Issue 104

Jan / Feb 2009

Contents

news

Britain’s oldest string found off Isle of Wight

Antiquities scheme saved: time to go to sea?

Consultation on ancient human remains ended Jan 31

In the press

In Brief & Phase 2

features

Rethinking Bush Barrow
New insights into a famous burial excavated 200 years ago

THE BIG DIG: Chichester
Burials at a leper hospital document this feared medieval disease

PEACE SITE: Greenham Common
John Schofield reports on the an archaeology of protest at the former US air base

Archaeology that matters
Gilly Carr investigates the world war two relics of the Channel Islands

on the web

Recommended websites
Caroline Wickham-Jones goes underwater and two new resources for Surrey are launched

letters

your views and responses

CBA correspondent

Campaigns, comment and communications from the CBA
Lynne Walker and Mike Anthony give an annual pick of listed building cases

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

PEACE SITE

An Archaeology of Protest at Greenham Common Air Base

Cruise missiles came to Greenham Common 25 years ago: three weeks later, thousands of protesting womenen circled the US air base. The missiles had gone by 1991, and the protestors by 2000.Archaeologist John Schofield, with the Common Ground Research Group, has beenr ecording the traces of peace camps.

On November 14 1983 the British defence secretary Michael Heseltine announced that American cruise missiles had arrived at Greenham Common airbase in Berkshire. So began one of the best known and most contested confrontations of the cold war: not between East and West, capitalism and communism, so much as between those that favoured an end to arms through maintaining a nuclear deterrent, and those that did not. Women-only peace camps were already established around the American airbase, and remained there for several years, their occupants challenging authority through nonviolent protest and direct action. These camps expanded and multiplied with the arrival of cruise. What happened next, over the following 10 or so years, shaped many people’s experiences of the cold war. Amongst the women at Greenham were archaeologists and students of archaeology. Some will be readers of BA magazine.

Much has changed over 25 years. The cold war ended, and across Europe political borders have disappeared. In Britain we now welcome eastern Europeans into our lives, communities and work. The war’s iconic places have changed too. The front line military base at Greenham Common, a closed and secretive establishment, has reverted to common land. The original “technical site” is now a business park. John Kippin, one of the artists inspired by the site, was commissioned by the Ministry of Defence to document its transition. There is a peace garden, established and maintained by the women who once protested here. And the place where cruise missiles were once stored and maintained – the fantastically named GAMA site (Ground-launched cruise missiles Alert and Maintenance Area) – is now protected as a scheduled monument.

Cold war heritage

English Heritage assessed Greenham Common in 1999, as part of a wider study of cold war heritage. That first brought me to GAMA, when colleagues and I stumbled upon earthworks in the woodland immediately south-east of its enclosure. During this short visit beyond the fence, we saw artefacts on the ground, posts that had been painted and faint graffiti on the road surface depicting white doves leaving GAMA behind them. We photographed a tattered fence whose cuts, repairs and counter-cuts represent a stratigraphy perhaps unique in its form and significance.

Others also noticed the fence. James Symmonds Roberts wrote a poem about it:

Now, in its senility,
the base has lost whole chapters,
bailed up like a harvest
between pointless concrete posts
like standing stones.
There is no longer any difference
between outside and in.
Extract fromThe Fence, 2001

The fence wasmore than just a physical boundary, although its physicality was a major part of its significance, determining the nature of the Greenham protest. The journalist David Fairhall described it also as a potent symbolic barrier to communication with a military force. The fact that a fence remains at GAMA, even now, illustrates to modern visitors that an “inside” and an “outside” were once the pervading characteristics of this distinctive landscape.

The realisation that GAMA and the airbase were not all that mattered here amounted to a eureka moment for me. Regardless of viewpoint, the peace camps were central to the Greenham story. One could make sense of neither GAMA nor camps without the other. This is not simply about context, or setting. These two archaeological phenomena are integral to one another; parts of the whole, albeit divided (in the case of GreenGate at least) by a tattered fence that some no doubt want removed.

Greenham had several peace camps. In subsequent visits with others, including staff from West Berkshire council, we sought the physical traces which I expected to survive where camps were not affected by later road widening or development. Three of the original sites seemed largely intact: at what the women called Green, Turquoise and Orange Gates. Parts of the camp at Blue Gate also seemed to have survived in woodland, while those at Yellow, Red and Indigo Gates were completely gone. Oral history and published accounts show these camps had distinctive social characteristics. Caroline Blackwood described Yellow or Main Gate as having the largest camp, and a “special urban desolation that made it grimmer than the rest”. Green Gate, established in January 1983, she called the “camp of intellectuals”, possessed of a “cosmic” atmosphere – a reference to symbolic actions such as weaving webs to represent strength in unity. There was a musicians gate, while Blue Gate developed a reputation as a community of tough, occasionally rowdy youngsters!

Could these camp characteristics be manifested in their physical remains? To find out, a more detailed archaeological study of one camp was planned, and the Common Ground Research Group (CGRG) came together.

Mapping Turquoise Gate

In a project directed by Yvonne Marshall and supported by the University of Southampton and a CBA Challenge Fund grant, work was undertaken at TurquoiseGate, a camp established in December 1983 by women from Blue Gate seeking a separate vegan zone. It was among the shortest lived of the Greenham camps, and was occupied intermittently by small numbers of women. The work was in three stages. Helpfully and throughout, SashaRoseneil, a former peace woman from Green Gate and author of two books on Greenham, participated actively in fieldwork and interpretation.

First of all, we mapped topography, vegetation and all visible cultural features and artefacts. We identified a concentration of protest-related artefacts, which as a second stage we subjected to more detailed, intensive survey, recording and collecting by metre square all objects exposed on the ground surface. We identified two clear features at this second stage – the base of a scrap wood structure, and a large fire pit. Some 150 objects we recovered included: car parts, bricks, concrete, tiles, wood, wire, plastic sheeting, plastic bags, clothing, wrappers, cans, bottles, kitchen utensils, toys and pharmaceuticals. The personal, domestic nature of many of these items ties them strongly to the occupants of the camp, and one – a discarded Smiths crisps wrapper bearing promotional information about the James Bond film Octopussy, released in 1983 – is definitively placed during the camp’s occupation. We also found a doll’s torso. A photograph published around 1985 shows doll body parts attached to the fence, one of them a torso identical to that recovered. The aim of protestors, some tell us, was to soften the fence; to subvert it,make it look less male, less military and more ridiculous. This was achieved often, as here, through transgression and by translating context – putting private things on public view, or creating something exquisite from rubbish.

As the project developed we in CGRG came to realise the sensitivity of the camps, considered sacred by many of those who once lived here. The methodology for our third stage changed as a result, with objects no longer collected, but recorded in situ and left as found. 3D point locations were captured for every artefact allowing spatial analyses to be conducted within a GIS, a project undertaken by Southampton MSc student Kayt Armstrong.

Not collecting surface artefacts allowed us to cover larger areas and a wider,more extensive survey revealed further hearths, stashed building materials, milk bottles, face cream jars and the remains of shelters beyond the area originally studied. Some 475 artefacts were recorded in this way, mostly occurring in two clusters that displayed subtle differences in the types of evidence contained – raising the possibility that camp activities could be reconstructed, much as archaeologists describe activity zones at ephemeral occupation sites from early prehistory.

The nature of the objects and their spatial distribution challenged the identity of Turquoise Gate established in literary and oral history. It was supposed to have been a camp of vegans, separated from Blue Gate. Yet the boundary between the two sites is not distinct, suggesting some spatial continuity. There were also a significant number of milk bottles on site: were the women really all vegan, or were they re-using the bottles? Were there children on site that needed milk? Perhaps the identity of the camp was blurred in reality, yet clearer and more distinct in the way women remember it?

“Money for bottle tops?”

Among the many visitors who helped us during fieldwork were two peace women, Lorna Richardson and Lynette Edwell. They took us to the small, previously unrecorded camp at Emerald Gate which they had occupied on various occasions to monitor GAMA. I was reminded of some of Lewis Binford’s ethnographic research, and specifically his Mask Site where Nunamiut hunters watched and waited. Emerald camp was found intact with some personal utensils, and rolled polythene sheeting used for tents or “benders”, still in the hiding place or cache under gorse bushes where they had been left many years before. The moment when Richardson rediscovered her coffee mug was captured in a photograph which seemed to sum-up the Greenham project and what we had set out to achieve. There was an intimacy to this moment which it was a privilege to share.

Given the involvement of artists at Greenham, and the strong artistic content in many protest actions, it seemed fitting that artists be part of the work. Kristin Posehn, then undertaking PhD research at Winchester School of Art, photographed and filmed fieldwork in process. Some of her photographs accompany this article. The focus of Lucy Orta’s previous work was examining the social bonds within communities and the relationships between individuals and their environments. In the early 1990s, Orta began a series of works that combined architecture, fashion and social activism. These works took the form of temporary refuges, prototype survival clothing, portable shelters, and tent villages for emergencies. There seemed an obvious resonance here with events at Greenham.

On her first visit, Orta was particularly taken with the control tower, the scene of an important event in the history of Greenham protests. It became her space of intervention, where she would investigate potential of the abandoned building for which she imagined a new life and a new meaning – a life thus far represented in models and drawings, but which may gain more concrete expression in the future. The results of this work were exhibited at Fort Asperen (a Dutch waterline defence site that features annual art events) in June–September 2008.

This project is one of diverse yet related strands. There is the relationship between art and archaeology for instance, and between the ephemera and transience of the archaeological record on one side of the fence, and monumental architecture on the other. There is also the question of acceptance and legitimacy as heritage. Why is one type of evidence OK, and another not? For archaeologists, the artwork presented an opportunity to view the site, so familiar to us all for different reasons, in new light. Orta had never before worked with archaeologists, or been influenced by them...not knowingly anyway. Some of us had never worked with an artist.

Greenham, ultimately, was about unity and confrontation. This was evident to some extent within the protest community, as also between that community and those whose actions they opposed – and those that opposed the camps. As a research group, we had our difficult moments about methodology and approach, partly perhaps related to gender and politics, but also about what was appropriate. Should artefacts be removed from the site, for example, or even be displayed in magazines like [BA], without the owners’ consent? Some striking images have been withheld from [publication in the printed magazine] for this reason.

It was not an easy project. Opinion on its validity may be sharply divided. Grant applications were mostly unsuccessful. I gave a presentation around 2001 to a committee who had in their gift a potentially significant grant award. They listened to my presentation on material culture and memory, and why this project was more about social context than the objects themselves, then a panel member asked, “So, let me get this right: you are asking for money to find bottle tops, crisp bags and baked bean tins?” I answered (with some exasperation), “In a way, yes”. We did not get the grant, but I enjoyed the moment. Perhaps work still needs to be done to persuade a sometimes sceptical public that contemporary archaeology can be worthwhile and socially relevant.

This project was undertaken by the Common Ground Research Group. In addition to the author, this comprises: Yvonne Marshall (Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton), Duncan Brown (Southampton City Museums), Veronica Fiorato (English Heritage), Andrew Crosby, Lucy Orta, Kristin Posehn (Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands) and Sasha Roseneil (Birkbeck College, University of London). Lucy Orta’s work was funded by the Arts Council, and the archaeological survey with a CBA Challenge Fund grant. John Schofield works for English Heritage’s Characterisation Team.

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