An Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery at Walkington Wold, Yorkshire

This paper presents a re-evaluation of a cemetery excavated over 30 years ago at Walkington Wold in east Yorkshire. The cemetery is characterized by careless burial on diverse alignments, and by the fact that most of the skeletons did not have associated crania. The cemetery has been variously described as being the result of an early post-Roman massacre, as providing evidence for a ‘Celtic’ head cult or as an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery. In order to resolve the matter, radiocarbon dates were acquired and a re-examination of the skeletal remains was undertaken. It was confirmed that the cemetery was an Anglo-Saxon execution cemetery, the only known example from northern England, and the site is set into its wider context in the paper

Communicating ‘smartness’: smart meter installers in UK homes

There is growing interest in ‘middle actors’ as influences on energy use in the built environment. This paper reports on novel research with four focus groups of meter installers, employed by three major energy suppliers, two in Great Britain and one in Northern Ireland. All the participants have been involved in installing smart meters or semi-smart keypad meters in homes. The Smart Metering Installation Code of Practice requires installers to be trained to communicate to householders the uses of, and potential benefits from, smart metering, along with any health and safety issues. Installers are also required to demonstrate how to use the in-home display that is offered to all customers, and to be able to give basic advice on energy efficiency. The smart meter rollout thus offers an opportunity for a representative of the supplier to go into every customer’s home and talk about energy with household members. Using transcripts from the focus groups, we analyse what the installers have to say about their work in terms of training, support, challenges, rewards, household priorities and concerns, and organisational issues. This material illustrates the social learning that can take place during and around the time of installation, for the utility and the installers themselves, as well as among households and their social networks. It highlights issues for policymakers when planning and evaluating smart metering programmes in terms of customer benefits from demand reduction, particularly those relating to installer training and working arrangements. To set the focus group material in context, the paper draws on findings from the UK Smart Metering Early Learning Project, published in 2015, which included a large-scale household survey