Hasted Prize

The Hasted Prize, inaugurated in 2007, is a biennial prize awarded by the KAS for what is assessed by a panel of judges to be the best thesis on an aspect of the archaeology or history of the historic County. The purpose of the Prize is to encourage research at a higher level on the County’s past, and to rescue academic theses that merit publication from the comparative obscurity of university library shelves. The Prize is worth £3000; £1000 goes directly to the successful entrant, and £2000 is retained by the Society to be used as a supplement towards the cost of publication once the work has been accepted by a publisher. Two books have been published with the help of the Hasted Prize.

The Hasted prize for 2011 has been awarded to Dr Alison Klevnäs for her Cambridge PhD thesis (2010): ‘Whodunnit? Grave robbery in early medieval northern and western Europe’.

The thesis draws on recent, mainly German, literature on grave robbing in central Europe and then closely examines and analyses similar practices and processes in Thanet during the 7th century. All copies of theses submitted for the Hasted Prize are available in the Society’s Library at Maidstone Museum.