Dr Tim Copeland
Tim is a Visiting Fellow in Landscape Archaeology. He taught archaeology, from pre-history to the medieval period, at the University of Gloucestershire for twelve years before taking early retirement to have more time to do archaeology. Concurrently, he was a Visiting Fellow at Bristol University contributing to both archaeology and media-studies courses, specifically concerned with documentaries about the past, including the hugely successful Channel Four series ‘Time Team’. Tim has an interest in Public Archaeology which has led to working with English Heritage, the National Trust, Historic Scotland and CADW producing guidebooks for visitors, and evaluating education provision at their sites. He was involved in the concept design of the celebrated Jorvik Viking Centre in York. This interest in what would now be called ‘Heritage Education’ resulted in Tim being appointed Chair of the Council for British Archaeology’s Education Committee, Chair of the Council of Europe’s Heritage Education Expert Committee, and advising European governments as contrasting as Finland, Spain and Romania on heritage policy, the most recent being in Prague for the Czech Republic. His work has been published in at least eight languages. Tim was also an advisor for the National Curriculum in History writing the ‘Schemes of Work’ for the Greek, Roman and Viking modules. More recently, he has been co-ordinating the writing up and publication of ‘cold-cases’, un-published excavation reports from the 1960s-2000s, in the Federal Republic of Congo and Hong Kong, as well the United Kingdom. Responding to the Thatcher government’s legislation on the need to explore and protect the historic environment before commercial or industrial development, Tim became a Director of Nexus Archaeology, a practice assessing threats and monitoring progress of archaeological interventions. Perhaps the proudest moment in his career was being elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries (FSA).
In terms of professional archaeology his first excavation was at the Roman Legionary fortress of ISCA, near Newport in South Wales at the age of 9 years. ISCA has interested him throughout his career, and as a tribute to the builders, occupants and excavators of the site his latest book is ‘Life in A Roman Fortress’. His main archaeological projects have been excavations in Mediaeval Hereford and Chepstow throughout the 1980s, Roman Villas and their landscapes especially the Roman Villa at Chedworth, and the prehistoric and Roman sites in the Thames Valley that were being destroyed by gravel extraction, the later flooding of which now form the Cotswold Water Park. His research interests are focussed on the changing landscapes of the late Iron Age and early Roman periods, especially and the archaeology of Oppida, late Iron Age centres of political importance throughout Europe. As well as his archaeological publications for academic journals there have been more popular books, ‘Akeman Street: Moving Iron Age and Roman Landscapes’ the archaeology of a Roman road, ‘An Archaeological Walking Guide to the Cotswold Way’ about sites of all periods on the Cotswold Scarp, and ‘Roman Gloucestershire’. Most recently he has been developing phenomenological approaches to the study of historic landscapes.
He enjoys Scandi/Celtic/French noire crime series on television, the music of the Baroque period especially Bach, and Mozart and Beethoven, 1940-70 Modern Jazz, real ales, and shopping in Waitrose.