Issue 88

May/June 2006

Contents

news

Meadowsweet flowers in prehistoric graves

Strange fish

"Find of several lifetimes" – cathedral archaeologist

Oldest houses in Scotland

Archaeologists mourn loss of two popular colleagues

In Brief

features

End of the line: St Pancras Station
How many graves would you have saved? Phil Emery rescues French revolution refugee history.

The floors that Rome built
Stephen R Cosh and David S Neal are recording every Roman mosaic.

Protests at Bling King's grave
What can the Prittlewell protesters hope to achieve?

on the web

Recommended websites

letters

Views and responses

CBA news

Headlines from the CBA office.

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

news

Meadowsweet flowers in prehistoric graves

The cremated remains of three people and at least one animal were buried in a bronze age cairn with fronds of the white-flowered meadowsweet.

The Fan Foel cairn, Carmarthenshire, excavated by Cambria Archaeology with funds from Cadw and Brecon Beacons National Park (News, Sep 2004), had a stone slab lined central cist. In one corner were the remains of part of a Food Vessel, an early bronze age funerary jar. Bones, ash and a few burnt flint tools were apart from the pot on the other side, and between lay an unfired flint tool.

Lampeter University environmental archaeologist Astrid Caseldine says meadowsweet pollen (Filipendula ulmaria) came from the cremation deposit, not in the pot, and showed no signs of having been burnt. The presence of immature and mature pollen suggests flowers in bud and in full bloom had been placed in the grave. Another cremation grave, on the edge of the cairn with a Collared Urn, also produced meadowsweet pollen, and unburnt seeds from bulrushes.

This is not the first time meadowsweet has been found in such a context. "Black greasy material" inside a Food Vessel excavated at North Mains, Strathallan, contained meadowsweet and cereal pollen. A sample from inside a Beaker from a grave at Ashgrove, Fife, revealed lime and meadowsweet pollen. These became famous as possible indications of honey-based mead or flavoured ale. However the new find, indicating meadowsweet could also be placed with the dead as a scented flower, confirms that drink may not be the only explanation.

Bone from the cist (identified by Ros Coard, Lampeter University, as indicating a probably female adult, a teenager and an infant, and at least one pig) has been radiocarbon-dated by Groningen University to c2025BC, and from the other grave (containing bone from two people) to c1840BC.

Dating burnt bone is still considered controversial by some archaeologists, but Gwilym Hughes, Cambria Archaeology, says the dates, funded by the National Museum of Wales, are "precisely what I would have predicted".

Strange fish

Amongst many thousands of neolithic ground stone and flint axeheads found in Britain are a few in flint that stand out for their style (long, thin and straight-sided), quality (beautifully made, being finely ground all over) and colour (though originally grey or black, the flint is stained a rusty orange, and often shows banding from embedded fossils). They are found scattered across England and Scotland, with one from Wales. Alan Saville, at the National Museums of Scotland, has suggested they were so distinctive that they may have been imported from outside Britain. Now Jan Glimmerveen, a Dutch amateur archaeologist collecting artefacts and fossils in the North Sea, has found a similar-looking flint axe on the Brown Bank in the Southern Bight, off the Netherlands. Alison Sheridan, a colleague of Saville's who has also studied these axes, suggests it may have been lost in transit from Denmark to Britain. At 38cm long, it is of exceptional size. Saville suggests these axes, "by virtue of their exotic raw material", had a "high prestige value".

"Find of several lifetimes" – cathedral archaeologist

When Gilbert Scott altered Lichfield cathedral, he recycled medieval stonework: but he never knew the best. During recent repairs to the stone floor he laid in 1861, an Anglo-Saxon carving was found of extraordinary beauty.The news was released in February, when it was displayed beside an electronic version of the eighth century Lichfield Gospels. British Archaeology has obtained further information and new pictures.

Cathedral archaeologist Warwick Rodwell had been excavating in advance of the floor repairs since 1992. In 2003 the Chapter installed a stone platform in the nave that can be levelled for public events. An octagon was dug out for siting motors and winding gear, 7.5m across and 1.2m deep. This revealed what Rodwell thinks may be the site of the shrine of St Chad (d672; the gospels are also known as the Chad Gospels). On the last day of the excavation and close to the shrine site, three fragments of a limestone carving were found in a small pit (see cover photo).

"The second it came out of the ground, I knew it was a magnificent object", says Rodwell. "The carving is in superbly crisp condition, with paint all over it."

In classical Byzantine-derived style, the wings and halo identify the Archangel Gabriel, descending with three-budded staff to tell the Virgin Mary that she will bear the Christ child: the panel's missing half would have shown Mary, in the Annunciation scene.

The paint on two pieces, which were resting on other stones, is exceptionally well-preserved. The white background is paint, as is the pink and red of the angel, and the feathers have white tips with black lines to emphasise shadow. Emily Howe is coordinating preliminary efforts to understand the angel's materials and condition. This work, for which the Pilgrim Trust has granted up to £30,000, will inform decisions about its eventual conservation.

In the late eighth century Chad's timber shrine (mentioned by Bede) was either replaced by stone, or, according to Rosemary Cramp, encased in it. The sculpture is from an end panel; the top edge of the other half would have been canted to the right, and the shrine would have had a ridged cover with perhaps three carved panels on the front side and one at the other end.

Rodwell thinks it was made when Lichfield was raised to England's third archbishopric (after Canterbury and York) during Offa's reign (757–796). Soon after, he says, it was destroyed by Vikings; in 873–4 they had a winter camp nearby at Repton. Pieces may have been gathered and ritually buried in pits around the site. There has been no recent disturbance or excavation elsewhere in the area.

Oldest houses in Scotland

Excavations just completed on North Uist, in the Western Isles, have revealed possible houses that would be the earliest signs of human activity in that region, and amongst the oldest structures from Britain. The original ground surface had been buried for some 4,000 years, until the peat was removed by archaeologists in February before the road from Lochmaddy to Lochboisdale was improved.

Excavation director Helen Holderness, of Archaeological Research and Consultancy at Sheffield University, says the structures are indicated by stone arrangements for holding posts in a thin, degraded soil. There seem to be four semicircular houses or huts, the largest c3m×4m across. Arectangular floor 2.5m×1.5m had a post at each corner, one in the centre and two down each side, with a kerb-like row of stones at the north end. The areas within the post settings had been cleared of rocks.

These structures are difficult to date. Western Isles archaeologist Mary Macleod says she strongly suspects they may be mesolithic hunting shelters from before 4000BC; Holderness says when radiocarbon dates are obtained, they may show the site to be neolithic and less old, but some of the quartz artefacts look mesolithic. The only pottery found is part of a neolithic decorated bowl, not directly associated with the structures.

Holderness says that the traditional distinction between mesolithic hunters and neolithic farmers may be less relevant in the Western Isles, where even recently crofting is a mobile lifestyle. "People are flowing rather than settling", she says. The excavations were funded by the local authority, Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.

Archaeologists mourn loss of two popular colleagues

Two of Britain's leading archaeologists died in February. Both were distinguished by work on fundamental issues of human history, John Wymer (age 77) with early human archaeology, Andrew Sherratt (age 59) with major themes in western civilisation.

John Wymer's first scientific publication, announcing his remarkable discovery of a third piece of the Swanscombe skull in a Kent quarry (still, at 400,000 years old, the only pre-Neanderthal skull from Britain), was in Nature. His last was in the same journal, 50 years later, illustrated with his fine drawings of the 700,000-year-old flint tools from Pakefield, Suffolk (Jan/Feb, page 22). Between his engagement with these iconic finds, he directed important excavations in England and in South Africa (notably at Klasies River Mouth, which, in deep deposits rich with fauna and artefacts, produced the then oldest evidence for Homo sapiens, c110,000 years ago).

While at Reading Museum, his first archaeological job, he excavated the hunting camp at Thatcham, Berkshire (c10,000 years ago), a rare mesolithic site with well-preserved animal bone. Starting in 1969 he excavated at well-known palaeolithic sites, Clacton, Essex and Hoxne, Suffolk, and from 1990 managed the major English Heritage project to document all palaeolithic finds. He wrote several key books about palaeolithic and mesolithic Britain.

Andrew Sherratt, writes Christine Finn, read archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, where he did his phd on the south-east European bronze age. Myth, imagination, ritual and humanity enriched and swayed his arguments, never more so than when expounding on the "secondary products revolution": his theory that "secondary" uses of animals (such as wool, blood, milk and traction), long followed domestication, with important repercussions for land use and human relationships.

At Oxford (Ashmolean Museum from 1973, reader in archaeology at the university from 1997 and a professor in 2002), he was the driving force behind the undergraduate degree in archaeology and anthropology, set up in the early 90s. He had just begun a new stage in his career in October, when he moved to Sheffield University to a new chair in old world archaeology (www.shef.ac.uk/archaeology/andrew-sherratt.html).

Like Gordon Childe and David Clarke, Sherratt was driven to understand how prehistoric Europe worked. He said "European archaeology must be as diverse but also as interconnected as the continent it studies": the world wide web could have been invented for him. He recently initiated a digital project, ArchAtlas, setting technology to work on complexity.

Both men received fulsome obituaries in the national press.

In brief

Henge result to be appealed

On February 21 North Yorkshire county council rejected Tarmac's proposals to extract sand and gravel from Lady Bridge Farm, close to the three Thornborough henges, recognising them as "nationally important archaeological remains". Local campaigners Timewatch immediately asked for a "no quarry zone" extending for "at least a mile radius from the central monuments". Tarmac will appeal. The archaeological case against quarrying emphasised the importance of the landscape around the henges. Mike Heyworth, CBA director, looked forward to a change in agricultural management of the area. Tarmac estate manager Bob Nicholson said the proposals posed "absolutely no threat to the ancient monument, which is protected by law", claiming protestors had used "misleading statements and images" and "mythical invention" to argue the henges were threatened. Announcing the news, BBC radio journalist Sally Nugent said, "During the bronze age this was probably the largest ceremonial site in Britain... covering an area many times the size of Stonehenge". "History is important", said quarryman Paul Ingram, "but what they've found basically is nothing, a bucketful of flints. Is that worth 50 jobs?"

Awards announced

The next day in London the 2006 British Archaeological Awards were launched, with culture minister David Lammy among those speaking. There are now 16 awards (needing at least 48 outstanding entries to make up a shortlist), ranging from young archaeologist of the year to three Channel 4 television awards. The submissions deadline was May 31; comments are also being solicited on the awards' future: see www.britarch.ac.uk/awards.

Tara road to go ahead in 2007

On March 1, in a case attracting wide interest, a high court judgement went against environmentalist Vincent Salafia, who had claimed that not just the Hill of Tara, Co Meath, but its wider landscape was also a national monument, making the proposed new M3 motorway route illegal. Meath Chambers of Commerce claimed that objectors had circulated misinformation.

Antiquaries challenge

In 2003 BBC2's University Challenge introduced a summer series of The Professionals: the Inland Revenue won that year, followed by the British Library and, last year, the Privy Council Office. Can archaeologists match such hallowed institutions? It may seem unlikely, but this year a team is fielded by the Society of Antiquaries of London: Chris Catling (editor of the society's online journal, Salon), Loyd Grossman (recently featured in Lego holding a pizza beside Damien Hirst's tanked shark in John Cake and Darren Neave's Art Craziest Nation), Carenza Lewis (working increasingly with introducing archaeology to schoolchildren) and, erm, another editor. The team told an apparently incredulous Jeremy Paxman, who said at one time he'd wanted to be an archaeologist, that, yes, there are people who have jobs being just that.

Phase 2

Paul Holder notes that our transcription of the soldier's name on the Roman tombstone from Lancaster (Mar/Apr, News) was likely to be wrong, Holder's current reading being INSVS VODVLLI [FIL]IVS, or Insus, son of Vodullus. We failed to credit Richard Hingley for the photograph of Thomas Thorneycroft's statue of Boadicea that illustrated Amanda Chadburn's article about iron age coins (The currency of kings); the coins and more are discussed in his and Christina Unwin's Boudica, Iron Age Warrior Queen (Hambledon & London, 2005). Apologies to you both.

The tombstone story, in which we revealed that news of its discovery was quickly followed by the owner's proposal to sell it in New York, was featured in a good spread in the Times (where we managed to get Holder's preferred reading inserted, but alas not the wrong one removed). This led to considerable local coverage in the press, and on radio and television. At least now, we hope, the people of Lancaster should be aware of the treasure that has been found in their city.

Now to resolve a minor confusion. In a review of Timberlake and Prag's The Archaeology of Alderley Edge (Books), we credited the publisher as Archaeopress. Gerald Brisch (of Archaeopress) wrote to say it wasn't his book, it was published by John and Erica Hedges. This might sound simple (and stupid – our mistake, not the reviewer's), but Archaeopress and the Hedges are publishers of different titles within the same series, under license from the original publisher Anthony Hands (who distributes them all through Hadrian Books, and even occasionally publishes one himself), and successors to earlier franchisees Tempvs Reparatvm. Apologies to all publishers of British Archaeological Reports.

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