Martin Carver
Martin Oswald Hugh Carver FSA BSc (London), Dip.Archaeol. (Durham), MIFA, is Professor of Archaeology at the University of York, England, and director of the Sutton Hoo Research Project and a leading exponent of new methods in excavation and survey. He specialises in the archaeology of early Medieval Europe. He has an international reputation for his work in Europe and for his major research project at Sutton Hoo, on behalf of the British Museum and the Society of Antiquaries. He is now directing major new excavations on the Pictish monastery at Portmahomack Tarbat, Easter Ross, Scotland. Previously he served in the Royal Tank Regiment
His previous post was at the University of Birmingham, where he set up the Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit (BUFAU), now called Birmingham Archaeology, one of the leading professional archaeological units in Britain, carrying out widespread contracting work. Carver also set up Field Archaeology Specialists Ltd. (FAS) in 1992 as a field unit in charge of the excavations at the Sutton Hoo project. FAS is currently based in York and carries out archaeological work in and around the Yorkshire area.
Martin Carver is also the inventor of the Carver matrix. This diagram, which is based on the Harris matrix is designed to represent the time lapse in use of recognisable archaeological entities such as floors and pits. Like Ed Harris he used contexts numbered and defined on site as the basic elements of the sequence, but he added higher order groupings ("feature" and "structure") to increase the interpretive power. Several other people such as N Hammond looked to develop similar systems in the 1980s and 90s.
His recent publications included Sutton Hoo Burial Ground of kings (BMP), Sutton Hoo. A Seventh-century princely burials ground and its context (BMP), (ed) The Age of Sutton Hoo (Boydell Press), Archaeological Value and Evaluation (SAP, Mantova), (ed.) The Cross goes North (Boydell Press).
Martin Carver is currently editor of the world archaeolgy journal ''Antiquity''.