Two hundred people signed into the society’s first Conference-on-the-Web on Saturday 4 April. They heard and watched new archaeological discoveries across Buckinghamshire ahead of the construction of the HS2 high-speed rail line. They were all sitting safely in their own homes.

The speakers told of a Saxon longhouse excavated at Great Missenden, what appears to be a ceremonial circle on the route through the Chiltern escarpment at Wendover, Roman farm buildings in the Colne Valley, and a Saxon ‘sunken-floor’ building at Chetwode.

The on-line conference was a joint effort between the Bucks Archaeological Society and Fusion, who are the main archaeological contractors for HS2. Fusion provided the speakers and organised the ‘webinar’ technology which delivered the four-hour conference into people’s homes. Applause is difficult to project on-line, but a stream of email messages followed the end of the conference complimenting the speakers and the organisers.

The society’s members led the way by assessing the impact of HS2 on the county’s archaeology as soon as the HS2 project was announced in 2010.

• You can read the full conference-on-the-web report here.
• View earlier BAS reports on archaeological sites affected by HS2 here.

The online conference was recorded. We will try and bring you a link to it as soon as we can.