Issue 110

Jan / Feb 2010

Contents

news

Burnt mound theory tested to perfection

Dig find proves flowers placed in bronze age graves

UK's first complete Roman lantern found in Suffolk

Research continues as Saxon hoard is valued at £3.3m

in the press

in brief & phase 2

features

Newhenge: Latest discoveries and interpretations from the Stonehenge Riverside Project team

Dig the beat: Exploring pop music from an archaeological perspective, including additional online content

THE BIG DIG Mellor: A hillfort in the garden: This long-running research excavation near Stockport, Greater Manchester, is now ready for publication

The Peat Men from Clonycavan and Oldcroghan: Findings of the Bog Bodies Research Project at the National Museum of Ireland, with Bibliography

letters

your views and responses

on the web

Caroline Wickham-Jones looks at archaeological gifts

Dan Pett summarises the website set-up and technologies for the Staffordshire Hoard

spoilheap

in view

The danger of heritage

In a broadcast world that chases noise, glamour and trivia, Greg Bailey finds solace at the Open University – but warns against complacency.

Two very different recent media events prompted me, once more, to consider the place of archaeological discussion in the public arena. The first (see Spoilheap, this issue) was Nick Griffin's ill-advised BBC Question Time appearance, during which he was reported as saying "We [implying the white British] are the aborigines here". Griffin's ill-digested notion was presumably co-opted from archaeological books or broadcasts about prehistoric Europe: a bleak reminder that archaeology can be dangerous stuff if misappropriated. By contrast, the second reminder (see My archaeology, this issue) was an occasion at Cambridge University celebrating a humanitarian – a muchloved public figure. At the most recent of Pamela Jane Smith's Personal Histories events, Sir David Attenborough was invited to recall his work with Paul Johnstone and Glyn Daniel pioneering TV archaeology, first on Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? then Buried Treasure and subsequently, as its first controller, developing bbc2's archaeology and history department and the seminal Chronicle strand.

With Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? archaeology was there at the very beginning of mass television broadcasting in Britain, and Attenborough admits to the avowedly "educational ambition Paul [Johnstone] and I had for the programme". However, following Attenborough's entertaining talk, he was joined by veteran Chronicle producers Ray Sutcliffe, Anna Benson Gyles and David Collison, and questions from the distinguished audience elicited opinion from several present that such ambition for TV archaeology today was either lacking or even no longer possible.

While Attenborough was at pains to point out changed historical circumstances – with audiences and incomes spread thinly across today's multi-channel and multi-platform media – the future of intelligent factual archaeology programming remained in question. Yet among the dross I regularly see and hear archaeological topics dealt with thoughtfully and creatively, both on BBC TV and radio (I leave aside the benchmark Time Team here, a very particular case which relieves Channel 4 of the need to reinvent the genre).

Among many others, these delights spring to mind, sharing a common advocacy: the quiet brilliance of Aubrey Manning's Landscape Mysteries, the accessible, clever edutainment of Coast, Radio 4's Things We Forgot to Remember, and its social-science flagship Thinking Allowed, which recently featured a discussion of grave goods with archaeologist Duncan Sayer.

Amid a clamour of shiny-floor plebiscitary game shows, mockumentaries and reality car-crash TV, the Open University still seems to provide intellectual backbone for the BBC with what is now an alternative, Reithian, model. Indeed, I have increasingly come to expect an OU production credit at the end of most stimulating, and for that matter entertaining, BBC factual output. The Open University has belatedly revived courses in archaeology and heritage studies, and correspondingly, to fully fund supporting broadcasts. And so it was a recent BBC2 strand which went some way to answering my concerns.

Saving Britain's Past, a seven-part series first shown in May 2009 on bbc2, had Times architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff outlining the often fractious history of debate concerning our built environment. He explained how, according to OU's introductory literature, in a radical period of postwar change, Britain decided what to keep and what to lose. In investigating a key event or battle each programme would define a decade's attitude to heritage – from Bath where the bomb damage inflicted on Britain's most beautiful city resulted in the birth of listed building status, to Brick Lane, Britain's most multicultural street, where debates are defined by cultural, religious and commercial interests.

I spoke to OU's broadcast and learning executive Caroline Ogilvie, who explained the programme's inception. "A few years ago when we were thinking about developing courses around heritage, I took the idea to the BBC who initially were not very interested at all. But over time [they] changed their view, and we developed the idea together... I got very excited at the prospect of being able to say to people, heritage isn't about what perceived wisdom may be. It is about empowering individuals to go out and fight to save something that they care deeply about; and to try and be a motivating force rather than a passive force, which television quite often is. We were trying to get people stirred up to want to see the importance of individuals taking a stand about things. To challenge what they perceive as heritage really. That it isn't all about the Tower of London and monuments and old buildings, it's current and relevant and very much of the 21st century."

Archaeologist Rodney Harrison, who with Susie West was academic consultant for and helped develop Saving Britain's Past, went on to tell me that "A lot of broadcasting confuses heritage with history, confuses heritage with an aesthetic model". "You know", he continued, "old stuff that's very pretty, very elite heritage... What we wanted to do was to introduce the idea that heritage was very much about the present. It's not really about the past, it's about the way we use the past to create a sense of social identity in the present. Hence the idea that heritage has changed through time."

As to the public role and responsibility of the professional archaeologist, Harrison articulated my own scattered thoughts rather succinctly. "There are all sorts of vested interests in this", he said. "I think the myth of the archaeologist as expert is something that's quite difficult to let go of for practitioners. Because if we let go of it, then it means that other people have an interest in the things that we study and we have to allow them an equal interest. For someone like me interested in engaging in work around the politics of the past, it's very important to allow people in and to be informed about the way in which archaeological debates are created and played out in an academic arena, and the way in which people's subject positions derive from particular political, social and academic contexts."

"In a way there's better scope for doing it on radio", Harrison continued, "and that's why I'm keen on doing more radio now. But, you know, I think we could also do it on television. You could show the way in which different people debate the meaning of particular archaeological sites, discussions that go on behind the academic scenes rather than presenting the argument as closed."

Indeed, and such discussion is not confined to received messages, as the Open University encourages viewers to "map the nation's contemporary heritage", by visiting Open2.net "to record a place, object or practice that means something to their [own] sense of identity and community".

Given these turbulent times and our short collective memory, with economic trouble, the threats of terrorism and environmental disaster, an impatience with democratic politics and a dwindling fourth estate – not to mention the chaotic state of British TV, with two of our terrestrial channels forced to seek new chief executives – alarm bells might be sounding for concerned academics working in the public sphere. And if the extreme right do emerge from this confusion with any credibility they will doubtless look to archaeology to underwrite their shabby claims. We have been here before.

As Rodney Harrison says, "Heritage is not set in stone, but is determined by a set of values which we wish to use to build a sense of community and identity in the present. What we define as 'heritage' is constantly changing in the light of the present, as we look to the past to imagine our future."

And, I might add, to define what we, the archaeological community, mean by British.

Greg Bailey researches TV archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol.

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