Matt Walker  BA HONS

Project Officer

Matt has worked in commercial archaeology full time for 15 years and his experience covers a wide range of site types and periods, from Neolithic pit alignments and Bronze Age/Iron Age barrows to Medieval domestic houses, right through to 18th/19th Century industrial crucible/smelting furnaces. Matt has worked on multiple large rural open area excavations including expansive quarries, housing developments, and multiple large rural linear schemes, such as the East Coast water pipeline. The latter uncovered significant Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Romano – British and Anglo Saxon landscapes along the route. This included prehistoric land divisions and burial sites and a significant Anglo Saxon domestic settlement with dwellings and burials. Matt has also worked extensively on urban excavations, which uncovered significant and well preserved Medieval stone-built dwellings with surviving floor layers, on sites such as Saturday Market and Flemingate in Beverley and Fruit Market and Dry Dock in Hull. Matt also has experience with excavating human remains associated with the Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, and Anglo Saxon periods, and he has also worked on numerous organic remains, including Bronze Age timber trackways in a peat landscape, large Roman wicker baskets, Medieval and Roman leather shoes, and Roman carbonised structures. Matt has also worked on sites of National Importance including Edinburgh Castle, Bronze Age bank and ditch systems that were scheduled, and recently Roman remains in East Yorkshire.

While working for AOC (permanent in 2015) Matt has worked on numerous large scale road and linear schemes including the extensive Iron Age and Roman settlement remains along the route of the Beverley Southern Relief Road, Iron Age settlement remains along the route of HS2, a complex sequence of early Roman remains on the Brough Relief Road, and significant Iron Age and Roman remains on the cable route for Dogger Bank Wind Farm A and B, which included archaeology of national importance. In addition, Matt has worked on rural open area excavations including Roman settlement activity at Rickerby. Matt has also notably worked on multiple complex urban sites at Micklegate in central York, the Fruit Market in Hull, Coventry, and Hollis Croft, Sheffield. The urban sites included Roman, Medieval, post – Medieval, and Industrial archaeology.

Matt is skilled at the execution and delivery of large-scale archaeological projects, especially linear infrastructure schemes such as HS2 and Dogger Bank Wind Farm A and B. The latter required the excavation of 156 trenches across 32km of cable route in 2019 and multiple open area excavations in 2020-2021. He is also skilled at the execution of large-scale and complex urban archaeological projects such as Fruit Market, Hull and Hollis Croft, Sheffield. He is skilled at delivering projects on time and to budget, managing onsite H&S and environmental policies, and liaising with stakeholders, including developers, consultants, construction crews, land agents and planning officials. Matt is also experienced with post-excavation work including sampling, finds processing, and producing post-excavation assessment reports. Matt has recently been promoted to Project Manager and has since overseen an urban site in Nottingham and a site in Beverley, which uncovered Medieval structures.

Matt is a certified First Aider, has SSSTS and CSCS certification, and is experienced in the use of survey-grade GPS.