Stonehenge, Britain's iconic prehistoric monument, continues to fascinate. Thanks to recent research including a new series of excavations undertaken over the last 10 years, the public's appetite for the story of Stonehenge is a voracious as ever, demonstrated by countless documentaries, popular books and a new visitor centre at the site. Here we wish engage new audiences with the remarkable detailed evidence for the consumption of food at Stonehenge, that has recently come to light through the Feeding Stonehenge Project (FSP) funded by the AHRC. Food is central to all our lives, forming the structure of our days and lying at the heart of many social events. At the same time, food is the focus of many health concerns, with advice on the quality, quantity, type and source of food never far from the front page or the screen. This project will tap into this public appetite for all things edible by providing a prehistoric perspective on how foods were treated (acquired, prepared and consumed) in Neolithic Britain. We will show how scientists have made these discoveries through examination and molecular analysis of bones and artefacts, focusing on those recently excavated from the Stonehenge monumental complex. Through these twin core themes (food and science), we aim to substantially extend the reach and significance of the original research. To do this we will embed a post-doctoral researcher within English Heritage (EH) during their temporary exhibition "Feast! Food and Feasting at Stonehenge''. As an archaeological scientist, the PDRA will train staff and volunteers, and collaborate with the EH interpretation team to develop creative engagement activities whilst ensuring that these are aligned to the original Feeding Stonehenge research. In addition to the exhibition, we will bring in specialists (food interpreters and artists) and work with the local community to recreate some of the food procurement and culinary practices at the visitor centre through a series of workshops designed to engage the public. Working with the EH educational team and STEM Learning, the largest provider of science education and careers support to schools, we will develop primary and secondary schools resources to enthuse young scientists in the scientific aspects of the original research. Finally, we will create and deliver workshops to engage families adn young people at national cultural events through expertise and networks developed by Cardiff University's outreach group, Guerilla Archaeology. Guerilla Archaeology takes archaeology to new audiences at music festivals; these hugely popular 3-4 day events are fast becoming the most exciting places to creatively engage with research, and provide the potential to bring entirely new audiences to prehistory. Guerilla Archaeology will help us to deliver pop-up, provocative and highly interactive events that make the past present for younger audiences, and stress the important role that both scientific enquiry and cultural reflection can bring to our understanding of ancient, modern and future lives. We will evaluate the effectiveness of transferring our key messages to the large number of visitors to the Stonehenge Visitors Centre, festival goers and the local community using embedded evaluation, face to face surveys and online questionnaires. By end of the project, will we have transferred knowledge to EH staff, artists and food interpreters, members of the community local to Stonehenge, and the Guerialla Archaeology team who will be well placed to continue the dissemination activities leaving a legacy to this project. We also will have created a series of online schools resources that will be freely available and preserved for the foreseeable future and which can be easily expanded or used as template by other cultural heritage agencies.

This follow-on project will provide additional impact by distilling and disseminating knowledge acquired during the AHRC-funded "French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era" project. In the original bid, we envisaged small-scale participatory research workshops with theatre practitioners to explore practical issues surrounding the relationship between text and music in theatre of the time. By rehearsing scenes from melodrama we have shown that apparently simple musical cues operated on multiple levels -alluding to places or people; establishing atmosphere; marking moments of emotional release and coordinating the movement of actors. Follow-on funding would allow us to explore this much further and enable us to work more innovatively with 2 non-HEIs to put on public performances of plays not performed anywhere for nearly 200 years. Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond The Georgian Theatre Royal is the country's most complete Georgian playhouse, in regular use between 1788 and 1830. We have been asked us collaborate on a public performance of a Pixerécourt play (in new translation) with contemporary Napoleonic music. We will run workshops with the youth theatre, local amateur dramatics groups and schools in conjunction with the Theatre's artistic director and 2-3 professional actors, leading to a 'performance in a day'. In addition to the broader positive cultural impact of restaging this play, our work with local actors will enhance their knowledge and skills base by training them in French acting techniques of the period and opening their sensibilities to the relationship between music and text. The Theatre does not currently have the funds to invest in interpretation and so our work with them will provide valuable recordings to be used in their exhibition space and in subsequent outreach activities. Portchester Castle The collaboration with English Heritage at Portchester will allow us to explore the plays performed by Napoleonic prisoners of war, which included an ambitious selection of hits from the Paris stage but also their own plays, including a full-scale melodrama, Roseliska, written in 1810 by a 21-year old sergeant, Jean Baptiste Louis de Lafontaine, who had been an actor at the Théâtre des Troubadours in Paris. The play draws heavily on the Parisian tradition of grand spectacle whilst addressing a number of themes close to the prisoners' hearts. Conducting performance-based research is particularly fruitful when surroundings can be properly taken into consideration. Although the wooden staging has not survived, the dimensions and acoustics of the basement of the Keep at Portchester are as they were in 1809/10 and working with actors and musicians alongside EH archaeologists allows us unique access into the mechanics of prisoner-of-war theatricals. Roseliska for instance has a scene where the hero escapes out of a window - working in situ will allow us to explore the possibility that the prisoners used the architecture of the keep to their advantage rather than constructing a set for this scene... Performing and recording the prisoners' own play will bring the Keep to life for visitors and allow them to discover more about the ingenuity and creativity of those detained. The performances will bring other benefits to Portchester, including increased visibility as an English Heritage property, potentially an increase in visitor numbers and income and will allow the Castle to expand the topics covered in its schools work. To coincide with the public performances at Portchester and in Richmond, we will run workshops for local schools on performing melodrama and the relationship between text and music. In this, we will be able to draw on our experience from running similar events in Oxford and Coventry in 2014. Staging Napoleonic theatre will allow us to reach new audiences, significantly enhance the value and wider benefits of the original project and create a firm basis for further collaboration with our non HEI partners.

The heritage industry has been struggling with the legacy of colonialism in their organisations for decades, however, it has only recently become a priority for curators and programmers to actively challenge colonial power structures embedded in heritage sites. Traditionally museum and heritage site narratives were designed to curate historical events through a particular lens, often fraught with colonial and empirical power structures. At the same time, UK and US based heritage organisations have raised concern over outdated exhibition styles, looking to curatorial innovation to attract more diverse, and younger, audiences. The core research inquiry of this project is to investigate the combination of immersive technologies and immersive performance as tools for decolonisation, that has the potential to attract diverse, 21st century audiences. The project asks how digital heritage performance, using in particular Mixed Reality technologies, can aid heritage sites in their endeavour to attract new audiences while critically engaging the public with under-represented voices and viewpoints of troubled European and colonial histories. To achieve this goal, the project will design and develop two innovative immersive heritage experiences combining Mixed Reality, in the form of smart glasses, and live performance at heritage sites in the UK and US focusing on under-represented stories from 18th century enslaved and freed slave populations living in London and Deerfield, Massachusetts. The research will further future transatlantic industry innovation by providing heritage workers, and their creative industry partners, with two toolkits to assist the design, implementation, and staff training for the use of MR immersive heritage experiences. In collaboration with historians, immersive technology designers, digital storytellers, performance makers, cultural heritage researchers, on-site staff, and marginalised communities at each heritage site, the project will explore appropriate design methodologies to create an affective story driven participatory experience that challenges colonial narratives in each site. The aim is to produce a toolkit to enable and support a sustainable design collaboration between heritage organisations and the creative industries in the process of decolonisation. In parallel, reflective design will examine challenges of such collaborations, in terms of digital scholarship, required skills, and technical and logistic aspects. It will then deliver a training toolkit for heritage staff and performers, that can help the heritage industry build digital capacity, create sustainable engagement with hybrid technological experiences as tools for decolonising museum sites, teach them innovative theatrical techniques in working with MR platforms, and explore emerging digital and performance skill sets and roles.

This follow-on proposal will provide significant additional impact by empowering young people to engage directly and creatively with research developed during the AHRC-funded "French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era" project (2013-2017). In performing a new play about the Caribbean Revolutionaries held at Portchester Castle in 1796, members of the National Youth Theatre and local Hampshire community groups will bring that research to both a live audience and a global virtual one. A recording of the production will be the centrepiece of a range of educational resources to help English Heritage tell a forgotten part of Black History. The original research showed how important theatre was in shaping debates about nationhood and political legitimacy during the First Empire and how prisoner-of-war theatre fostered cultural exchange, themes that will be echoed in the new play. In 1807, French prisoners of war on board the prison hulk The Crown, moored in Portsmouth Harbour, opened a Theatre of Emulation (the name comes from one of the popular Boulevard theatres in Paris) and premiered a 4-act historical drama, The Revolutionary philanthropist or Hecatomb on Haiti, which tackled the incendiary topic of the Haitian Revolution. A manuscript of the play survives and it shares a number of themes with the only other known surviving French prisoner-of-war play manuscript of the period, Roseliska, which premiered at Portchester Castle in 1810. Ideas of freedom, imprisonment, resistance, patriotism and loyalty suffuse both texts but, unlike Roseliska, the Revolutionary Philanthropist is unperformable in a 21st-century context because it reproduces 18th-century notions of racial difference that are wholly unacceptable today. In 2019, sound artist Elaine Mitchener subverted the intention of the anonymous author of the Revolutionary Philanthropist to highlight Black agency in the struggle for emancipation by using extracts from it in a Warwick-commissioned sound installation, 'Les Murs sont témoins /These Walls Bear Witness' at Portchester Castle. This has revealed the potential for working creatively with the play as a means of exploring the Revolution in the Caribbean and Portchester's role in global history: over 2000 Black revolutionaries from St Lucia, St Vincent, Guadeloupe and Haiti, including women and children, were captured by the British in 1796 and sent to Portchester. Their lives mirror those of the on-stage rebels in the Revolutionary Philanthropist. Heritage Lottery Funding has already paid for me to work with a director, Mumba Dodwell and a playwright, Lakesha Arie-Angelo since July 2020, and for 2 weeks of R&D [research and development] workshops under English Heritage's flagship youth engagement programme Shout Out Loud. Two powerful work-in-progress performances have been transformational for those involved. The NLHF money was never going to be enough to cover a full production and it is clear that the legacy of the project will now fall short of its full potential unless the new play is performed on site at Portchester to engage meaningfully with decolonising Portchester's history as a prison-of-war depot. Follow-on funding would enable us to continue to work with playwright and director and record the production to use as the focal point of a range of educational resources. A live streaming of the play will be broadcast simultaneously on the EH and NYT YouTube channels, which between them have 1.3 million subscribers. The new play, written in conjunction with young Black actors from NYT, explores fundamental questions about human rights, discrimination, identity and power. It moves beyond traditional narratives of the enslaved as victims and celebrates the role of women in Revolution. Bringing it to production would allow us to reach new audiences, especially in the Caribbean, significantly enhance the value and wider benefits of the original research project and enable young people to take ownership of history.

The Tudor period continues to captivate and maintain a presence in popular culture. Henry VIII's reign, in particular, fascinates as much for its architectural magnificence and courtly splendour, its music, masques, tournaments and hunting parties as for its dynastic concerns, political machinations and religious controversies. 2020 will mark the quincentenary of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, described as "the most spectacular progress". It is an opportune moment not only to assess the characteristics, iconography and material culture associated with Tudor royal progresses and ceremony, but also to invite network participants, project partners and the public to engage with and reflect on what it means for us in the 21st century. This one-year research network led by Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) and the University of York (UoY) will examine the nature and significance of Henry VIII's journeys between royal residences and to parts of the realm, setting them in their political, social and cultural context and considering their implications for modern heritage practice and management. A wealth of archival and material evidence survives, yet Henry's progresses have never been systematically studied. Our network aims to recover their role within the regional and national politics of 16th century England and assess their cultural significance both on a broader international stage and at a crucial moment in the development of English Renaissance architecture, drama, art and music. Using surviving records we will track the movements of Henry VIII and his court, their impact on venues visited, and how progresses affected perceptions of access to the king in Tudor England. We will explore notions of public and private space and assess the logistical challenges entailed in supplying and accommodating an itinerant household. We will also evaluate the role of Henry's progresses in fashioning an image of the monarchy, and the consequences of the cultural and material legacy for interpretation of the Tudors as a heritage phenomenon today. The workshops and conference initiated by this network will interrogate the whole phenomenon of royal progresses with a view to identifying research priorities, exploring which themes might be most fruitfully pursued, and ascertaining the most appropriate methodologies to be employed (including digital and virtual reality technologies) in anticipation of applying for funding for a larger multi-disciplinary and collaborative project. The participating scholars and heritage experts will aim to challenge orthodoxies associated with royal progresses, enabling clearer distinction between Henry VIII's expeditions and those of his medieval predecessors and Tudor successors. In short, this network will begin the work of re-connecting Henry VIII's royal palaces (whether extant buildings or archaeological sites) with the culture of royal magnificence that created them and gave them their meaning. Tudor monarchs are central to the presentation of historic royal sites including Hampton Court and the Tower of London (HRP). This project builds on a public appetite for information on the Tudors heightened by period dramas filmed at historic locations. There is also public interest in lost Tudor palaces such as Whitehall, Nonsuch, Greenwich, and the old Palace of Westminster (subject of a major AHRC project led by Cooper). Royal residences outside London (e.g. Sudeley Castle and Beaulieu Palace) and elite houses (e.g. Greys Court and the Vyne), were built by or altered for Henry VIII and possess important architectural and archaeological remains that deserve better investigation and public presentation. HRP and UoY will use their technical expertise in creating immersive experiences through virtual and augmented reality to bring venues to life for visitors by exploring existing palaces and recreating 'lost palaces' as well as aural and visual experiences of the court on progress.