Issue 114

Sept / Oct 2010

news

All the latest archaeology news from around the country

features

MAIN FEATURE: Happisburgh

The project leaders give us the latest findings after six years of research on the earliest humans in Britain.

The obscure ownership of archaeological material

Haggai Mor recently worked in one of the world's largest archaeological store and wondered who all the things dug up actaully belong to?

Finding Boudica's Last Battlefield

With the help of computerised terrain analysis, Steve Kaye has narrowed down the possibilities.

The Lost Anglo-Saxon Church of Westbury-on-Trym

Jon Cannon explores a crypt beneath a Bristol church and is greeted with an amazing find.

Finding Private Mather

A victim of battle in WW1 remembered by his family, is finally laid to rest.

Archaeology: What Is It For?

Martin Carver reflects on how and why archaeologists do what we do.

The Varmints Show

In the Varmints' second exploration of music and archaeology, Breck Parkman is uncovering the 'Whitehouse of Hippiedom' at the Olompali State Historic Park, San Francisco.

science

The dark secrets of ancient peat, the decaying of Star Carr

on the web

Audio-visual presentations online and the 'Visual Essays' of ArchAtlas.

Mick's travels

Mick and Jon share the wonders of Jersey

CBA Correspondent

From CBA Publications Officer, Catrina Appleby

letters

Your views and responses

features

THE BIG DIG: Links of Noltland

Eroding sand dunes are revealing an ancient landscape on a windswept and remote Scottish island.

MAIN FEATURE: Digging for (Invisible) People

Eroding sand dunes are revealing an ancient landscape on a windswept and remote Scottish island.

Dig for Shakespeare

Literary critics may wonder if Shakespeare wrote all those plays, but archaeologists know where to find him.

The Varmints Show

An occasional series specifically for the website, showcasing pop music inspired by archaeology or heritage. The first of the series features Air-Raid Shelter (Pillbox) by The Human Cabbages.

More online features to follow

news

All the latest archaeology news from around the country

on the web

Caroline Wickham-Jones investigates real and reconstructed worlds, and Andy Burnham highlights ancient sites viewable from the roadside, including extra content.

letters

Your views and responses

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

features

Archaeology: What Is It For?

After a career as an officer in the Royal Tank Regiment, Martin Carver was drawn to archaeology through a love of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic epic poetry. He worked first as a freelance field archaeologist, and later taught archaeology at York University, all the time gaining extensive experience in the field. Here he reflects on how, and why, archaeologists do what they do.

Let me start with a tale of three excavations

In 1978, 20,000 people took to the streets of Dublin to protest about what was happening at Wood Quay. Incoming Vikings had built a shanty town there on the banks of the river Liffey. The wet ground had preserved the 10th century timber houses, jetties, boat-parts and light industries very well indeed, but this was where Dublin Corporation planned to build its new headquarters. Locals campaigned for the conservation of earthworks and more excavation, and the site was declared a national monument – though strangely that only enabled a further six weeks of excavation, and the bulldozers moved in.

From Ireland to Cambodia. In 2008, students at the University of Phnom Penh alerted German archaeologists to the destruction of an iron age cemetery at Prohear. Andreas Reinecke got permission to dig under a road – the only part of the cemetery spared by looters. He impressed the local community with his great care and reverence, and the previous "specialists" came forward to share their considerable knowledge about how to find graves and what was in them. Reinecke published a beautiful book, which explains what he did, what the scientific analyses show and why it all matters. He won the hearts and minds of the looters.

Finally, to New York, Manhattan, 290 Broadway. During the construction of a federal office building, workers were spotted attempting to spirit human remains off the site in skips. Word got out. The archaeological contractors – who had failed to appreciate the significance of the phrase "Negros Burial Ground" on an 18th century map – were replaced. Many African-Americans successfully argued that the original archaeologists could not have proper respect for the remains, and a black team was asked to study them. Renewed excavations were completed in 1992, and there was tremendous exposure and sympathy for the plight of the slaves of 200 years before. The burial ground is now a national historic landmark, a national monument and a memorial of honour.

Apart from the regrettable damage that occurred to such powerful historic sites, what unites these three excavations?

They show what citizens want from archaeology. The people of Dublin were not conservationists or nationalists: the former town was Norwegian, not Celtic, and they wanted it dug not preserved. They were campaigning for the right to know. The response to Cambodian looters was not to shoot them, as in China (or to congratulate them on their good fortune and generate mindless publicity, as with the Staffordshire hoard in England): it was to bring them successfully into the professional team and encourage them to think about what they had lost. And in Manhattan the popular demand was also for good research. The mayor of New York David N Dinkins had demanded to see, wait for it… the archaeological research design. There wasn't one. The Village Voice responded with a famous aphorism: doing archaeology without a design is like driving a bus without a steering wheel.

My point is this. What defines archaeologists is not theory, associated with prestige by leading academics and their admiring students, but fieldwork. What makes archaeologists special is what they do, and what they do, that noone else does, is field archaeology. The practice is creative, original and life enhancing: archaeologists are not just recording or reading the past, they are writing it, telling the stories that people want to know. And as the basis of archaeology is not theory, so the basis of field archaeology is not technique: as The Village Voice proclaimed, it is design.

Being appropriate

What's the right way to do this? Area excavation and single context recording, developed in the 1970s and 80s, are still regarded by many British practitioners as the only proper way to dig – especially for complex urban archaeology. The goal is the analytical recording of a site's stratification (in "contexts"), kept quite distinct from interpretation – which comes later. By contrast, Ian Hodder, a leading contemporary archaeological theorist, has encouraged interpretation on site "at the trowel's edge" – as was always the way on good research excavations – favouring continual revisions and discussions as progress continues.

These trends can be reconciled by project design, which offers the aims, methods and strategy for scrutiny in advance. This way we get a balance between conserving a precious resource, pursuing a research goal and tackling different kinds of terrain.

Project design also helps raise standards – and they need raising. Weekly on television, we see messy digs that would horrify Sir Mortimer Wheeler, famed for his impressively neat trenches laid out in perfect grids. Why is this? What actually makes the difference between a good excavation and a bad one? Are we waiting for one method to supersede all the others? I hope not!

The single contexters yearn for an integrated unified discipline with common goals and methods, like geology or chemistry. They want to recover and store data, and the results of fieldwork to mean the same wherever they are, in whichever period of the past. How strange then that, for all this evangelical reverence, the single context package still remains confined to a rather narrow base, largely British, well-funded and urban.

If we look around the world, we find that method varies by geography. Popular in Germany is the schnitt – the geometric slicing of strata. Here the deposit is cut into horizontal and vertical surfaces meticulously cleaned and recorded independent of layer edges: it is for analysts at a later date to recreate stratigraphic sequence. Protagonists maintain that they are not ignoring stratification but recording it in a way that is precise and checkable.

Wheeler predicted the end of test pits, but they are now probably the most common method of excavation worldwide, and dominate archaeology in America. He would have looked more favourably on modern India and China, where his box method of excavation, which generates linked vertical sections, is widely practised.

How to explain this pattern? It is partly a matter of different terrain and different research questions, but very influential too is the social context of the land where the work is done: the funding, the training, the public interest. The box system suits those with a shortage of skilled labour, the test pit those who have virtually only skilled labour – and a small number on site. Open area stratigraphic archaeology is extremely expensive compared with the others and requires a large skilled labour force – but is vital to solve certain historical questions. There is an infinite number of right ways to do things, provided they are justified by design: doing field archaeology is a matter of being appropriate.

A creative profession

My first such experience was in 1971 at Winchester, when, ex army, I was invited with other volunteers to work with Martin Biddle at the Roman South Gate. He was a most inspiring companion, trowelling and chatting away about the layers as we tried to define them. They were later recorded with precision, but (as was the fashion) we talked in nicknames – the nutty crunch, the Dundee cake and so on.

I had my first break in 1973, supervising the excavation of a car park in York. It was a complex site, with a 19th century theodolite factory, a mass of medieval pits and a Roman house, and we filled in context cards. But I found it almost impossible to dig without interpreting, and I would sit for hours with my A4 black book, sketching and dreaming about what it might all mean. I was convinced that the new dogma of throwing away the notebook, the narrative record of provisional interpretations, was wrong.

In 1982 I was entrusted with Sutton Hoo on the basis of design competition. I asked my funders, the Sutton Hoo Research Trust, for three years to put together a fully-costed project design, that matched the terrain – acid sand – with our objectives – the social and ideological changes experienced in early England – and with the social context of late 20th century Suffolk.

Archaeology is a historical pursuit deploying scientific procedures in a social arena. The way this is achieved, as it is in novel writing, building a motorway or going to the moon, is by design. Design is different for every project, and all method and theory are subsumed within it. Doing field archaeology is team creativity, like making a film, but unlike making a film, you only get one take. Detailed preparation is essential. Design is all.

In most countries archaeologists work in different offices that want different things from them. Universities want them to teach and exchange ideas, government wants them to administer conservation, developers want to get the stuff out of the way, museums to present it. This is one reason that dogma takes root of course: it is economically and socially convenient for the employer.

But imagine for a moment that a desire to know more about the past is the one thing all of us have in common. Similarities between archaeologists are then more important than differences: but that can only be if they feel free enough to share and to move between employers, whether government, university or commerce.

In March the then British government issued new planning policies for "the conservation of the [English] historic environment", known as PPS5. Calling the archaeological resource the "historic environment" does it few favours: what archaeologists offer the world are not things, but discoveries, expeditions, exhibitions – real events, real experiences by real people who once lived. Every bit of the past is different. In archaeology, unlike the natural environment, only research represents the real value of the resource.

But there are signs of change. Among PPS5's objectives are: "to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of our past… and to make this [evidence] publicly available, particularly where a heritage asset is to be lost". This is a massive improvement on PPG16 (the guidance PPS5 replaces). I congratulate English Heritage and the government for treating archaeological assets not as monuments, but as a research resource. If the archaeology can be thought of as giving added value to a development project, then the archaeologist comes in as creative agent, like the architect and of equal status. That is what the citizens of Dublin, Prohear and Manhattan wanted. And it is what we deserve: to be seen as a creative, imaginative, inventive profession.

Martin Carver is emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of York and editor of Antiquity. He explored these ideas at greater length in the 2010 Rhind lectures hosted by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. His new book, Archaeological Investigation, is reviewed in the printed magazine.

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