DRAGEN Tales features projects from the DRAGEN Lab and Environments of Change.

On Wednesday, October 9th the DRAGEN Lab hosted the first free lecture of the 2024/2025 academic year with an exciting summary of Dr. Stephen Sherlock’s archeological work in the United Kingdom.

On Saturday August 10th, our team of students in North Yorkshire broke ground at an archaeological dig in Streethouse, UK. Just north of Loftus in an old farm field, the site was first discovered as a focus of curiosity when Dr. Stephen Sherlock had hired a third party to conduct a geophysical scan of the terrain. Upon analysis of the results, Sherlock noticed that there were some indicators of archaeological activity in the field.

Last week, our Streethouse team received GPS training, and learned about the process of Lidar drone scanning on-site by a third party called Tri-Tech Surveys, out of North Yorkshire. Throughout the process, our representative named Johnny, supported our team in learning the basics to capturing GPS location data, and had students mastering the skill of using a surveying GPS in preparation for sedimentary core sampling which would begin the next day. This is a skillset that would also later be applied to archaeological field work with Dr. Stephen Sherlock. 

While on their research assignments in north Yorkshire, members of our team were eager to attend a medieval iron smelting demonstration in Sutton Bank. This area of the UK was an historic site for medieval iron bloomeries and smelting.

During the first week of August 2024, a small group of students from the DRAGEN Lab began a month-long research and work assignment that has taken them to Streethouse, located in North Yorkshire. For the duration of this assignment, the team will be participating in various research and experiential learning opportunities to support work being conducted by Dr. Stephen Sherlock, a project collaborator, and his archaeological expeditions at the Streethouse Farm.

It is an odd thing to do, isn’t it? To dig out dust from a brick of a church and eat it? Even more curious is the practice surrounding this belief when considering that the bricks of the outer church were not themselves miraculous, but simply close to the miraculous wooden statue of Saint Job.

The wooden statue of Saint Job at Sint-Martinuskerk (Church of Saint Martin) sits within a glass case elevated about five feet off the ground. Job is magnificent — he is handsome and captivating despite being small in size. Miraculously, despite fires, thefts, and the arduous passage of time, this statue of Saint Job remains housed in the village church of Wezemaal, Belgium, which saw its veneration by pilgrims in the late Middle Ages

Week three of the work term for members of the DRAGEN Lab team led them to North Yorkshire, to engage with artifacts discovered during archaeological excavations at Streethouse from 1979 to the present day.

When I visited Sint-Dimpnakerk (The Church of Saint Dymphna) in Geel, Belgium at the end of May to learn more about the church and the history surrounding Saint Dymphna, I did not anticipate finding six pilgrim badges in a sixteenth-century enclosed garden (Besloten Hofje) in a corner of the church.

Two years ago, I became interested in several Saint Job pilgrim badges from a village church in Wezemaal, Belgium. This church saw throngs of medieval pilgrims flock to its site for healing and protection from physical ailments. I now find myself drawn to another pilgrimage site just thirty-five kilometres north of Wezemaal in Geel, Belgium, where pilgrims flocked not for healing of their bodies, but of their minds. Sint-Dimpnakerk (the Church of Saint Dymphna) marks where the legendary seventh-century Dymphna is honoured as both patron saint of the city and of mental illness.