Kenyon Medal

Professor Michael Fulford is awarded the 2025 Kenyon Medal for playing a leading role in advancing understanding of the Roman world, especially that of Roman Britain. His innovative research methods and his numerous influential publications – over 30 monographs alone - has greatly enhanced our understanding of urban and rural life, Roman pottery and the Roman economy.

At the age of about 11, a charismatic teacher inspired his interest in archaeology, which was further fostered at St Edward’s, Oxford, the school playing a key role in encouraging that interest and an early participation in excavations at Winchester under Martin Biddle and at Fishbourne under Barry Cunliffe, with whom he continued to excavate throughout his undergraduate years at Southampton University.

A more focused interest in the Roman world began with his PhD at Southampton under Barry and the late David Peacock, on the New Forest Roman pottery industry. This led to a lifelong curiosity in researching pottery as an indicator of Roman trade and economic activity, for example engaging in a major project with David Peacock on the ceramics of Punic, Roman and Byzantine Carthage and subsequently on the ceramics of Sabratha.

More recently, he oversaw the publication of the tens of thousands of the name stamps used by the potters working in the industries located across Roman Gaul which produced the distinctive and widely distributed red gloss tableware known in Britain as samian, an invaluable resource for researching such an important Roman industry.

After a short spell in Oxford as Professor Barry Cunliffe’s research assistant, he was appointed lecturer in archaeology at the University of Reading in 1974, where he has spent his whole career, promoted to a personal professorship in 1988, and also serving in the senior administrative roles of Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences and as Pro-Vice-Chancellor.

An early opportunity to carry out excavations from 1974 for the Directorate of Ancient Monuments at the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum at Silchester, Hampshire, conveniently located only 10 miles south of Reading, led to several major excavations to enrich and deepen our knowledge of the town and the lifeways of its inhabitants from its origins in the late Iron Age through to the end of the Roman occupation of Britain at the beginning of the fifth century.

Excavations explored both the public realm – amphitheatre, defences, forum basilica and public bath house – and the private, including a major, 25-year-long project on one insula, its publication only recently completed in 2024. Work continues on the publication programme as it does on the excavations undertaken with Professor Andrew Wallace Hadrill in the 1990s exploring the deep history of Pompeii through the lens of what became the House of Amarantus in Regio i.

While urban archaeology has been a dominant theme of Fulford's career, so has the countryside of Roman Britain and its rural economy. That early interest in the rural pottery industry of the New Forest led to landscape projects on the late Iron Age and Roman settlement of the chalk lands of Salisbury Plain and the estuarine landscape of the Severn Estuary where he worked with an inspirational geologist, the late Professor John R L Allen FRS.

Meanwhile a mass of new data on the rural settlement of Roman Britain was accumulating following the implementation of Planning Policy Guidance 16 in 1996 which required developers to mitigate the damage done to the heritage by their projects, including through the funding of excavations. With grants from English Heritage and the Leverhulme Trust it was possible to bring together this new evidence in three volumes, addressing themes of diversity of settlement, of rural economy and of funerary landscapes across newly defined regions of Roman Britain, also publishing the underpinning evidence online.

He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1994 and has served as, successively, the chair of its archaeology section, the chair of BASIS, now BIRI, the committee which oversees the funding of the research programmes of the international Schools, Institutes and Societies, and, finally, its Treasurer and Vice-President, 2010-15.

He has also served as President, the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, and as a Commissioner of English Heritage, subsequently, Historic England. It was an honour to be appointed CBE in 2011.

"I am greatly touched and honoured by the award of the Kenyon Medal, not something I would ever have expected. The award provides an opportunity to shine a light on the contribution of all the teams which have played such an essential role in the delivery of my research, and of two previous winners who helped shape my career: Dr Richard Reece who showed the schoolboy Fulford how to join an excavation and the late Professor David Peacock, my PhD supervisor and long term friend and colleague.

"It also gives me great pleasure to observe that Professor Stephen Rippon, my PhD student at Reading and winner of the Landscape Medal, will also be present at the awards ceremony, a case of the hare and the tortoise perhaps."

- Professor Michael Fulford, August 2025

The award was endowed by Sir Frederic Kenyon (1863-1952), elected a Fellow in 1903 and serving in turn as the British Academy’s sixth president and second secretary. The medal was awarded for the first time in 1957.