Issue 69

March 2003

Contents

news

Tale of the Bronze Age barge sunk in Trent

Roman baths at trading settlement by Thames

Earliest evidence of medieval open fields near Cambridge

Mesolithic houses in both Scotland and the North East

Planned Bronze Age village found in Co Londonderry

In Brief

features

Rethinking Cursuses
David McOmish rethinks some old ideas to explain cursuses

Burial with the Romans
Alison Taylor on all the horrible aspects of Roman burial

Great sites
Anna Ritchie recalls the great Viking excavation at Jarlshof

letters

Saxon zoos, copperas, and how long Britain stayed Roman

issues

George Lambrick on broader history education after age 14

Peter Ellis

Regular column

books

Garrison Life at Vindolanda by Anthony Birley

Grahame Clark by Brian Fagan

The Archaeology of Mills and Milling by Martin Watts

The Roman Shore Forts by Andrew Pearson

Heads and Tales by Iain MacLeod & Brian Hill

CBA update

favourite finds

David Longley on his first undisturbed archaeological site

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Simon Denison

favourite finds

Bronze Age pottery underneath the M25

David Longley recalls the moment he discovered his first undisturbed archaeological site

For my favourite find, I've chosen a few scruffy pieces of prehistoric pottery that I found more than 25 years ago at Runnymede Bridge, where the M25 motorway now crosses the Thames west of London.

I was working as a field archaeologist in Surrey at the time, just one year out of university. The M25 was then being built around London, and in 1975 construction work had got to within a few hundred yards of the Thames on the south side. Prehistoric pottery had been found in the area before, so we decided to do a little investigation near the bridge, which then carried the A30 over the river.

The site was a mess. Rubbish had been tipped over the side of the A30 down the embankment onto our excavation area. It was wet, flooded, silted, and overgrown with reeds. The site did not look promising at all.

A few rough sherds

We started to excavate, and initially it seemed that there was nothing of interest there. But then we came to a layer of clean river silts, and underneath we found dark soil - an undisturbed archaeological layer - with a couple of pieces of prehistoric pot sticking out it. The sherds were just rough, browny-black, not particularly well-formed pieces of coarse pottery - hardly the world's most exciting find, you might think.

But this was my first job as a field archaeologist, working without supervision; and what this pottery showed was that we'd got an in situ archaeological site, which I knew was going to lead to a proper excavation. That was a hugely exciting feeling.

The pottery started it all. But it was what happened next that made the experience outstanding. It was winter, and in a few months' time construction would start to create a 10-lane carriageway over the river. So with just three friends, I excavated a narrow strip by the side of the A30. It was very cold. A lot of the time the ground was frozen solid, and we couldn't do a thing. But over that winter we produced something like 600 sherds of pottery, a collection of late Bronze Age metalwork, spindlewhorls, loom weights, and animal bone.

It turned out that this material was nationally significant. There was a lot of debate at the time in academic circles about the transition period between the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. The type of coarse pottery we were finding was then regarded as Iron Age, associated with invaders coming to Britain from the Continent and dramatically different to what had gone before.

But what we were able to show was that both the metalwork and the pottery were indigenous and late Bronze Age. So this was one of the first sites that showed that pottery of this type was being manufactured in the late Bronze Age, a kind of missing link, without the need for any Iron Age incomers to explain it.

In subsequent years, of course, Runnymede became one of the best-known Bronze Age sites in the country, producing tonnes of material, as a result of a series of excavations led by Stuart Needham of the British Museum. Our little site was the beginning of it all.

Stashing the finds

Then in the evening, we piled all the stuff - including any finds that we'd made - into the back of the car and drove home again. We stashed everything in my shed at home, including all the Bronze Age artefacts. It seems laughable now, but that's how we worked all that winter.

At the time, we were very pleased at the significance of what we had achieved. But at that stage I don't think I realised that these sorts of discoveries don't happen on a regular basis. Runnymede was probably one of the most important sites I have ever been involved with - and I got it right at the start of my career.

David Longley is the Director of the Gwynedd Archaeological Trust

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