Helen Geake
Dr Helen Geake is one of the key members of Channel 4's popular and long-running archaeology series Time Team, presented by Tony Robinson, along with Mick Aston and Phil Harding.[1]
Geake was born in Wolverhampton in 1967 but grew up in Bath. She won a Blue Peter badge in the early 1980s, being judged "Highly Commended" in a garden design competition. She originally trained as a secretary. However, reading archaeology books and attending lectures by Mick Aston led her to study medieval archaeology at University College London. Subsequently she took a PhD at the University of York in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries contemporary with the spectacular ship burial at Sutton Hoo.[2]
After university she worked as assistant keeper of archaeology at Norwich Castle Museum. Currently she is Finds Advisor for Early Medieval to Post-Medieval Objects for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, based at Cambridge University Department of Archaeology.[3] She first worked for Time Team in 1998 as a digger, and took part occasionally thereafter as an Anglo-Saxon specialist. She joined the frontline team of presenters for the 2006 series.[4]
She has contributed a number of articles on her specialist field, editing and writing other works. In 2003 she was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.[5]
Geake is married. She has two sons and a daughter. She lives in Suffolk.
Selected works:
- The Use of Grave Goods in conversion-Period England c.600-c.850, British Archaeological Reports, Oxford, 1997. ISBN 0860549178
- 'Why were hanging bowls deposited in Anglo-Saxon graves?' in Medieval Archaeology vol. 43, 1999.
- Early Deira: Archaeological Studies of the East Riding in the Fourth to Ninth Centuries AD (editor, with Jonathan Kenny), Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2000. ISBN 1900188902