 4:25 – 4:30 pm | Alice Lyons: Conference Close
Speaker Synopses
Yvonne Boutwood
Kay – Friend and Mentor – Her Legacy Lives On
After graduating from Leeds University in 1985, Brian Hartley introduced me to Kay, starting a friendship that lasted until she passed away in 2025. A summer job extended to six years, officially recording Mancetter-Hartshill pottery but assisting Kay in all aspects of mortarium studies across Britain. In 2018, I re-engaged with Kay to work on potters’ stamps, contributing to the Kay Hartley Mortarium Archive Project, inspired by Ruth Leary to preserve Kay’s lifetime work and share it online with pottery scholars. Kay’s legacy lives on there, but as my mentor, my skills are now passed on in recent training to a new generation of pottery specialists.
Enikö Hudák
Networks of Exchange and Exploitation: The Distribution of Mancetter-Hartshill Mortaria in Roman Britain
Many in our Roman pottery family will immediately think of Kay when they hear anything about Mancetter-Hartshill. Indeed, not only did Kay lead the excavations of the kilns between 1960 and 1977, but she also worked relentlessly on the mortaria and the stamps throughout her career, often without funding and certainly in her non-existent spare time. Despite the efforts and many calls in various research agendas, a comprehensive publication of the excavations, sadly, has yet to be completed. Building on Kay’s legacy and taking another step towards a complete publication, my PhD research established a simplified typology of Mancetter-Hartshill mortaria and compiled and analysed their distribution data. This talk introduces the results of this project and aims to show how reconsidering the distribution can help rethink the dynamics of socioeconomic interactions in Roman Britain. The new economic model proposed by this research is then explained through the case study of Piddington Roman Villa.
Naomi Payne
Tracing Motifs Across Media: Samian Ware and the Coins of Carausius
My paper will tell the story of the identification of a previously unrecorded reverse on a coin of Carausius with the help of decorated samian ware. It will illustrate an unconventional way in which Roman pottery can shed light on other Roman artefacts and art.
Scott Martin
“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.”
Midden formation and dispersal in the Late Iron Age and Roman periods at Little Kimble, Buckinghamshire.
Edward Biddulph and Kate Brady
What Were Tankards Used For?
The tankard – a single-handled, mug-like vessel – is a standard form of the Severn Valley ware industry and has a distribution that is largely restricted to western Britain. It is assumed to be a drinking vessel, but whether it contained beer or some other beverage has not been established. In this paper, we will reveal the results of residue analysis on tankards from Innsworth in Gloucestershire, confirming that residues can be obtained from such vessels and presenting evidence for a curious concoction, potentially one with regional significance.
Charlotte Burn
Let’s Make This Official! – Procuratorial Stamps on Mortaria from Londinium
The paper will first cover the work done by Kay on this particular class of stamp by recapping her findings published in the 1996 volume Interpreting Roman London: Papers in Memory of Hugh Chapman (Bird, J., Hassall, Mark., Sheldon, H. (eds.)). Following this, it will review more recently excavated examples and provide an overview of the potential significance of these finds.
Fiona Seeley
A Testimony and a Tutorial: Reading Kay Hartley’s Report on the Bloomberg Mortarium Stamps
Last summer I was editing the Roman pottery contributions for the forthcoming third report on the excavations at the Bloomberg site in London. One of these contributions was Kay’s report on the site’s mortarium stamps which she completed in 2016. Reading her text, I was struck by how the phrasing mirrors her speech; it was like having Kay in the room providing a tutorial on why, how and what to record. This paper is not about the Bloomberg stamps but is a consideration of how one of Kay’s last reports for a London assemblage can be seen as a tutorial as well as a specialist publication.
Steven Moorehouse
Identifying Roman Landscapes from Medieval Documents, Historic Maps and Name Evidence
Numerous ways in which the multi-disciplinary work of a landscape historian can help understand the Roman and post-Roman landscapes using medieval documents, names and map sources. Topics to be covered will include groups of small villas around Roman forts and civilian settlements which show continuity throughout the post-Roman period as commercial centres to be recorded in the Domesday Book (as at Bainbridge), the identification of other such groups from boundaries shown on the first edition 6-inch OS maps (as at Malton and Stamford Bridge), and certain name elements and botanical evidence for identifying new Roman roads (as has been demonstrated at Dunnington, east of York).
Colin Wallace
Kay Hartley in Scotland – Early Days and a Lasting Legacy
Roman Scotland, the land north of the Tyne-Solway line, saw both some of Kay’s earliest work on mortaria, and some of her most significant. Here, where successive, separate Flavian, Antonine, and Severan-period occupations after campaigning mean that by and large the sites date the pottery, Kay came into her own. Here too, her work on the varied sources of mortaria (and by implication other coarse pottery) is important to discussing both the users and the suppliers of Roman pottery (not least in as much as considering whether they were different, or the same). Even one key exception to TSDTP, some pottery dating a whole occupation episode, was down to Kay. Kay’s work (alongside that of others) demonstrated quite firmly that there are differences between the periods – some expected with the passage of time, but some pointing to changing relationships between local people and Roman things, helping us escape emplotment. I will set her work in a Scottish/North British context, looking back to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I also intend – when there has been some recent difficulty with applying the word ‘industry’ in Romano-British pottery studies, not to mention an extreme reluctance to mention slavery – to follow her lead in thinking about just who made Roman mortaria in Britain, if not why. Uhuru!